René Guénon

René Guénon (Born René Jean Marie Joseph Guénon) also Sheikh 'Abd al-Wahid Yahya, (name taken upon his embracement of Islam) (Blois, France November 15 1886 - Cairo, Egypt January 7 1951) was a French-born author. An appropriate label for his 'specialisation', if one could exist, is metaphysics, particularly applied to the study of cultural traditions. (Or perhaps hierology?) Labels such as philosopher, thinker etc. were disowned by Guénon, who described himself as an "exposer of Traditional data". Thus the aspects of his work dealing with history of religions, social criticism, etc. may be interpreted as by-products of the traditional function with which he was invested: to provide modern man with the means to understand traditional societies.

From Paris to Cairo

Born in Blois, France into a Catholic household, Guénon excelled as a youth in mathematics and philosophy. Dissatisfied with the status quo of modern society, he moved to Paris in 1907 and became deeply involved in a series of underground cultural movements, including Theosophy, Spiritualism, occultism, Gnosticism, and a Shivaite branch of Hinduism. At the same time, he exposed himself to Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. He was at this time critical of Buddhism as a "Hindu heresy", but later accepted its validity when evidence of its essential orthodoxy was presented to him by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Marco Pallis.

Guénon became a Sufi Muslim in 1912, when he was initiated in Paris by a wandering Swedish Sufi named Abd al-Hadi Aguéli. However, he did not reveal his conversion; he was married in a Catholic church ceremony in later years. Guénon championed the validity of other religions as vehicles of the one same Truth, though he believed that they were designed for the acceptance of different cultures. Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam were among those with which he concerned himself most, in terms of his attempts to rectify their values, which he saw as distortions of (but ultimately soundly based upon) what he called Universal Truth. He believed that universal objective spiritual truth could be expressed via valid religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, and that if this truth were presented properly, even secular intellectuals of his day would accept it.

Guénon began writing in the 1920s. His Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines in 1921 was an attempt to begin expressing his concept of Universal Truth. After World War I, which was popularly supposed to be the "last war", Western civilisation was overwhelmed with a sense of relief and euphoria. Guénon, seeing this as delusion, criticised the society of his day as being disorganized and reckless. "It is as if an organism with its head cut off were to go on living," he wrote in 1924. Guénon's main criticism of despiritualized Western culture was its self-proud lack of recognition of a greater power which maintained a higher order than that of man. His writings on traditionalism had a great influence on the Italian fascist occultist Julius Evola.

After Guénon's first wife died, he left Paris in 1930 and settled in Cairo, Egypt, where he remarried (with an Egyptian Muslim) and raised children, and where Guénon would remain for the rest of his life, living as a Sufi. Having offended the Paris intellectuals whom he considered his peers, especially with two books denouncing occultism, he feared being attacked by his enemies through magical or spiritual energy, and lived primarily incognito. According to his biographer Robin Waterfield, he suffered from intermittant bouts of "persecution mania."

When Guénon died in 1951, his wife was pregnant with the couple's fourth child, who was born after his father's death.

Guénon wrote a compendium of universal spiritual symbols, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science, which was published in 1962. It attempted to illustrate common meanings and interpretations of images, concepts, and symbolisms among major religions, again tying them all back into the truth explained by Hinduism.

Guénon did not believe in purely personal exposition and did not write or contribute to any biography of his life.

Overview of his teaching

According to the christian philosopher Jean Borella, Guenon's work is organized around five central themes: a critique and reform of the modern world, the Tradition, symbolism, metaphysics and spiritual realization.

The critique of the modern world aims at creating the conditions for an intellectual reform of a Western world in the grips of the Dark Age (Kali Yuga). This reform implies the revival of an intellectual elite able to retrieve a knowledge long forgotten that once formed the core of all traditional societies.

Tradition, symbolism, and metaphysics are the three pillars of this knowledge. Guénon developed a non-dual metaphysics of the multiple states of being opposed to mere philosophical systems of modernity and to doctrines intellectually valid but limited, born in the West with Aristotle. This metaphysics, whose various expressions are found in the Vedanta, Sufism, and Neoplatonism, is not the result of mental speculation but of a spiritual intuition which forms the foundation of traditional symbolism. Guenon also proposes to revive the intellectual meaning of this symbolism. According to him, a symbol is not only a "representation." A symbol is a presence of an intelligible archetype within the gross manifestation. Tradition refers to the many forms taken by traditional sciences, rites, and initiatory practices, as they link man to heaven. Tradition thus has a divine origin, transmitted from the Golden Age (Satya Yuga) to the present day.

In the end, this knowledge aims at spiritual realization. For the human being two ends are conceivable: perfection of the human state (Salvation) or perfection of the divine state (Deliverance or Deification). All religions proffer the first end, but to attain the second end, a special rite is necessary given only to those who are "qualified" and which Guénon calls an initiatory rite because it inaugurates the beginning of the spiritual path and it confers the germ for deification.Guénon provides a complete typology of initiations (sacerdotal, knightly, craft), of the spiritual ways (way of action, love and knowledge) and of the spiritual steps (lesser and greater mysteries, Deliverance). He also defines a set of criteria to distinguish orthodox and regular initiations from their counterfeiting (pseudo-initiation) and their satanic caricatures (counter-initiation).

Considered mainly "theoretical" by Frithjof Schuon, the work of René Guénon remains nonetheless central to the Traditionalist School and he continues to play a major role in it. In Knowledge and the Sacred, Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes : "Guénon, as he is reflected in his writing, seemed to be more an intellectual function than a man."

Bibliography

Books written by René Guénon (ordered chronologically according to their first publication date):

Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues, 1921)
Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (Le Théosophisme - Histoire d'une pseudo-religion, 1921)
The Spiritist Fallacy (L'erreur spirite, 1923)
East and West (Orient et Occident, 1924)
Man and His Becoming according to the Vedânta (L'homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta, 1925)
The Esoterism of Dante (L'ésotérisme de Dante, 1925)
The King of the World (Le Roi du Monde, 1927)
The Crisis of the Modern World (La crise du monde moderne, 1927)
Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (Autorité Spirituelle et Pouvoir Temporel, 1929)
St. Bernard (Saint-Bernard, 1929)
Symbolism of the Cross (Le symbolisme de la croix, 1931)
The Multiple States of the Being (Les états multiples de l'Être, 1932)
Oriental Metaphysics (La metaphysique orientale, 1939)
The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps, 1945)
Perspectives on Initiation (Aperçus sur l'initiation, 1946)
The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus (Les principes du calcul infinitésimal, 1946)
The Great Triad (La Grande Triade, 1946)

Posthumous collections

Initiation and Spiritual Realization (Initiation et réalisation spirituelle, 1952)
Insights into Christian Esoterism (Aperçus sur l'ésotérisme chrétien, 1954)
Symbols of Sacred Science (Symboles de la Science Sacrée, 1962)
Studies in Freemasonry and Compagnonnage (Études sur la Franc-Maçonnerie et le Compagnonnage, 1964)
Studies in Hinduism (Études sur l'Hindouisme, 1966)
Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles (Formes traditionelles et cycles cosmiques, 1970)
Insights into Islamic Esoterism & Taoism (Aperçus sur l'ésotérisme islamique et le Taoïsme, 1973)
Reviews (Comptes rendus, 1973)
Miscellanea (Mélanges, 1976)

The Collected Works of René Guénon, New English Translation, 23 Volumes (Sophia Perennis)

East and West 2001; cloth, 2004
The Crisis of the Modern World 2001; cloth, 2004
The Esoterism of Dante 2003; cloth, 2005
The Great Triad 2001; cloth, 2004
Initiation and Spiritual Realization 2001; cloth, 2004
Insights into Christian Esoterism 2001; cloth, 2005
Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism 2003; cloth, 2004
Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines 2001; cloth, 2004
The King of the World 2001; cloth, 2004
Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta 2001; cloth, 2004
Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus 2003; cloth, 2004
Miscellanea 2003; cloth, 2004
The Multiple States of the Being 2001; cloth, 2004
Perspectives on Initiation 2001; cloth, 2004
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times 2001; cloth, 2004
The Spiritist Fallacy 2003; cloth, 2004
Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power 2001; cloth, 2004
Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage 2005; cloth, 2005
Studies in Hinduism 2001; cloth, 2004
The Symbolism of the Cross 2001; cloth, 2004
Symbols of Sacred Science 2004; cloth, 2004
Theosophy, the History of a Pseudo-Religion 2003; cloth, 2004
Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles 2003; cloth, 2004

Books About René Guénon (Sophia Perennis)

René Guénon: Some Observations, by Frithjof Schuon 2004
The Simple Life of René Guénon, by Paul Chacornac 2005; cloth, 2005
René Guénon and the Future of the West, by Robin Waterfield 2002; cloth, 2005
Guénonian Esoterism and Christian Mystery, by Jean Borella 2005

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: René Guénon

From Paris to Cairo

Overview of his teaching

Bibliography

See also

External links