René Guénon
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| Western & Eastern philosophies 20th century philosophy |
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A 1925 studio photo portrait (age 38).
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| Name |
René Jean Marie Joseph Guénon (Abd al-Wahid Yahya)
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| Birth | November 15, 1886 Blois, Loir-et-Cher, France |
| Death | January 7, 1951 (aged 64) Cairo, Egypt |
| School/tradition | Traditionalism, Realism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Nondualism, Sufism, Advaita Vedanta |
| Main interests | Metaphysics, Comparative religion, Esotericism, Occultism, Symbolism, Mythology, Gnosis, Religious texts, Freemasonry, Mathematics, History, Society, Social criticism |
| Notable ideas | Critique of modernity from the perspective of ancient wisdom traditions; refounding of western esotericism based on the still living eastern ones |
| Influenced by | Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Lao Tse, Confucius, Gregory Palamas, Meister Eckhart |
| Influenced | Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Julius Evola, Marco Pallis, Huston Smith, Ananda Coomaraswamy and many others |
René Jean Marie Joseph Guénon (November 15, 1886 – January 7, 1951) was a French orientalist and philosopher who wrote numerous books on the esoteric aspects of various religions and the symbolic significance of traditional teachings and practices. His field was metaphysics, applied to the study of revealed traditions of mankind. Even though the original meaning of the word "Philosophy" as used by Socrates and Plato to refer to the "Love of Wisdom" has nothing pejorative about it, yet given the current abuse of the term "philosophy" in the modern world labels such as philosopher and thinker were disowned by Guénon, who described himself instead as an "exposer of traditional data". His work dealing with history of religions and social criticism may be interpreted as by-products of the traditional function with which he was invested: to provide modern man (a man who has lost faith in an absolute principle and in the revealed traditions and instead is characterized by materialism, rationalism, relativism and individualism) with the means to understand traditional societies and their spiritual practices.
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[edit] Life
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 sometime between 1911-1912, when he was initiated in Paris by a wandering Swedish Sufi named Abd al-Hadi Aguéli. Abd al-Hadi also made Guénon one of the founding members of the Al Akbariyya society. 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 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 present eastern doctrines from an "oriental" perspective, in contrast with the western presentations of Hinduism that prevailed at that time. 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 . From 1925-27, Guénon wrote for the Catholic periodical Regnabit, dedicated to the subject of symbolism. Chacornac indicates the condemnation of Action Francaise by the Catholic Church prompted Guénon to clarify Traditional metapolitical doctrine in his book, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power. In this work, Guénon notes a progressive downfall and regression of the character of Western society through the four ancient castes: initiates (brahmins), warriors (kshatriya), merchants (vaishya) and plebeians (sudras). In the present democratic-plebeian world order, Guénon saw nothing but the mindless rebelliousness of the Dark Age against the higher possibilities of the human person.
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. Guénon scorned what he called the "illusion of democracy", a dysfunctional system wherein natural spiritual hierarchy is inverted to serve base materialistic and quantitative goals and the psychically unqualified majority is irresponsibly empowered. Guénon traces the origins of modern secularist demagogic tyranny to "the year of 1313, with the destruction of the Knights Templar by Philip the Fair, then King of France. This monarch ordered the surrounding of the Pope's palace, who died, humiliated, a few days after such an insult. Philip the Fair then decided to force the nomination of a submissive pope, pliable to his greed and to his political projects--an impossibility under the authority of a real Sovereign Pontiff."
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. There Guénon would remain for the rest of his life, living as a Sufi Muslim with the name Abd al-Wahid Yahya. 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 the somewhat reductionist account of biographer Robin Waterfield, he suffered from intermittent bouts of "persecution mania."
When Guénon died in Cairo 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.
[edit] The Doctrina Sacra
Along with Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, Guénon is considered to be one of the founders of the Traditionalist School. Several articles by Guénon on topics of traditionalism and spirituality were published posthumously in the quarterly journal, Studies in Comparative Religion, alongside articles by Schuon and Coomaraswamy (among others).
According to the Christian philosopher Jean Borella, Guénon'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. Guénon 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 theoretically foundational by Frithjof Schuon, the work of René Guénon remains 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."
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Books by René Guénon
(ordered by 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)
[edit] 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)
[edit] The Collected Works of René Guénon
New English translation, 23 volumes, Sophia Perennis (publisher)
- East and West (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- The Crisis of the Modern World (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- The Esoterism of Dante (paper, 2003; cloth, 2005)
- The Great Triad (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- Initiation and Spiritual Realization (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- Insights into Christian Esoterism (paper, 2001; cloth, 2005)
- Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism (paper, 2003; cloth, 2004)
- Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- The King of the World (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus (paper, 2003; cloth, 2004)
- Miscellanea [paper, 2003; cloth, 2004]
- The Multiple States of the Being, tr. Henry Fohr (2001) 2nd edition 2004, paperback: ISBN 0-900588-59-4 hardcover: ISBN 0-900588-60-8
- Perspectives on Initiation (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- The Spiritist Fallacy (paper, 2003; cloth, 2004)
- Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage (paper, 2005; cloth, 2005)
- Studies in Hinduism (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- The Symbolism of the Cross (paper, 2001; cloth, 2004)
- Symbols of Sacred Science (paper, 2004; cloth, 2004)
- Theosophy, the History of a Pseudo-Religion (paper, 2003; cloth, 2004)
- Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles (paper, 2003; cloth, 2004)
[edit] Books About René Guénon
(Sophia Perennis)
- Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon: Some Observations (paper, 2004)
- Paul Chacornac, The Simple Life of René Guénon (paper, 2005; cloth, 2005)
- Robin Waterfield, René Guénon and the Future of the West (paper, 2002; cloth, 2005)
- Jean Borella, Guénonian Esoterism and Christian Mystery (cloth, 2005)
- Xavier Accart, René Guénon ou Le Renversement des clartés Paris, Milanos: Edidit Arche (2005)
[edit] Internet
Who was René Guénon - Shaykh `Abd Al Wahid Yahya? http://www.livingislam.org/trg.html
Vìa Shâdhilita de Renè Guènon http://www.livingislam.org/o/vsrg_s.html
- Metafisica e Sophia Perennis International forum about Metaphysic, Guénon and Tradition.
[edit] See also
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[edit] External links
- List of Titles by René Guénon - Fons Vitae books
- Biography from Sophia Journal
- Biography from Institute for Gnostic Studies
- Sofia Perennis Universalis has many Guénon books in print
- Guénon and Vedanta
- A web site on the Perennialist/Traditionalist School
- Who was René Guénon - Shaykh `Abd Al Wahid Yahya? - text excerpts
- René Guénon Books translated into Romanian
- La Lettera G. Italian-French review of Freemasonry inspired by the work of René Guénon
- Metafisica e Sophia Perennis International forum about Metaphysic, Guénon and Tradition.
