René Guénon
Pub Date: 08/01
Publisher: Sophia Perennis
Binding: Paper, 132pp.
ISBN: 0900588330
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Related Books: Christianity and Hesychasm
Related Audio/Video: Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon

Consists of articles collected and published posthumously in 1954, to which has been added Guénon’s separate study Saint Bernard. When first published as an article, chapter two, ‘Christianity and Initiation’, gave rise to some controversy because Guénon here reaffirmed against certain other traditionalist writers and various Christian intellectuals his denial of the efficacy of the Christian sacraments as rites of initiation, a point he had made in other books. The interested reader is referred to the extensive literature on the subject in French. Some closely related articles published much earlier (1925) are to be found in the slim volume The Esoterism of Dante.

In the first part of the present work, Guénon addresses the role of sacred languages and the principle of initiation in the Christian tradition. The second part deals with such esoteric Christian themes and organizations as the Holy Grail, the Guardians of the Holy Land, the Sacred Heart, the Fedeli d’Amore and the ‘Courts of Love’, and the Secret Language of Dante. The book closes with a lengthy study on St Bernard of Clairvaux. Guénon’s The Esoterism of Dante treats related themes.

René Guénon was the chief influence in the formation of my own intellectual outlook (quite apart from the question of Orthodox Christianity). . . . It was René Guénon who taught me to seek and love the truth above all else, and to be unsatisfied with anything else.

Fr. Seraphim Rose, Not of This World

If during the last century or so there has been even some slight revival of awareness in the Western world of what is meant by metaphysics and metaphysical tradition, the credit for it must go above all to Guénon. At a time when the confusion into which modern Western thought had fallen was such that it threatened to obliterate the few remaining traces of genuine spiritual knowledge from the minds and hearts of his contemporaries, Guénon, virtually single-handed, took it upon himself to reaffirm the values and principles which, he recognized, constitute the only sound basis for the living of a human life with dignity and purpose or for the formation of a civilization worthy of the name.

Philip Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition

Foreword

René Guénon (1886–1951) left a considerable literary legacy: seventeen books published during his lifetime and hundreds of articles and reviews published in various periodicals, principally the Catholic review Regnabit and Études Traditionnelles (formerly Le Voile d’Isis), for which he provided the inspiration from 1929 onward.

We have already brought together in a volume entitled Initiation and Spiritual Realization a series of his articles written between 1945 and the end of 1950, which constitutes a sequel to Perspectives on Initiation. We now present certain studies that appeared at various times, but share a common reference to the subject of Christian esoterism. This is not to say that these studies systematically treat — even in summary fashion — the different aspects of this important subject, which René Guénon never set out to present in a didactic manner. They are occasional studies whose point of departure was furnished either by readers’ questions, or by works with which Guénon was familiar, works whose errors or insufficiencies he felt obliged to point out. Fragmentary though they are, the interest of these studies seems all the greater to us since, apart from a monograph on St Bernard and the short work entitled The Esoterism of Dante, Guénon devoted no single work to Christianity, the tradition form that rightly preoccupied the great majority of his readers.

This reserve of René Guénon is closely connected to the role he assigns, in East and West and in The Crisis of the Modern World, to the Western elite. Guénon’s contribution is to be found primarily in a synthetic elucidation of Eastern metaphysical doctrines intended to awaken in intellectually qualified Westerners the desire to rediscover and, to a certain extent, to bring back to light the deeper aspects of their own tradition. It is therefore incumbent upon these Westerners to demonstrate that the intellectual and spiritual degeneration of the West is not so total, or so irremediable, that all hope of redress must needs be relinquished. Given this perspective, it was natural that René Guénon should confine himself, as regards the Christian tradition, to providing a few ‘keys’, and to pointing out a few paths of research. This is just what he did in many chapters and notes in his various works, in his The Esoterism of Dante, and in articles collected after his death.

Guénon's attitude in this respect, quite understandable in itself, has been met by a wide diversity of interpretations from readers with superficial and incomplete knowledge of the Guénonian oeuvre, as also from critics who were perhaps not always disinterested. It seemed necessary therefore to collect together those texts in which Guénon most clearly stated his position with regard to Christianity—even if this means having to apologize to those who have made an attentive and complete study of his work.

The most important text, from this point of view, is without doubt the passage in The King of the World where Guénon, assimilating the three Magi of the Gospels to the three chiefs of the Supreme Spiritual Center, writes:

“It should be noted that the homage thus rendered to the new-born Christ by the authentic representatives of the primordial tradition, in the three worlds that are their respective domains, at the same time testifies to the perfect orthodoxy of Christianity with regard to that Tradition.”

Speaking elsewhere of this same event in sacred history, Guénon expresses the same idea with more precision. Having alluded to Melchizedek, who appears in the Bible invested with both priestly and royal qualities, he writes:

“Finally, Melchizedek is not the only personage in Holy Scripture who appears with the double nature of priest and king. In the New Testament, in fact, we find the union of these two functions again in the Magi. This might lead us to think that there is a quite direct line between them and Melchizedek, or in other words that in both cases we have to do with representatives of the same single authority. Now, by the homage they accord to Christ and by the gifts they offer him, the Magi expressly recognize in Him the source of that authority in all the domains where it is exercised: the first offers Him gold and salutes Him as king; the second offers Him incense and salutes Him as priest; the third, finally, offers Him myrrh, the balm of incorruptibility, and salutes Him as prophet or spiritual Master par excellence, which corresponds directly to the common principle of the two powers, sacerdotal and royal. From the moment of His human birth homage is thus rendered to Christ in the ‘three worlds’ of which all the Eastern doctrines speak: the terrestrial world, the intermediary world, and the celestial world; and those who render it are none other than the authentic depositories of the primordial tradition, the guardians entrusted with the revelation made to humanity in the Terrestrial Paradise. Such at least is the conclusion that, for us, clearly emerges from a comparison of the corresponding testimonies to be found on this point among all peoples. Moreover, under the varying forms it assumes during the course of time, under the more or less opaque veils that sometimes conceal it from the gaze of those who hold to external appearances, this great primordial tradition has in reality always been the sole true religion of all humanity. Should we not therefore regard the step taken by the representatives of that tradition, as related in the Gospel (if we would understand it truly), as one of the most beautiful proofs of the divinity of Christ, and at the same time as a decisive recognition of the supreme priesthood and royalty that truly appertains to Him “according to the Order of Melchizedek”?

Indeed, the Christianity that René Guénon was thinking of is not that of the pseudo-esoterists, who see in Christ no more than a ‘great initiate’. And no more is it that of the liberal Protestants. It is the authentic Christianity of the Apostolic Churches:

“Protestantism is illogical, for in attempting to ‘humanize’ religion, it still allows the supra-human element of Revelation to exist, at least in theory and despite everything. It does not dare to push the negation to the limit, but, in subjecting this revelation to all sorts of discussions stemming from purely human interpretations, it in fact soon reduces it to nothing; and when one sees people who persist in calling themselves ‘Christian’ while no longer admitting even the divinity of Christ, it is permissible to think that they are (perhaps unsuspectingly) much closer to complete negation than to true Christianity.”

A few lines further on, Guénon's position becomes still clearer:

“One might here object: would it not have been possible for Protestantism, though separating from the Catholic Church, to keep its traditional doctrines by continuing to accept the Sacred Books? It is the introduction of ‘free interpretation’ that absolutely opposes such an hypothesis, since it gives free rein to individual fantasies; besides, the preservation of the doctrine presupposes an organized traditional teaching by means of which the orthodox interpretation is maintained; and in fact, in the Western world, this teaching is identified with Catholicism.”

What was true at the time of the Reformation is still true today:

There is no doubt whatsoever, despite everything, that only Catholicism still preserves whatever remains of the traditional spirit in the West; but does this mean that one can speak here of an integral preservation of the tradition, secure against the onslaught of the modern spirit? Unfortunately, such does not appear to be the case; or, to be more precise, were the deposit of the tradition still intact (which is supposing a great deal), it is doubtful that its profound meaning could be effectively understood, even by a small elite — whose existence would undoubtedly manifest itself through some action, or, rather, through an influence that is in fact nowhere in evidence. At issue, more likely, is what we would willingly call a ‘latent preservation’ that permits those capable of it to rediscover the meaning of the tradition, even though this meaning may not in fact actually be grasped by anyone.

The preceding quotations, however important they may be, nevertheless call for further clarification. Given that Christianity occupies relatively little place in Guénon's work as a whole, and that he did not apply himself to the task of bringing to light its metaphysical and initiatic content, certain people have believed themselves entitled to conclude that Guénon considered Christianity, although undeniably a regular and orthodox form, as in some way incomplete with regard to metaphysical knowledge . Guénon declared himself opposed to such a misconstruction of his thought right from the outset. In 1925, in Eastern Metaphysics, Guénon made a declaration that leaves no room for ambiguity. After speaking of the ‘partial metaphysics’ of Aristotle and his successors, he writes:

[For] or our part we are certain that there was something other than this in the West, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages; that there were, for the use of an elite, purely metaphysical doctrines that we may call complete — comprising that realization which, for most of our contemporaries, is no doubt almost inconceivable.

Now, in the West and in the Middle Ages — and we know that when Guénon speaks of the Middle Ages he has in mind above all the period of the Latin Middle Ages, extending from the reign of Charlemagne to the beginning of the fourteenth century — these complete and purely metaphysical doctrines, as well as the corresponding methods of realization, could only depend on Christian esoterism and, more precisely, on an esoterism based on the religious exoterism of Roman Catholicism (one of the most important testimonies that have come down to us of the existence of such doctrines in the Middle Ages is the work of Meister Eckhart, and these doctrines assuredly had their equivalent in Eastern Christianity). René Guénon’s has permitted many to rediscover and correctly interpret these generally forgotten or ill-understood doctrines.

The studies brought together in the present volume are, for the most part, devoted to organizations that Guéon considered to have been responsible, in the Middle Ages, for extending the teaching and methods of Christian esoterism: the Order of the Temple, the Fideli d’Amore, and the Knighthood of the Holy Grail. As such, they constitute a complement to The Esoterism of Dante and to The King of the World. They are preceded with two studies, entitled ‘Concerning Sacred Languages’ and ‘Christianity and Initiation’. The first, which brings to light the importance of the Hebrew language in Christianity, indicates perhaps the most important way forward for profound research in the traditional sciences and the methods of Christian esoterism. The second concerns the very structure of Christianity, both in its religious and its initiatic aspects.

In conclusion, it seems to us indispensable to formulate a question that will spring to mind for many readers once they have acquainted themselves with this small work: has esoterism, in its purity if not its integrality, remained living somewhere at the heart of Latin Christianity? In a note written in December 1949, near the end of his life—and included in this book—Guénon envisages this possibility. Why should this astonish us? Let us refer to some words we ought not forget. On the one hand: “And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it”; and on the other: “Turning round, Peter saw, following them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, the one who at the Supper had leaned upon His breast. . . . Peter therefore, seeing him, said to Jesus, ‘Lord, and what of this man?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If I wish him to remain until I come, what is it to thee? Do thou follow me.’ This saying therefore went abroad among the brethren, that that disciple was not to die. But Jesus had not said to him, ‘He is not to die’, but rather, ‘If I wish him to remain until I come, what is that to thee?’”

The work of René Guénon certainly does not contradict this.

Jean Reyor.