René Guénon

Biography, Page 2
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René Guénon was born in Blois in 1886. He grew up in a strict Catholic environment and was schooled by Jesuits. As a young man he moved to Paris to take up studies in mathematics at the College Rollin. This subject remained a lifelong interest, and a few years before his death he published a short mathematical treatise, Les Princips du Calcul Infinitéstimal. However, his energies were soon diverted from academic studies and in 1905 he abandoned his preparation for Grandes Écoles. For the next seven years, seized by what Anatole France called ‘the vertigo of the invisible’, Guénon submerged himself in fin-de-siécle French occultism.[7] He became a leading member in several secret societies—theosophical, spiritualistic, masonic, and ‘gnostic’.

The central goal of most occult groups was a spiritual and cultural renovatio through a recovery of man’s ‘Adamic privilege’. This, apparently, was to be achieved through a revival of occult traditions of ‘esoteric wisdom’ and ‘spiritual alchemy’.[8] As one historian of religion has noted, among the most potent symbols appropriated by such groups were the Temple of Solomon, which was to be symbolically reconstructed; the Order of the Knights Templar, which was to be reconstituted; and the Holy Grail, ‘whose myth and hidden meaning were supposedly present in the operations of spiritual alchemy.’[9]

During the years after 1906 Guénon frequented the ‘hermetic’ and ‘Martinist’ school of a certain Dr. Encausse, who achieved some celebrity under the name ‘Papus’. Guénon was a member of several Martinist Lodges that claimed filiation from Don Martines de Pasqually (1743-1884) and from Louis de Saint-Martin, both 18th century occultists of some renown—or notoriety, depending on one’s point of view.[10] Following the Spiritualist and Masonic Congress of 1908, Guénon met Fabre des Essarts—also known as ‘the Gnostic patriarch’, or ‘Synesius’—and became a ‘bishop’ in a Masonic brotherhood where he assumed the name ‘Palingenius’, which he sometimes used as a nom-de-plume.[11]In June 1909 Guénon founded the occultist journal La Gnose, subtitled organe de l’Eglise gnostique universelle. It lasted a little over two years and carried most of Guénon’s writings from this period.

Guénon’s involvement in the occultist underground seems to have been somewhat indiscriminate. As well as playing a leading role in the ‘gnostic’ groups, Guénon was also involved in theosophy, spiritualism, and masonry. He was a member of the Thebah Lodge of the Grand Lodge of France (Masonic), but around the years 1910-1912 he also became involved with the anti-masonic group clustered around the Catholic review La France Anti-Maçonnique, to which he contributed under the alias ‘le Sphinx’.[12] From the vantage-point of Guénon’s later work this was a murky and bizarre period of his life, one of which he apparently did not care to be reminded. Indeed, he was to become one of the most ferocious critics of these occultist movements. Nevertheless, Guénon learned a good deal in this period and his preoccupations and general orientation always retained something of the stamp of fin-de-siécle occultism. As Whitall Perry has observed, Guénon took on the coloring of the ‘hermetico-occultist’ milieu in which he moved in the pre-War years.[13]

In the context of the present study it is not necessary to unravel all the details of Guénon’s participation in various secret societies.  However, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of this period in his life.  In its sociological dimension occultism provided, as it doubtless still does, a framework for the repudiation of the bourgeois ideologies and institutions of the day. Most of the occult groups turned to the archaic past in search of authentic spiritual values against which modern civilization could be measured and found wanting. As Mircea Eliade has observed

     involvement with the occult represented for the French literary and artistic avant-garde one of the most efficient criticisms and rejections of the religious and cultural values of the West—efficient because it was considered to be based on historical facts.[14]

Although Guénon was to disown the philosophical and historical assumptions on which such movements were built, and to contrast their ‘counterfeit spirituality’ with what he came to see as genuine expressions of traditional esoterism, he remained steadfastly opposed to contemporary European civilization.

Some of the occult movements stimulated a study of ancient esoteric traditions in Egypt, Persia, India, and China, and directed attention toward the sacred writings of the East. The role of the Theosophical Society, for example, in promoting a more sympathetic and receptive attitude to India’s religious heritage, is well-known.  Precisely how Guénon came to a serious study of Taoism, Hinduism, and Islam remains unclear, but it seems likely that it was through his involvement in one of the occultist groups.

There have been suggestions that Guénon received during this period either a Taoist or an Islamic initiation—or both.[15] Whitall Perry has suggested that the ‘catalyzing element’ was Guénon’s contact with representatives of the Advaita school of Vedanta.[16] The facts of the matter are far from clear and there is insufficient evidence to make speculation fruitful.  Guénon always kept a cloak of secrecy wrapped tightly around his own spiritual life. It was certainly during this period however that he embarked on a serious study of the doctrines of Taoism, Hinduism, and perhaps Islam. Although his earliest writings in La Gnose exhibit some rationalistic and anti-religious bias, they also demonstrate a familiarity with Vedanta.

It has often been asserted that Guénon converted to Islam in 1912.[17] This supposition seems to have taken on the status of a ‘fact’, but, as J. P. Laurant makes clear, it has yet to be supported by incontrovertible evidence.[18] Such may have been the case, but some scholars have argued that Guénon’s personal sympathies, and perhaps his formal affiliations, belonged to the Roman Catholic Church in the years between about 1912 and 1928, and that his formal conversion to Islam did not come until Guénon moved to Cairo in 1930.[19] In either case it can be said that Guénon’s life certainly entered a new phase in 1912, one marked by his marriage to a devout Catholic.

Guénon emerged now from the rather subterranean world of the occultists and moved freely in an intensely Catholic milieu, leading a busy social and intellectual life. He was influenced by several prominent Catholic intellectuals of the day, among them Jacques Maritain, Fathers Peillaube and Sertillanges, and one M. Milhaud, who conducted classes at the Sorbonne on the philosophy of science. The years 1912 to 1930 are the most public of Guénon’s life.  He attended lectures at the Sorbonne, wrote and published widely, gave at least one public lecture, and maintained many social and intellectual contacts. He published his first books in the 1920s and soon became well-known for his work on philosophical and metaphysical subjects.

Whatever Guénon’s personal commitments may have been during this period, his thought had clearly undergone a major shift away from occultism and toward an interest in esoteric sapiential traditions within the framework of the great religions. One of the foci of interest for Guénon was the possibility of a Christian esoterism within the Catholic tradition. (He always remained somewhat uninformed on the esoteric dimensions within Eastern Orthodoxy).[20] Olivier de Fremond, a friend of Guénon’s in these years, wrote of Guénon’s letters from this period, ‘Les vieilles lettres que j’ai de lui respirent un parfait esprit catholique.’[21] Guénon envisaged, in some of his work from this period, a regenerated Catholicism, enriched and invigorated by a recovery of her esoteric traditions, and ‘repaired’ through a prise de conscience.[22] He contributed regularly to the Catholic journal Regnabit, the Sacre-Coeur review founded and edited by P. Anizan. These articles reveal the re-orientation of Guénon’s thinking in which ‘tradition’ now becomes the controlling theme. Some of these periodical writings found their way into his later books.

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