A good deal of Guénon’s energy in the 1930s was directed to a massive correspondence that he carried on with is readers in Europe, people often in search of some kind of initiation, or simply pressing inquiries about subjects dealt with in his books and articles. Most of Guénon’s published work after his move to Cairo appeared in Études Traditionnelles (until 1937 Le Voile d’Isis), a formerly theosophical journal that was transformed under Guénon’s influence into the principal European forum for traditionalist thought.[25] It was only the war that provided Guénon enough respite from his correspondence to devote himself to the writing of some of his major works including, The Reign of Quantity (1945).

In his later years Guénon was much more preoccupied with questions concerning initiation into authentic esoteric traditions. He published at least twenty-five articles in Études Traditionnelles dealing with this subject, from many points of view. Although he had found his own resting-place within the fold of Islam, Guénon remained interested in the possibility of genuine initiatic channels surviving within Christianity. He also never entirely relinquished his interest in Freemasonry, and returned to this subject in some of his last writings.  Only shortly before his death did he conclude that there was no effective hope of an esoteric regeneration within either masonry or Catholicism.[26]

The relationship between Guénon’s life and his work has engaged the attention of several scholars. J. P. Laurant has suggested that his intellectual, spiritual, and ritual life only achieved a harmonious resolution after his move to Cairo, within the protective embrace of Islam.[27] P. L. Reynolds has charted the influence of his French and Catholic background on his work.[28] Others, especially those committed to traditionalism themselves, have argued that Guénon’s whole adult life represents a witness to an unchanging vision of the truth, and that his participation in occultism was part of this function. Such commentators suggest that his thought does not ‘evolve’ but only shifts ground as hen responds to changing circumstances. Thus Michel Valsan, a collaborator on Études Traditionnelles, writes:

     Il convient de préciser en l’occurrence que le privilège spécial qu’a cette oeuvre de jouer le rôle de critère de vérité, de régularité et de plénitude traditionnelle devant la civilisation occidentale dérive du caractére sacré et non-inviduel qu’a revêtu la fonction de René Guénon. L’homme qui devait accomplir cette fonction fut certainement préparé de loin et non pas improvisé.  Les matrices de la Sagesse avaient prédisposé et formé son entité selon une économie précise, et sa carrière s’accomplit dans le temps par une corrélation constante entre ses possibilités et les conditions cycliques extérieures.[29]

Each of these claims carries some legitimacy. The shaping influence of his own background and period is obvious enough in his work. Nor is there any point in denying that, looked at as a whole, Guénon’s thought does undergo a radical change between about 1910 and 1914. While much of his early work remains interesting, and often illuminating, it cannot be said to represent a balanced expression of traditionalism such as we find in his later works. To borrow one of his own favorite images, his early work is not without ‘fissures’ that left it vulnerable to some of the more fanciful theories of the occultists. However, if we leave aside a few jejune writings from these early years, Guénon’s work does exhibit an arresting consistency, an apparently intuitive grasp of metaphysical and cosmological principles, and an authoritative explication of the Sophia Perennis. One commentator has observed that, after the occultist period, Guénon only revised his position on two substantial issues—the authenticity of Buddhism as an integral tradition, and the initiatic possibilities of freemasonry.[30] If we add to this his changing attitude to the revival of Christian esoterism, we have indeed catalogued the only radical revisions in Guénon’s work over almost forty years. We shall return to this aspect of Guénon’s achievement in discussing his own perception of the role he had to play.

Guénon was a prolific writer. He published seventeen books during his lifetime, and at least eight posthumous collections and compilations have since appeared. Here we shall take only an overview of his work.  The œuvre exhibits certain recurrent motifs and preoccupations and is, in a sense, all of a piece. Guénon’s understanding of tradition is the key to his work. As early as 1909 we find Guénon writing of ‘...the Primordial Tradition which, in reality, is the same everywhere, regardless of the different shapes it takes in order to be fit for every race and every historical period.’[31] As Gai Eaton has observed, Guénon

     believes that there exists a Universal Tradition, revealed to humanity at the beginning of the present cycle of time, but partially lost… [His] primary concern is less with the detailed forms of Tradition and the history of its decline than with its kernel, the pure and changeless knowledge which is still accessible to man through the channels provided by traditional doctrine...[32]

The existence of a Primordial Tradition embodying a set of immutable metaphysical and cosmological principles, from which derive particular traditions that express these principles in forms determined by the exigencies of the particular situation, is axiomatic in Guénon’s work.[33] It is a first principle that admits no argument; nor does it require any kind of ‘proof’ or ‘demonstration’, historical or otherwise.

Guénon’s work, from his earliest writings in 1909 onward, can be seen as an attempt to give a new expression and application to the timeless principles which inform all traditional doctrines. In his writings he ranges over a vast terrain—Vedanta, the Chinese tradition, Christianity, Sufism, Folklore and mythology from all over the world, the secret traditions of gnosticism, alchemy, the Kabbalah, and so on, always intent on excavating their underlying principles and showing them to be formal manifestations of the one Primordial Tradition. Certain key themes run through all of his writings, and one meets again and again  such notions as these: the concept of metaphysics as transcending all other doctrinal orders; the identification of metaphysics and the ‘formalization’, so to speak, of gnosis (or jñana if one prefers); the distinction between exoteric and esoteric domains; the hierarchic superiority and infallibility of intellective knowledge; the contrast of the modern Occident with the traditional Orient; the spiritual bankruptcy of modern European civilisation; a cyclical view of time, based largely on the Hindu doctrine of cosmic cycles; and a contra-evolutionary view of history. All of these key ideas would bear further comment, but here we must confine ourselves to a few general remarks and to a brief look at the Guénonian corpus.

Guénon gathered together doctrines and principles from diverse times and places, but always emphasized that the enterprise was a synthetic one, which envisaged formally divergent elements in their principal unity, rather than a syncretic one, which could only press-gang incongruous forms into an artificial unity. This distinction is crucial not only in Guénon’s work, but in traditionalism as a whole.[34]

Guénon repeatedly turned to oriental teachings, believing that it was only in the East that various sapiential traditions remained more or less intact. It is important not to confuse this Eastward-looking stance with the kind of sentimental exotericism nowadays so much in vogue. As Coomaraswamy noted,

     If Guénon wants the West to turn to Eastern metaphysics, it is not because they are Eastern but because this is metaphysics. If ‘Eastern’ metaphysics differed from a ‘Western’ metaphysics—one or the other would not be metaphysics.[35]

One of Guénon’s translators made the same point in suggesting that, if Guénon turns so often to the East, it is because the West is in the position of the foolish virgins who, through the wandering of their attention in other directions, had allowed their lamps to go out; in order to rekindle the sacred fire, which in its essence is always the same wherever it may be burning, they must have recourse to the lamps still kept alight.[36]

The contrast between the riches of traditional civilizations and the spiritual impoverishment of modern Europe sounds like a refrain through Guénon’s writings.  In all his work Guénon’s mission was twofold: to reveal the metaphysical roots of the ‘crisis of the modern world’ and to explain the ideas behind the authentic and esoteric teachings that still remained alive… in the East.[37]

By way of expediency we may divide Guénon’s writings into five categories, each corresponding roughly with a particular period in his life: pre-1912 articles in occultist periodicals; exposés of occultism, especially spiritualism and theosophy; expositions of Oriental metaphysics; treatments both of the European tradition and of initiation in general; and lastly, critiques of modern civilization. This classification may be somewhat arbitrary, but it does help situate some of the focal points in Guénon’s work.

Guénon’s earliest writings appeared, as we have seen, in the organs of French occultism. In light of his later work, a certain portion of this periodical literature must be considered somewhat ephemeral. Nonetheless the seeds of most of Guénon’s work can be found in his articles from this period. The most significant, perhaps, were five essays that appeared in La Gnose between September 1911 and February 1912, under the title ‘La constitution de l’être humain et son évolution selon le Védânta’; these became the opening chapters of one of his most influential studies, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, not published until 1925. Other writings from this period on such subjects as mathematics and the science of numbers, prayer and incantation, and initiation, all presage later work.

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