René Guénon

Biography, Page 4
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The shift in Guénon’s intellectual orientation away from occultism is difficult to pinpoint precisely. However, as early as 1909 we find him attacking what he saw as the misconceptions and confusions abroad in the spiritualist movements.[38] Although his misgivings about many of the occultist groups were mounting during the 1909–1912 period, it was not until the publication of two of his earliest books that he launched a full-scale critique: Le Théosophisme, Historie d’une Pseudo-Religion (1921) and L’Erreur Spirite  (1923). The titles are suggestive: they are lacerating attacks not only on theosophy and spiritualism, but also on the Papus’ ‘gnostic’ groups, and movements such as Rosicrucianism. Guénon’s exposé was not merely a polemical fusillade, but a meticulously detailed analysis. Of the groups in which Guénon himself had been involved only the Masons escaped relatively unscathed. As Mircea Eliade has noted:

     The most erudite and devastating critique of all these so-called occult groups was presented not by a rationalist outside observer, but by an author from the inner circle, duly initiated into some of their secret orders and well acquainted with their occult doctrines; furthermore, that critique was directed, not from a sceptical or positivistic perspective, but from what he called ‘traditional esoterism’. This learned and intransigent critic was René Guénon.[39]

The details of this demolition job need not concern us here, but it is worth noting the main lines of attack. Guénon’s fundamental indictment was that such movements, far from preserving traditional esoterisms, were made up of a syncretic mish-mash of distorted and heterogeneous elements forced into a false unity, devoid of any authentic metaphysical framework. Thus they were vulnerable to the scientistic ideologies of the day and inevitably fell prey to the intellectual confusions rampant in Europe. One of the most characteristic confusions of such groups, to cite but one example, was the mistaking of the psychic for the spiritual.[40] Occultism as a whole he now saw as one of the ‘signs of the times”, a symptom of the spiritual malaise in modern civilization.  Guénon was to take up some of these charges again in later works, especially The Reign of Quantity.

Guénon’s interest in Eastern metaphysical traditions had been awakened around 1909, and some of his early articles in La Gnose were devoted to Vedantic metaphysics. His first book, Introduction Générale á l’Étude des Doctrines Hindoues (1921), marked Guénon a commentator of rare authority. It also served notice of Guénon’s formidable power as a critic of contemporary civilization. Of this book Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written

     It was like a sudden burst of lightening, an abrupt intrusion into the modern world of a body of knowledge and a perspective utterly alien to the prevalent climate and world view and completely opposed to all that characterizes the modern mentality.[41]

However, Guénon’s axial work on Vedanta, L’Homme et son Devenir selon le Védânta, was published in 1925. Other significant works in the field of oriental traditions include La Métaphysique Orientale, delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1925 but not published until 1939, La Grande Triade, based on Taoist doctrine, and many articles on such subjects as Hindu mythology, Taoism and Confucianism, and doctrines concerning reincarnation. Interestingly, Guénon remained more or less incognizant of the Buddhist tradition for many years, regarding it as no more than a ‘heterodox development" within Hinduism, without integrity as a formal religious tradition. It was only through the influence of Marco Pallis, one of his translators, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, that Guénon decisively revised his attitude.[42]

During the 1920s, when Guénon was moving in the coteries of French Catholicism, he turned his attention to some aspects of Europe’s spiritual heritage. As well as numerous articles on such subjects as the Druids, the Grail, Christian symbolism, and folkloric motifs, Guénon produced several major works in this field, including L’Ésotérisme de Dante (1925), St Bernard (1929), and Le Symbolisme de la Croix (1931).  Another work, Autorité Spirituelle et Pouvoir Temporel (1929), was occasioned by certain contemporary controversies. The quintessential Guénon is to be found in two works that tied together some of his central themes: La Crise du Monde Moderne (1927), and his masterpiece,  Le Régne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (1945). The themes of these two books had been rehearsed in an earlier one, Orient et Occident (1924). The books mounted an increasingly elaborate and merciless attack on the foundations of the contemporary European world-view. It will be useful to dwell on the last of these works in some detail.

The Reign of Quantity is a magisterial summation of Guénon’s work.  It is, characteristically, a difficult work. Guénon was quite unconcerned with reaching a wide audience and addressed the book to those few capable of understanding it, ‘without any concern for the inevitable incomprehension of the others.’[43] He set out to challenge nearly all of the intellectual assumptions current in Europe at the time. The book, he writes, is directed to the understanding of some of the darkest enigmas of the modern world, enigmas which the world itself denies because it is incapable of perceiving them although it carries them within itself, and because this denial is an indispensable condition for the maintenance of the special mentality whereby it exists.[44]

At first sight the book ranges over a bewildering variety of subjects: the nature of time, space, and matter, as conceived in traditional and modern science; the philosophical foundations of such typically modern modes of thought as rationalism, materialism, and empiricism; the significance of ancient crafts, such as metallurgy; the nature of shamanism and sorcery; the ‘illusion of statistics’; the ‘misdeeds of psychoanalysis’; the ‘pseudo-initiatic’ pretensions of spiritualism, theosophy, and other ‘counterfeit’ forms of spirituality; tradition and anti-tradition; and the unfolding of cosmic and terrestrial cycles.  Close study of the book reveals that these apparently disparate strands have been woven into a work of subtle design and dense texture. The Reign of Quantity is a brilliantly sustained and excoriating attack on modern civilisation. It has less polemical heat and moral indignation than some of his earlier works, but is none the less effective for that.  The book is a controlled and dispassionate, but devastating, razing of the assumptions and values of modern science. At the same time it is an affirmation of the metaphysical and cosmological principles given expression in traditional cultures and religions.

In connection with the doctrine of cosmic cycles, Guénon unfolds a startling thesis about the present terrestrial situation. His vision is rooted in the Hindu conception of the Kali-Yuga, but is not restricted to the purely Indian expression of this doctrine.  There is a dark apocalyptic strain in the book, which some readers are tempted to dismiss as the rantings of yet another doom-sayer. For Guénon the dire circumstances in which the modern world finds itself are to be explained largely through an elucidation of the cosmic cycles, whereby humankind is seen to be degenerating into an increasingly solidified and materialized state, more and more impervious to spiritual influences. Conversely, the world grows simultaneously more and more susceptible to infernal forces of various kinds.[45] The forced spatial convergence of different civilizations correlates with the temporal unfolding of the present terrestrial cycle, which is moving toward an inexorable cataclysm.

Guénon took the inevitable end of the world absolutely seriously.[46] By the time he wrote this book he believed ‘remedies’ were no longer possible, that there was no escape from the apocalypse. To some readers this looks like a ‘despairing pessimism’, to which Guénon might have retorted that neither optimism nor pessimism have anything to do with the matter. Moreover, what from one angle might be seen as a ‘worldly pessimism’, appears from another as a ‘celestial optimism’, since the end of a cycle marks its completion and the restoration of order.

Closely related to the doctrine of cycles is Guénon’s profoundly challenging thesis, based on traditional cosmologies, about nature of time, space, and matter. Contrary to the claims of modern science, asserts Guénon, time and space do not constitute a kind of uniform continuum or matrix in which events and material phenomena manifest themselves. Rather, time-and-space is a field of qualitative determinations and differences. In other words, the nature of time and space is not a constant, fixed datum, but is subject to both quantitative and qualitative change. Any exclusively quantitative and materialistic science such as now tyrannizes the European mind cannot accommodate this principle: it strives rather to reduce qualitatively determined phenomena to the barren and mechanistic formulae of a profane and materialistic science. (One might add that some of the ‘discoveries’ of physicists since Guénon’s time have done nothing to disprove his thesis; indeed, to some minds they give it more credibility. Guénon himself would have argued that metaphysical and cosmological principles such as he was applying could in no way be affected by empirical considerations).[47]

Guénon’s critique of scientism—the ideology of modern science—is something quite other than just another attack on scientific reductionism, although that surely is part of his case. Nor is it a catalogue of the inadequacies of this or that scientific theory. Rather, it is a radical and disturbing challenge to almost every postulate of modern European science. The critique hinges on the contrast between sacred, traditional sciences on the one hand, and profane, materialistic science on the other. In an earlier work Guénon had elaborated the basis of this contrast in uncompromising terms:

     Never until the present epoch had the study of the sensible world been regarded as self-sufficient; never would the science of this ephemeral and changing multiplicity have been judged truly worthy of the name of knowledge… According to the ancient conception… a science was less esteemed for itself than for the degree in which it expressed after its own fashion… a reflection of the higher immutable truth of which everything of any reality necessarily partakes…  [All] science appeared as an extension of the traditional doctrine itself, as one of its applications, secondary and contingent no doubt… but still a veritable knowledge none the less…[48]

For Guénon and the other traditionalists, the notion of a self-sufficient, self-validating, autonomous material science is a contradiction, an incongruity; for all sciences must have recourse to higher and immutable principles and truths. Science must be pursued in a metaphysical and cosmological framework that it cannot construct out of itself. In another work Guénon wrote that modern science

     in disavowing the principles [of traditional metaphysics and cosmology] and in refusing to attach itself to them, robs itself both of the highest guarantee and the surest direction it could have; there is no longer anything valid in it except knowledge of details, and as soon as it seeks to rise one degree higher, it becomes dubious and vacillating.[49]

These principles, of course, are quite alien to the modern mentality. They are likely to provoke all kinds of quite irrelevant responses about the material inadequacies of traditional cosmologies—geocentricism, for example. The traditionalist vision of both traditional and modern science cannot of course be so easily brushed aside, as even a cursory examination of the relevant works will show; but space does not permit further elaboration of this point here.

The Reign of Quantity also seeks to demonstrate the intimate connections between traditional metaphysics and the arts, crafts, and sciences that are found in any traditional culture, and to show how modern and profane sciences are frequently a kind of degenerated caricature of traditional sciences.[50]Such a demonstration turns largely on Guénon’s explanation of the nature of symbolism and of the initiatic character of many traditional sciences.

What of the qualities of mind and temperament revealed in Guénon’s writings? Marco Pallis wrote of Guénon that he had a mind of phenomenal lucidity of a kind one can best describe as ‘mathematical’ in its apparent detachment from anything savoring of aesthetic or even moral considerations; his criteria of what was right and what was inadmissible remained wholly intellectual ones needing no considerations drawn from a different order of reality to reinforce them—their own self-evidence sufficed.[51]

Another commentator speaks of Guénon’s exposition as ‘so crystalline and geometric, so mathematically abstract and devoid of almost any human element,’[52] while Gai Eaton notes that ‘in him the blade of French intellectuality is tempered to a razor-sharp edge.’[53] Theodore Roszak writes of his ‘keen, spiritual discrimination,’[54] while Schuon, referring to the absence of any sentimental or even psychic dimension in Guénon’s work, once used the image of ‘an eye without a body.’[55]

These images of sharpness, or a finely-honed cutting edge—a mathematical precision and incisive penetration—all testify to Guénon’s clarity of thought in his metaphysical expositions and his pitiless exposure of the ‘signs of the times.’ Nonetheless, Guénon’s work is by no means easy to assimilate. Gai Eaton, a great admirer of Guénon, concedes that ‘it is questionable whether anyone with the normal tastes and intellectual background of our day can approach Guénon’s work for the first time without a sense of revulsion.’[56]  Why so?

Firstly, there is the substance of Guénon’s work. It is not easy of access and, at first sight, often strange, startling, baffling. His premises are too radically at odds with conventional wisdom for him to gain any easy following. His critique of European civilization is so ruthless, so unnerving in its implications, that it often provokes a kind of defensive reflex, an emotional and intellectual resistance that makes for a failure to engage what is actually being said. Without the right kind of predisposition, the reader is unlikely to recover from the initial shock. An acceptance of Guénon’s general thesis also entails a drastic intellectual and existential adjustment for most readers. Andre Gide typified one kind of response to Guénon’s work when he wrote:

     If only I had known Guénon in my youth!… Now it is too late; the die is cast. My sclerosed mind has as much difficulty conforming to the precepts of that ancestral wisdom as my body has to the so-called ‘comfortable’ position recommended by the Yogis… To tell the truth, I cannot even manage really to desire resorption of the individual into the Eternal Being they seek… I cling desperately to my limits and feel a repugnance for the disappearance of those contours that my whole education made a point of defining… I am and remain on the side of Descartes and of Bacon.  Nonetheless, those books of Guénon are remarkable...[57]

This is very much to the point. Guénon’s vision cannot be accepted ‘a little’.  One might disagree of course over details, but his fundamental premises must either be accepted or rejected. There is nothing of the smörgasbord in Guénon’s writings.

Then also there is Guénon’s claim to being a mouthpiece for a metaphysical vision or theoria that is beyond the reach of ‘proof’, or even of debate. Take for instance, the following:

     Those who are qualified to speak in the name of a traditional doctrine are not required to enter into discussion with the ‘profane’ or to engage in polemics: it is for them simply to expound the doctrine such as it is, for the sake of those capable of understanding it, and at the same time to denounce error wherever it arises... [Their] function is not to engage in strife and in doing so to compromise the doctrine, but to pronounce the judgement which they have the right to pronounce if they are in effective possession of the principles which should inspire them infallibly.[58]

Such a passage is likely to stick in the craw—to say the least—of many contemporary scholars, for obvious enough reasons. For Guénon, a genuine understanding of metaphysical principles represents a ‘permanent and changeless certitude’ that leaves no room for debate: one either understands these principles or one does not. Guénon was not bent on ‘proving’ anything whatsoever, but only on making traditional doctrines more intelligible.

Hand in hand with this perception of his role went a tone of implacable certitude, all too easily seen as a kind of intellectual arrogance. Roszak, for example, speaks of ‘a mind whose very precision led to an aristocratic intolerance and an elitism that risked sterility.’[59]  Roger Lipsey refers to Guénon’s ‘formidably intolerant’[60] attitude to the modern West, while Pallis writes of his ‘habitually hectoring tone… adopted in regard to people whose views he disapproved of.’[61] Bernard Kelly refers to the ‘withering, intransigent, unbending’ tone of Guénon’s writings.[62]  Jacques Lacarriere has regretted Guénon’s ‘aristocratism, his exclusive attachment to esoterism, his arbitrary rejection—and at times indeed, his faulty knowledge—of contemporary philosophies, and his ferocious intellectualism.’[63]

There is in Guénon’s work an adamantine quality, an austerity and inflexibility, and a combative tone, as well as ‘icy brilliance.’[64] He was not one to coax, cajole, or seduce his readers. He wrote as a man convinced that he was in possession of timeless truths, and would brook no compromises. There is no concession to alternative points of view, no sense of dialogue with his readers, no hospitality to any ideas at odds with those he is expressing. Something of Guénon’s unyielding posture is evinced in the following passage (and it needs be remembered that he is writing in the 1920s):

     hitherto, so far as we are aware, no one else beside ourselves has consistently expounded authentic Oriental ideas in the West; and we have done so...without the slightest wish to propagandize or to popularize, and exclusively for the benefit of those who are able to understand the doctrines just as they stand, and not after they have been denatured on the plea of making them more readily acceptable…[65]

In an unusually personal vein, Guénon reprimanded a critic who had suggested that he had ‘passed’ from Hinduism to Islam:

     We have never ‘passed’ from one thing to another, as all our writings abundantly prove; and we have no need to ‘seek the truth’ since we know (and we must insist upon this word) that it exists equally in all traditions…[66]

For many contemporaries such claims will doubtless smack of arrogance and extravagant confidence. However, the crucial point is this: to be offended by Guénon’s ‘arrogance’, and to invalidate his message, are two quite different matters. It is to the latter purpose that Guénon’s would-be critics should address themselves. One might also add that in these times of full-scale relativism any claim to certitude is likely to be dismissed, without further consideration, as ‘arrogance’, or ‘fanaticism’, or some such thing. Looked at from another angle, Guénon’s militant posture is nothing other than an expression of his fierce commitment to the truth, and it is precisely his refusal to compromise first principles that gives his work its power and integrity.[67]

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