René Guénon

Biography, Page 5
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Another factor can help explain Guénon’s comparative obscurity in the West: his methodology and his attitude to scholarship. We have already seen how, for Guénon, metaphysical principles were self-evident and self-authenticating. This poses a problem for the scholarly mind. However, the problem runs deeper than this. If it were simply a matter of Guénon working from the basis of certain clearly-stated premises there would be no more reason to reject his work than that of many a philosopher or theologian. No, the fact is that Guénon was, in Whitall Perry’s words, ‘somewhat slipshod in scholarship’:

     [His] certitude about principles lent a false sense of security on the factual level, where a little research would have sufficed to protect him from the barbs of orientalists who, if incognizant of metaphysical and spiritual truths, had a least done their homework.[68]

Guénon was never primarily a scholar. Father Sylvian Lévi, to whom Guénon submitted a draft of Introduction Générale as a possible doctoral thesis, recommended its rejection on the grounds that

     Il entend exclure tous les éléments qui ne correspondent pas à sa conception… tout est dans le Vedanta… il fait bon marché de l’histoire et de la critique historique… il est tout prêt à croire á une transmission mystique d’une vérité première apparue au génie humain dès les premiers âges du monde…[69]

This is not unjust. However, while Guénon can reasonably be reproached with a failure to ‘do his homework’ on the empirical and historical level, we must remember that he was a metaphysician concerned with first principles. If his application of these principles to contingent phenomena sometimes left room for a more scrupulous scholarship, then this is indeed regrettable, but it leaves the principles themselves quite unaffected.[70] This is sometimes forgotten by those who wish to force Guénon into the mould of the historian, the sociologist, the anthropologist, or the comparative religionist.

Guénon was quite out of sympathy with the prevailing ideals of academic scholarship. Nothing could have been further removed from the spirit of his work than the notion of scholarship for its own sake. ‘Passion for research,’ he said, ‘taken as an end in itself is mental restlessness without end and without issue’.[71] Guénon kept his distance from the academic intelligentsia; as Roger Lipsey remarked, ‘he mistrusted the academic mind and received abundant mistrust in return.’[72]

All of these factors conspire to limit Guénon’s appeal. However, while Guénon’s influence remains minimal in the Western academic community at large, he is the seminal influence in the development of traditionalism. Along with Coomaraswamy and Schuon, he forms what one commentator has called ‘the great triumvirate’ of the traditionalist school.[73] By way of concluding this introduction to Guénon we shall briefly consider his own perception of his role, and the way he is seen by other traditionalists.

For those who accept Guénon’s premises his work is a voice crying in the European wilderness. However, as both Schuon and Perry have stressed, Guénon’s function cannot strictly be termed ‘prophetic’, the age of prophecy being over. Schuon:

     If on the doctrinal plane the Guénonian work has a stamp of unicity, it may not be useless to point out that this is owing not to a more or less ‘prophetic’ nature—a supposition that is excluded and which Guénon had already rejected beforehand—but to an exceptional cyclical conjuncture whose temporal aspect is this ‘end of the world’ in which we live, and whose spatial aspect is—by the same token—the forced convergence of civilizations.[74]

We have already met with Michel Valsan’s contention to the same effect.  Guénon himself did not doubt that he had access to the sophia perennis about which he wrote. In a conversation with Dr. Grangier in 1927, Guénon spoke of the wisdom to which he gave expression as ‘impersonelle, d’origine divine, transmise par révélation, détachée et sans passion.’[75] Although certain of his own realization of the truth, Guénon never assumed the role of spiritual master; he consistently refused those who requested initiation from him.[76] 

Like other traditionalists, Guénon did not perceive his work as an exercise in creativity or personal ‘originality’, repeatedly emphasizing that in the metaphysical domain there is no room for ‘individualist considerations’ of any kind. In a letter to a friend he wrote, ‘I have no other merit than to have expressed to the best of my ability some traditional ideas.’[77]When reminded of the people who had been profoundly influenced by his writings, he calmly replied ‘...such disposition becomes a homage rendered to the doctrine expressed by us in a way that is totally independent of any individualistic consideration...’[78] Like Coomaraswamy, Guénon certainly did not see himself building a new philosophy or creating a new school of thought. If it is sometimes necessary to speak of the traditionalist ‘school’, this is, from a traditionalist viewpoint, merely an expedient. For the traditionalists Guénon is the ‘providential interpreter of this age.’[79] It was his role to remind a forgetful world, ‘in a way that can be ignored but not refuted, of first principles, and to restore a lost sense of the Absolute.’[80]