East and West, The Crisis of the Modern World,
Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrine, and Man and His
Becoming, Luzac, London, (1941-1946) are the first in a series in which the
majority of René Guénon’s works already published in French will appear in
English. Another versions of Man and His Becoming had appeared earlier.1
M. René Guénon is not an “Orientalist” but what the Hindus would call a
“master,” formerly resident in
In the meantime important articles form Guénon’s pen appeared monthly in
La Voile d’Isis, later Études Traditionnelles, a journal of which
the appearance was interrupted by the war, but which has been continued as form
September-October, 1945. Études Traditionnelles is devoted to “La Tradition
Perpétuelle et Unanime, révélée tant par les dogmes et les rites des religions
orthodoxies que par la langue universelle des symboles initiatiques”. [The
Perpetual and Unanimous Tradition, revealed as much by the dogmas and the rites
of the orthodox religions as by the universal language of initiatory symbols.] Of
articles that have appeared elsewhere attention may be called to “L’Esotérisme
Islamique” in “Cahiers du Sud”.14 Excerpts from Guénon’s
writings, with some comment, have appeared in ‘Triveni’ (1935) and in the
Visvabharati Quarterly (1935,1938). A work by L. De Gaigneron
entitled Vers la connaissance interdite15 is closely
connected with Guénon’s; it is presented in the form
of a discussion in which the Atman (Spiritus), Mentalité (“Reason”, in the
current, not the Platonic, sense), and a Roman abb&#eacute; take part; the
“forbidden knowledge is that of the gnosis which the modern Church and the
rationalist alike reject, though for different reasons – the former because it
cannot tolerate a point of view which considers Christianity only as one
amongst other orthodox religions and the latter because, as a great Orientalist
(Professor A. B. Keith) has remarked, “such knowledge as is not empirical is
meaningless to us and should not be described as knowledge” [16] – an almost
classical confession of the limitations of the “Scientific” position.
Guénon’s French is at once precise and limpid, and inevitably loses in
translation; his subject matter is of absorbing interest, at least to anyone
who cares for what Plato calls the really serious things. [17] Nevertheless is
has often been found unpalatable; partly for reason already give, but also for
reasons that have already been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of Blakney’s ‘Meister Eckhart’ in
the ‘Harvard Divinity School Bulletin’, [19] who says that, “To an age which
believes in personality and personalism, the
impersonality of mysticism is baffling; and to an age which is trying ort
quicken its insight into history the indifference of the mystics to events in
time is disconcerting.” As for history, Guénon’s “he
who cannot escape from the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least conception of the
metaphysical order” [19] adequately complements Jacob Behmen’s
designation of the “history that was once brought to pass” as “merely the
(outward) form of Christianity.” [20] For the Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and dateless,
and the Krishna Lila “not an historical event”; and the reliance of
Christianity upon supposedly historical “facts” seems to be its greatest
weakness. The value of literary history for doxography
is very little, and it is for this reason that so many orthodox Hindus have
thought of Western scholarship a as a “crime”: their interest is not in “what
men have believed,” but in the truth. A further difficulty is presented by Guénon’s uncompromising language: “Western civilization is
an anomaly, not to say a monstrosity.” Of this a reviewer [21] has remarked
that “such sweeping remarks cannot be shared even by critics of Western
achievements..” I should have thought that now that
its denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a statement might have
been recognized by every unprejudiced European; at any rate Sir George Birdwood in 1915 described modern Western civilization as
“Secular, joyless, inane, and self-destructive” and Professor La Piana has said that “What we call our civilization is but a
murderous machine with no conscience and no ideals” [22] and might well have
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very easy to cite innumerable
criticisms of the same kind; Sir S. Radhakrishnan
holds for example, that “civilization is not worth saving if it continues on
its present foundations,” [23] and this it would be hard to deny; Professor A.
N. Whitehead has spoke quite as forcibly – “There remains the show of
civilization, without any of it realities.” [34]
In any case, if we are to read Guénon at all,
we must have outgrown the temporally provincial view that has for so long and
so complacently envisaged a continuous progress of humanity culminating in the
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask ourselves whether there has
not been rather a continued decline, “from the stone until now,” as one of the
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It is no by “science” that we
can be saved: “the possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more often harm the owner.” [25]
“We are obliged to admit that our European culture is a culture of the mind and
senses only”; [26] “The prostitution of science may lead to world catastrophe”;
[27] “Our dignity and our interests require that we shall be the directors and
not the victims of technical and scientific advance”; [28] “Few will deny that
the twentieth century thus far has brought us bitter disappointment.” [29] “We
are now faced with the prospect of complete bankruptcy in every department of
life.” [30] Eric Gill speaks of the “monstrous inhumanity” of industrialism,
and of the modern way of life, as “neither human nor normal nor Christian…. It
is our way of thinking that is odd and unnatural.” [31] This sense of
frustration is perhaps the most encouraging sign of the times. We have laid
stress on these things because it is only to those who feel this frustration,
and not to those who still believe in progress, that Guénon
addresses himself; to those who are complacent everything that he has to say
will seem to be preposterous.
The reactions of Roman Catholics to Guénon are
illuminating. One has pointed out that he is a “serous metaphysician,” i.e. one
convinced of the truth he expounds and eager to show the unanimity of the
Eastern and scholastic traditions, and observes that “in such matters belief
and understanding must go together.” [32] Crede ut intelligas [believe
in order to understand] is a piece of advice that modern scholars would,
indeed, do well to consider; it is, perhaps, just because we have not believed
that we have not yet understood the East. The same author writes of ‘East and
West’, “René Guénon is one of the few writers of our time whose work is really
of importance … he stands for the primacy of pure metaphysics over all other
forms of knowledge, and presents himself as the exponent of a major tradition
of thought, predominantly Eastern, but shared in the Middle Ages by the
scholastics of the West … clearly Guénon’s position is not that of Christian
orthodoxy, but many, perhaps most, of his theses are, in face, better in accord
with authentic Thomist doctrine than are many opinions of devout but
ill-instructed Christians.” [33] We should do well to remember that even St.
Tomas Aquinas did not disdain to make use of “intrinsic and probable proofs”
derived form the “pagan” philosophers.
Gerald Vann, on the other hand, makes the mistake which the title of his
review, “René Guénon’s Orientalism” [34] announces; for this is not another
“ism,” nor a geographical antitheses but one of modern empiricism and
traditional theory. Vann springs to the defense of the very Christianity in
which Guénon himself sees almost the only possibility of salvation for the
West; only possibility, not because there is no other body of truth, but
because the mentality of the West is adapted to and needs a religion of just
this sort. But if Christianity should fail, it is just because its intellectual
aspects have been submerged, and it has become a code of ethics rather than a
doctrine form which all other applications can and should be derived; hardly
two consecutive sentences of some of Meister Eckhart’s sermons would be
intelligible to an average modern congregation, which does not expect doctrine,
and only expects to be told how to behave. 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 form
a “Western” metaphysics – as true philosophy differs from what is often so
called in our modern universities – one or the other would not be metaphysics. It
is from metaphysics that the West has turned away in its desperate endeavor to
live by bread alone, an endeavor of which the
The issue of “East and West” is not merely a theoretical (we must remind
the modern reader that from the standpoint of the traditional philosophy,
“theoretical” is anything but a term of disparagement) but also an urgent
practical problem. Pearl Buck asks, “Why should prejudices be so strong at this
moment? The answer it seems to me is simple. Physical conveyance and other
circumstances have forced parts of the world once remote from each other into
actual intimacy for which peoples are not mentally or spiritually prepared. … It
is not necessary to believe that this initial stage must continue. If those
prepared to act as interpreters will do their proper work, we may find that
within another generation or two, or even sooner, dislike and prejudice may be
gone. This is only possible if prompt and strong measures are taken by peoples
to keep step mentally with the increasing closeness to which the war is
compelling us.” [35] But is this is to happen, the West will have to abandon
what Guénon calls its “proselytizing fury,” an
expression that must not be taken to refer only to the activities of Christian
missionaries, regrettable as those often are, but of those of all the
distributors of modern “civilization” and those of practically all those
“educators” who feel that they have more to give than to learn form what are
often called the “backward” or “unprogressive” peoples; to whom it does not
occur that one may not wish or need to “progress” if one has reached a state of
equilibrium that already provides for the realization of what one regards as
the greatest purposed of life. It is as an expression of good will and of the
best intentions that this proselytizing fury takes on its most dangerous
aspects. To many this “fury” can only suggest the fable of the fox that lost
its tail, and persuaded the other foxes to cut off theirs. An industrialization
of the East may be inevitable, but do not let us call it a blessing that a folk
should be reduced to the level of a proletariat, or assume that materially
higher standards of living necessarily make for greater happiness. The West is
only just discovering, to its great astonishment, that “material inducements, that is, money or the things that money can
buy” are by no means so cogent a force as has been supposed; “Beyond the
subsistence level, the theory that this incentive is decisive is largely an
illusion.” [36] As for the East, as Guénon says, “The
only impression that, for example, mechanical invention make on most Orientals
is one of deep repulsion; certainly it all seems to them far more harmful than
beneficial, and if they find themselves obliged to accept certain things which
the present epoch has made necessary, they do so in the hope of future riddance
… what the people of the West call ‘rising’ would be called some ‘sinking’;
that is what all true Orientals think.” [37] It must not be supposed that
because so many Eastern peoples have imitated us in self-defense that they have
therefore accepted our values; on the contrary, it is just because the
conservative East still challenges all the
presuppositions on which our illusion of progress rests, that is deserves our
most serious consideration.
There is nothing in economic intimacies that is likely to reduce
prejudice or promote mutual understanding automatically. Even when Europeans
live amongst Orientals, “economic contact between the Eastern and Western
groups is practically the only contact there is. There is very little social or
religious give and take between the two. Each lives in a world almost entirely
closed to the other – and by ‘closed’ we man not only ‘unknown’ but more:
incomprehensible and unattainable.”[38] That is an
inhuman relationship, by which both parties are degraded.
Neither must it be assumed that the Orient thinks it important that the
masses should learn to read and write. Literacy is a practical necessity in an
industrial society, where the keeping of account is all important. But in
It is not, however, primarily with a protection of the East against the
subversive inroads of Western “culture” that Guénon is concerned, but rather
with the question, What possibility of regeneration, if any, can be envisaged
for the West? The possibility exists only in the event of a
return to first principles and to the normal ways of living that proceed
from the application of first principles to contingent circumstances; and as it
is only in the East that these things are still alive, it is to the East that
the West must turn. “It is the West that must take the initiative, but she must
be prepared really to go towards the East, not merely seeking to draw the East
towards herself, as she has tried to do so far. There is no reason why the East
should take this initiative, and there would still be none, even if the Western
world were not in such a state as to make any effort in this direction useless.
… It now remains for us to show how the West might attempt to approach the
East.” [39]
He proceeds to show that the work is to be done in the two fields of
metaphysics and religion, and that it can only be carried out on the highest
intellectual levels, where agreement on first principles can be reached an
apart from any propaganda on behalf of or even apology for “Western
civilization.”
The work must be undertaken, therefore, by an “elite.” And as it is here
more than anywhere that Guénon’s meaning is likely to be willfully
misinterpreted, we must understand clearly what he manes by such an elite. The
divergence of the West and East being only “accidental,” “the bringing of these
two portions of mankind together and the return of the West to a normal
civilization are really just one and the same thing.” An elite will necessarily
work in the first place “for itself, since its members will naturally reap from
their own development an immediate and altogether unfailing benefit.” An
indirect result – “indirect,” because on this intellectual level one does not
think of “doing good” to others, or in terms of “service,” but seeks truth
because one needs it oneself – would, or might under favorable conditions,
bring about “a return of the West to a traditional civilization,” i.e. one in
which “everything is seen as the application and extension of a doctrine whose
essence is purely intellectual and metaphysical.”[40]
It is emphasized again and again that such an elite does not mean a body
of specialists or scholars who would absorb and put over on the West the forms
of an alien culture, nor even persuade the West to return to such a traditional
civilization as existed in the Middle Ages. Traditional cultures develop by the
application of principles to conditions; the principles, indeed, are
unchangeable and universal, but just as nothing can be known except in the mode
of the knower, so nothing valid can be accomplished socially without taking
into account the character of those concerned and the particular circumstances
of the period in which they live. There is no “fusion” of cultures to be hoped
for; it would be noting like an “eclecticism” or “syncretism” that an elite
would have in view. Neither would such an elite be organized in any way so as
to exercise such a direct influence as that which, for example, the Technocrats
would like to exercise for the good of mankind. If such an elite ever came into
being, the vast majority of Western men would never know of it; it would operate
only as a sort of leave, and certainly on behalf of rather than against
whatever survives of traditional essence in, for example the Greek Orthodox and
Roman Catholic domains. It is, indeed, a curious fact that some of the most
powerful defenders of Christian dogma are to be found amongst Orientals who are
not themselves Christians, or ever likely to become Christians, but recognize
in the Christian tradition an embodiment of the universal truth to which God
has never nor anywhere left himself without a witness.
In the meantime, M. Guénon asks, “Is this really ‘the beginning of an
end’ for the modern civilization? … At least there are many signs which should
give food for reflection to those who are still capable of it; will the West be
able to regain control of herself in time?” Few would deny that we are faced
with the possibility of a total disintegration of culture. We are at war with
ourselves, and therefore at war with one another. Western man is unbalanced,
and the question, Can he recover himself? is a very real one. No one to whom
the question presents itself can afford to ignore the writing of the leading
living exponent of a traditional wisdom that is no more essentially Oriental
than it is Occidental, though it may be only in the uttermost parts of the
earth that it is still remembered and must be sought.