James Cutsinger - Review of the Essential Frithjof Schuon

8/2/2019 James Cutsinger - Review of the Essential Frithjof Schuon

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B o o k R e v i e w s 20 9be as much an expert on die use of inclusive language as he is on physicaltheory.

Kevin J . SharpeUnion Graduate School

The Essential Writ ings of Frithjof Schuon. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.Amity Hou se, 1986. 5 43 pages. $34.9 5.It is a matter of no little amazement to those familiar with the work ofFrithjof Schuon diat in spite of the appear ance during th e last fifty years of m oredian twenty books bearing his name, books exhibiting a comparativist rangeand dieological depth virtually unrivaled in our time, so little attention has beendevoted to them in academic discussion and inquiry. This is beginning tochange, how ever. Not only is one mo re likely to find at least the obligatoryreference in die occasional index. An increasing num ber of serious scholars arediscovering, how central and indispensable Schuon's insights can b e to dieirwork as a whole, as the recent creation of an American Academy of Religionprogram group on esotericism and p erennialism serves to attest The presen tandiology should go far toward encouraging an even wider interest.The general neglect of the Schuon corpus is not really surprising, however,for three closely related reasons. The reader is struck first by the u nco mp rom is-ing and implacable character of the author's approach. Some have found hiswork shrill, and a frequent complaint, despite his unexceptionable observationthat "a thought is 'dogmatist,' or else it is nothing" (488), is that die viewpointis to o dogmatic, as if diis were a matter admitting degrees. In sh ort, diere arenone of the hesitations, qualifications, apologies, and indirections that charac-terize die usual scholarly pros e. This rigor, appare nt from the very first glance,is die stylistic expression and complement of a second, somewhat deeper, onemight call it more mediodological, feature, which can be seen in die audior'scomplete disregard for such diings as cultural context and historical influencein die exposition of ideas. As Nasr observes in his excellent Introduction to thevolume, Schuon is simply not "satisfied widi die study of religion in terms of

any other category of diought or d iscipline" and is "strongly o pposed to histori-cism " (3). For those taught to suppo se diat religious ideas can be studied onlyat die level of dieir pheno menal and contingent expression, Sch uon's m ediod ofoperation, unhampered by die familiar collations of texts and empirical facts orthe induction of tentative dieories, but deriving instead from a source of author-ity completely transcending, he claims, the historical order, cannot but appearto be arrogant and irresponsible, and diey will be tempted to point to his lack of"professional" university training as the only explanation for such audacity.Who does he diink he is?This question, sarcastically asked and usually put in a way to dismiss orreduce the teachings at issue, leads to a diird reason for Schuon's neglect and,in a sense, to the very heart of his concer ns. For though he alm ost never refers


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210 Jo urnal of the American A c a demy o f Religionto himself, and certainly never to boast, the matter of who he is, and with whatauthority he speaks, is clearly essential to the content and legitimacy of hiswork. Nasr points out that "Schuon always writes from the point of view ofrealized knowledge and presents a teaching which itself has the operativepower of transforming the reader" (41). Wh at he writes about, perhaps morethan anything else, is the distinctive capacity of human beings for just this"realization" or "transformation ." "Man is a divine manifestation" (38 7) andpossesses as such, above and beyond the discursive, strictly regulative reason,whose operations require die data of sense, and which is in this way subject tothe relativities of time and space, a dimension of "Intellect," inaratus etincrcabile (in the language of Eckhart diat Schuon often employs), "a visionwhich is completely independent of opinions, conclusions, and creeds" (538).This is without doubt the s ine qua non an d ports asinorum of every page he haspenn ed. And it is dius, whether explicitly so or not, that virtually all thosepages are devoted to describing, defending, and evoking a mode of knowledgeor level of insight diat is not die effect or result, but the cause by manifestationand condensation, of die empirical, social, physical, and cultural world, thevisible world, simply taken as given in nearly all our research.

Th e Essential Writings are well chosen and have been organized so as toprovide a clear illustration of bodi the range and unity of Schuon's work. Nasrhas divided the volume into nine major parts, on Religion and Revelation, dieStudy of Religions, the Nature of Reality, Art and die Spiritual Significance ofBeauty, Man, die Spiritual Life, Eschatology and die Afterlife, Criticism of dieModem World, and Spiritual Impressions, die last of which includes colorplates of several of Schuon's paintings and selections from his poetry. Thesecond, and longest, part contains not only some of die most crucial passagesconcerning Schuon's comparative mediodology, but substantial examples of hisinsights into each of die great religions, as well as archaic traditions, A mericanIndian religions, and Shintoism. The editor's detailed and insightful Introd uc-tion has already been men tioned. This includes a brief synopsis of each volum ein die Schuon corpus and is supplemented by a helpful Appendix on die prin-cipal editions and translations of the author's mostly French originals.It is clearly impossible to do diis work justice in a sho rt review. Two recur-rent themes call for mention , however. The first is Schuon's critique of m od-ernism. A telling com bination of dissection and dem olition, his criticisms ofpost-medieval western culture and diought are closely connected to the "real-ized knowledge" already discussed, for he is convinced diat the skepticism,scientism, relativism, and reductionism of modem diinlting and living can bedirectly traced to an absence of "vision," which only intellection, or die revela-tions diat are its crystallizations, can supply. Modernity is nothing if not proofof "die helplessness of die human mind when left to its own resources" (134)."When man has no 'visionary' knowledge of Being, and merely 'thinks' widihis 'brain' instead of 'seeing' widi his 'heart, ' all his logic is useless to him,because it starts out from an initial fallacy" (484). Hence die audior's disdainfor all our usual schools of thought:


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B o o k Reviews 21 1Contemporary philosophy . . . really amounts to a decapitated logic:what is intellectually evident it calls "prejudice;" wishing to free itselffrom servitude to the mental, it sinks into infralogic; shutting itself offfrom the intellectual light above, it exposes itself to the obscurity of thelowest "sub con sciou s" ben eath . Philosophical skepticism takes itselffor a healthy attitude and for an absence of "prejudices," whereas it is infact something completely artificial; it proceeds, not from real knowl-edge, but from sheer ignorance, and for this reason it is as alien to intel-ligence as it is to reality (484).In art, the same decapitation has meant the substitution of instinct or tastefor criteria deriving from truly objective standards; the modem artist has forgot-ten, according to Schuon, that "the foundations of art lie in the spirit, in meta-physical, theological, and mystical knowledge" (516). Meanwhile, "modemscience, as it plunges dizzily downw ards . . . is another examp le of that loss of. . . equilibrium characteristic of contemplative and still stable civilizations"(498). Again it is the disproportionate emphasis placed up on purely empirical,and therefore quite subordinate, facts by the contemporary mentality thatSchuon hopes to expose and challenge, not to mention the presumptioninvolved in the endeavor of science to reach "conclusions in fields accessible

only to a supra-sensible and truly intellective wisdom, the existence of which itrefuses on principle to admit" (498).These observations naturally lead to a second theme, which can bedescribed by mean s of the title of one of the author 's earliest books: the tra n-scende nt unity of religions. According to Schuon, the leading effect of mo de mdeviations from human normality has been to give religion a "mortal wound."Religion has been "disarmed" and compelled to "falsify" and "disavow" itself.Modem science and philosophy "prove nothing to contradict the traditionalpositions of religion, of course, but there is no one at hand to point this out"(501). W hat need s pointing out above all, the author believes, is the unanim ityand solidity of the great religions. "As depicted and described by Sch uon ,"Nasr observes, "other religious worlds become a divine compensation for theloss suffered by religion in the mode m wo rld" (15). It is Serm on's claim tha tthe western traditions in particular, especially Christianity, have been soseverely damages by both the attacks of outsiders and the compromises of theirown ad heren ts that assistance from their eastern allies is essen tial. For only bylooking East to the more readily apparent and integral metaphysical truths andcontemplative methods of Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist teaching can the west-em believer begin to discover the spiritual resources that have been moredeeply hidden at the center of his own religion. Of course, n o one will look forsuch assistance until it is clear that the different religions ar e truly allied. Thusthe need for establishing the principles of what Schuon has called esotericecumenism.Although he is "as far as can be from approving a gratuitous and sentim en-talist 'ecumenism' which does not distinguish between truth and error and


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212 Jo urnal of the American A cade m y o f R e hgi mwhich results in religious indifference and the cult of man" (74), Schuonrepeatedly teaches that at their heartnot on the level of rite or dogma, butfrom the standpoint of the gnosis or wisdom w hich the great sages and saints ofthe traditions have attained and embodiedthe major religions are intimatelyunited, certain "dogmatically coagulative and piously unilateral" (128) expres-sions notwidista nding , each a different dialect of a single language. "W ha tdetermines the difference among forms of Truth," he writes, "is the differenceamong human receptacles. . . . The existence of spiritual receptacles so differ-ent and so original demands differentiated refractions of die one Trudi" (149-50) . This Truth is itself die metaphysical explanation of the presence of differ-ence at the level of manifestation, for "diversity in the world is a function of itsremoteness from the divine Principle, which am ounts to saying that the Creatorcannot will both that the world should be, and that it should not be die world"(150). As for the nature of that Truth, which is the sum and substance of thephibsophia, or rrligio, pcrennis, it is simplicity itself, though a simplicity suscepti-ble in Schuon's work to myriad applications, compre ssions, and irradiations. Itis that God became man diat man might become God; or, in one of the para-phrases of Irenaeus that Schuon suggests, "the Real entered into the illusory sothat the illusory might be able to return unto die Real" (68).

No summary can succeed in even suggesting the interpretive power whichdiis formula has come to possess in Schuon's hands, and certainly an esotericapologetics, even if such a thing were possible, could not be ventured he re. Asingle example of this comparativist's insight must suffice:If Buddhism sees the world only as a chaos of irreducible substances{dharmas) of which the numberless combinations produce subjectiveand objective appearances, this is for die same reason which results inChristianity having, stricdy speaking, no cosmology: it is becau se bod ithese two great perspectives regard the world, not in view of its reality orunreality, but solely in connection w ith the way of coming out of it. Forthe Buddhist even more man for die Christian, to seek to know thenature of the world is a distraction; for the Hindu on the contraryknowledge of die cosmos is an aspect of knowledge of the Absolute, itbeing nodiing other than Atma as Maya, or die "Universal Soul" as"Creative Illusio n." Th is perspective, wh ich starts from the Absolute, istruly meta-physical, whereas the Buddhist and Christian perspectives,which start from man, are initiatic, diat is, centered first of all on spiri-tual realization, diough, since they are intrinsically true, they contain theHindu metaphysical perspective just as it in turn contains the initiatic(165).These comments ought not to conclude widiout a word about die audior'swriting style. Nasr has said that Schuon's prose possesses "a rhythm . . . ofoscillation between analysis and synthesis" and that it has "a spherical qual-ity"containing, that is, "die maximum amount of meaning for a given expres-sion" (54), even as a sphere embraces die greatest volume for a given area.


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B o o k R e v i e w s 21 3Analytic and synthetic both, the style could also be called centripetal and con-centric, to refer to a symbolism Schuon often employs, one that is displayed onthe cover of this and many of his other book s. These geom etrical analogies arevery appropriate, for there is in this work the kind of economy, clarity, andelegance charac teristic of mathem atical expression. But there is the music ofpoetry, too, a music which seems to echo die mercy and con descension of God,even as the crystal-like structure reflects the divine rigor and justice . All this isquite deliberate, and in keeping with the author's conviction diat "truth mustbe enunciated, not only in conformity with certain propo rtions, but also accord-ing to a certain rhythm . One ca nnot speak of sacred things 'just a nyho w'. . . .Every manifestation has laws, and diese intelligence must observe in manifest-ing itself, or otherwise truth will suffer" (114).

And yet it goes without saying, of course, though few w ill deny the beauty ofhis words, and even fewer their lucidity, diat die writings of Fridijof Schuon arenot for that reason pleasing, and will certainly never be pop ular . They areextraordinarily demanding, and where diey do not repel, they still will notalways attract. It is obvious that Schuon will continu e to put pe ople off, and heis obviously aware of die fact. "Pe rhaps som e people will repro ach us with lackof reticence, but we would like to ask where is die reticence of die philosopherswho sham elessly slash at the wisdom of coundess centuries" (496). The de n-sity of the style, the authoritative tone, die flouting of academic conventions, diedioroughly unhistorical method, the often caustic dismissal of all that manyhold m ost dearthe se unm istakeable features will not go away. It is no usesupposing they will, nor attempting to make die author more palatable by play-ing them dow n. This reviewer has chosen instead not to ignore or to mask, butto stress, and perchanc e to explain, these characteristics. For he believes thatdiose who are duly prepared to meet diem will be the less troubled, because notso surprised, and hence die less likely to put die work down without the slowand deliberate examination which it deserves, and which cannot but repay thesensitive reader.

James S . Cuts ingerUniversity of So uth Carolina

Narrative and Mo rality: A Theo logical Inquiry. By Pau l Nel son . Pen n-sylvania State University Press, 1987. 180 page s. $2 1.5 0.In the mid-1970s, Stanley Hauerwas made dieological waves when hechided C hristian ediicists for reaching for universalizable prin cipl es. The stan-dard acco unt of morality diey were trying to imitate found in philo soph erssuch as R.M. Hare and G.E. Moorewas, according to Hauerwas, a pipe-drea m . In attempting to overcome the particularities of history in favor of ahis-torical, transcultur al norm s, this account would not only be u nsuccessful. Itwould also ultimately deceive its practitioners who, thinking they were identify-ing foundational principles binding on all rational agents, were actually only

James Cutsinger - Review of the Essential Frithjof Schuon

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