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René Guénon (also Sheikh 'Abd al-Wahid Yahya) (Blois, November 15 1886 - Cairo, January 7 1951) was a French-born author, philosopher, and social critic of the early 20th century. He was the founder of the Traditionalist School.
Born in Blois, France into a Catholic household, Guénon excelled as a youth in mathematics and philosophy. Dissatisfied with the status quo of modern society, he moved to Paris in 1907 and became deeply involved in a series of underground cultural movements, including occultism, Gnosticism, and an unorthodox sect of Hinduism. At the same time, he exposed himself to Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. He was at this time critical of Buddhism as a "Hindu heresy", but later accepted its validity when evidence of its essential orthodoxy was presented to him by Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Guénon began writing in the 1920s, after World War I, the war which was believed to end all wars. Western civilization was overwhelmed with a sense of relief and euphoria. Guénon, seeing this as delusion, criticized the society of his day as being disorganized and reckless. "It is as if an organism with its head cut off were to go on living," he wrote in 1924. Guénon's main criticism of despiritualized Western culture was its self-proud lack of recognition of a greater power which maintained a higher order than that of man.
Shortly after beginning his writing career, Guénon studied Sufism, despite a growing anti-religion prejudice in the country. Guénon believed in a universal objective spiritual truth, or religio perennis, of a supreme God and a hierarchy of spirits, which could be expressed in the terms of any religion. Guénon also believed that if this truth was presented properly, even the anti-religious intellectuals of his day would accept it. He wrote Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines in 1921 in an attempt to begin expressing this truth.
Guénon left Paris in 1930 and moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he would remain for the rest of his life, living as a Sufi. Having offended the Paris intellectuals whom he considered his peers, especially with two books denouncing occultism, he feared being attacked by his enemies through magic or spiritual energy, and lived primarily incognito.
Guenon had been a Sufi Muslim since 1912, having chosen the name Abd al-Wahid Yahya. Guénon championed the validity of other religions as vehicles of the one same Truth, though designed for the acceptance of different cultures. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam were among those with which he concerned himself most, in terms of rectifying their values as distortions of (but ultimately soundly based upon) the Universal Truth.
Guénon wrote a compendium of universal spiritual symbols, Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science, which was published in 1962. It attempted to illustrate common meanings and interpretations of images, concepts, and symbolisms among major religions, again tying them all back into the truth explained by Hinduism.
He had a great influence on Julius Evola.
Guénon did not believe in purely personal exposition and did not write or contribute to a biography.
Bibliography
Books written by René Guénon (ordered chronologically according to their first publication date):
- Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues, 1921)
- Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (Le Théosophisme - Histoire d'une pseudo-religion, 1921)
- The Spiritist Fallacy (L'erreur spirite, 1923)
- East and West (Orient et Occident, 1924)
- Man and His Becoming according to the Vedânta (L'homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta, 1925)
- The Esoterism of Dante (L'ésotérisme de Dante, 1925)
- The King of the World (Le Roi du Monde, 1927)
- The Crisis of the Modern World (La crise du monde moderne, 1927)
- Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power (Autorité Spirituelle et Pouvoir Temporel, 1929)
- St. Bernard (Saint-Bernard, 1929)
- Symbolism of the Cross (Le symbolisme de la croix, 1931)
- The Multiple States of the Being (Les états multiples de l'Être, 1932)
- Oriental Metaphysics (La metaphysique orientale, 1939)
- The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps, 1945)
- Perspectives on Initiation (Aperçus sur l'initiation, 1946)
- The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus (Les principes du calcul infinitésimal, 1946)
- The Great Triad (La Grande Triade, 1946)
Posthumous collections
- Initiation and Spiritual Realization (Initiation et réalisation spirituelle, 1952)
- Insights into Christian Esoterism (Aperçus sur l'ésotérisme chrétien, 1954)
- Symbols of Sacred Science (Symboles de la Science Sacrée, 1962)
- Studies in Freemasonry and Compagnonnage (Études sur la Franc-Maçonnerie et le Compagnonnage, 1964)
- Studies in Hinduism (Études sur l'Hindouisme, 1966)
- Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles (Formes traditionelles et cycles cosmiques, 1970)
- Insights into Islamic Esoterism & Taoism (Aperçus sur l'ésotérisme islamique et le Taoïsme, 1973)
- Reviews (Comptes rendus, 1973)
- Miscellanea (Mélanges, 1976)
See also
- Buddhism
- Confucianism
- Christianity
- Esotericism
- Gnosticism
- Hinduism
- Initiation
- Islam
- Lamaism
- Metaphysics
- Rosicrucianism
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr
- Shamanism
- Sufism
- Symbolism
- Taoism
- Theosophy
- Tradition
- Traditionalist School
External links
- Biography from Sophia Journal (http://www.sophiajournal.com/Vol1Num1/Article02.html)
- Biography from Institute for Gnostic Studies (http://pages.zoom.co.uk/thuban/html/guenon.htm)
- Sofia Perennis Universalis has many Guénon books in print (http://www.abebooks.com/home/PERENNIS/)
- Guenon and Vedanta (http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1989/10/1989-10-02.shtml)fr:René Guénon