Miscellanea (Rene Guenon Works)

What is here presented as a 'miscellany' of essays would in the case of most other writers on metaphysical subjects be considered a major work, both in breadth and depth. Some claim that René Guénon's views never 'developed', that his knowledge of metaphysics was innate, as primordial and unchangeable as truth itself. Though clearly an exaggeration-for example, A. K. Coomaraswamy and Marco Pallis led Guénon to considerably revise his views Buddhism-there is still a remarkable degree of truth to this claim. Information must be acquired, and in the process erroneous notions will be corrected; yet the capacity for intellective insight is not an acquisition, but a gift; it is developed not by adding something, but by removing a veil. Some of the essays in the present volume could be considered Guénon's 'juvenalia', yet the unerring instinct for metaphysical truth is already there, fully formed, along with the first stirrings of the author's lifelong preoccupation with initiatic spirituality, the cosmological sciences, and the errors of modernity; there is no real incompatibility of outlook here between the Guénon of 1909 and the Guénon of 1950. Far from being a mere collection of fugitive writings, Miscellanea is an important work in its own right, worthy of its own unique place in the Guénonian corpus.

René Guénon (1886–1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization. René Guénon, of whom Jacob Needleman wrote in The Sword of Gnosis that ‘no other modern writer has so effectively communicated the absoluteness of truth,’ is gradually being recognized by deeper thinkers as one of the few who have truly penetrated the seductive veil of the modern age. As an expositor of pure metaphysics and its application to the science of symbols, Guénon is without peer; and his extraordinarily prescient critique of the modern world is attracting more and more attention among cultural commentators. Little known in the English-speaking world till the recent appearance of his Collected Works in translation, Guénon has nevertheless long been recognized as a veritable criterion of truth by a vanguard of remarkable writers who evince that rare combination: intellectuality and spirituality. After a lonely childhood, often interrupted by ill health, Guénon navigated the seductive half-truths of occultism toward a deeper, unified vision offering a way out from the confusion and fragmentation of our time. Regarded by leading scholars as the first truly authentic interpreter of many Eastern doctrines in the West, Guénon never tired, in face of the seemingly inexorable process of dissolution in the twentieth century, of pointing to the transcendent unity of all religious faiths and the abiding Truth that contains them all.