RENÉ GUÉNON
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THE CONCEPT OF INITIATION
IN RENÉ GUÉNON'S THOUGHT

To elaborate his concept of Initiation, René Guénon based himself very much on the Sufi notion of Initiation, the latter being called bayat. This bayat or oath is performed in order to receive the barakah (efficient grace) that comes from the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.s.) through a given silsilah or chain of transmission. The latter is constituted by various certified Masters who are sometimes mythical but most of the time historical. As in chains of transmission of this Efficient Grace pertaining to other religious and esoteric currents, it is common in Sufism to fill a chain interruption with an "ace", a mythical/mystical Master that will occupy the gap, and in Islam it is common to place in this case the Khidr. What is at stake is power, for the institution must ascertain if someone is or isn't a legitimate Master. If the latter's pedigree has gaps or blanks, a new pedigree must be created.

This Efficient Grace is to Guénon a divine spark of non-human transcendent origin that is necessary in order that individual initiatic work may bear fruit. In other words, it is a formal ritual Initiation tha bears the character of potentiality, of virtuality. Considering contemporary Man as irremediably decayed (for Guénon considers true the Indo-European myth of the Four Ages of the World, a myth that is present both in Plato and in Vedic texts), this "impulse" given by Virtual Initiation is necessary to transmit something impalpable yet real. The spark that is transmitted (traditio/transmissio) will then propitiate, if properly nourished, Real Initiation, the latter being something that is arduously worked for by the Initiate and that derives of his sole merit. In a real sense, then, it is only the individual that initiates himself, for it is a fruit of his own efforts. However, the Initiate will need a help. This help is transcendent in origin but immanent to both the Initiatic chain and the rituals aimed at this end.

Why use the term "Efficient Grace"? The reason is simple: this kind of institutional behaviour is also quite common in Western religious currents. It was the same problem raised by the Père Arnault, by Blaise Pascal, in a word by the Jansenist movement in the XVIIth century: the question of the Essence behind Catholic Sacraments.

It was the same question behind the institutional need to ascertain, at the time of Philip the Fair (the same that destroyed the Order of the Temple), who was the legitimate Pope, the one seated in Rome or the one in Avignon...

This issue is vital to institutions for it regulates the legitimacy of the power that they exert. Its resolution is crucial for their survival, legitimacy and continuity.

But what does this have to do with the practice of a spiritual path? Very little, in my opinion. Well then, is a Master necessary or not?

He is essential, but for far more pedestrian reasons. Learning a spiritual practice is very similar to learning a traditional art or craft. If we were shoemakers, how would we learn to make shoes? Traditionally every corporation has its secrets, so it won't be effective to simply read some manual entitled Shoemaking for Dummies. It is the traditional practice of shoemaking that matters here. Where should we learn it? Why, we should find a master-shoemaker that is willing to take us as apprentices. In the beginning we will simply imitate or monkey the master, and as time passes we will begin to grasp the occult and subtle reasons behind the way the master artfully makes his shoes. At this moment we might be raised to the status of companions, for the master has verified that our shoes are good and getting better. As the years go on our technique transmutes into an art, our shoes are properly ours and exhale our aroma, our spirit. We now become Masters and have by our turn the corporation's tacit or explicit permission to initiate and train new apprentices. And so the art of shoemaking continues through time, we are integrated into this vast chain as one more ring.

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RENÉ GUÉNON, AN INTRODUCTION

Trying to to write about René Guénon is almost a contradiction in terms, as his work tends to put its reader in a terrible dilemma: trying to view it from outside, an attitude that was overtly condemned by the author, or becoming his disciple, his follower, and viewing this same outside with the perspective given by his work. A compromise is difficult if not outright impossible. His thinking was profound, systematic, totalizing, and methodically answered any possible criticism as it readily placed itself in an unreachable position. To Guénon his work was only (and this onlyness certainly denoted an enormous megalomania) a traditio/transmissio of the Philosophia Perennis, of the one and only pristine Metaphysics that generated all great religions. He never used the personal pronoun, and behaved as a sibyl sent by the Logos to these times of spiritual darkness, to the "end of times" (in the Vedic and Platonic sense) in which we live.

It seems we have two options regarding Guénon. The first and easier one would be to ignore him and to send his writings to a well-deserved limbo of what can be termed "non-knowledge", pseudo-knowledge, or simulacrum of knowledge.

The other option, which is in my opinion the most interesting one, would be to explore his system of thought, to take it seriously for a moment and in the end to judge by ourselves if we have gained something in the process. How does Guénon see the world? What irritates him so much in Modernity? What are the reasons of his nonconformity? What does he seem to be criticizing and what is he proposing instead? In sum, let us explore this author's mental universe and try to understand it. Let us act as a curious psychiatrist, avoiding easy labels that would be extrinsic to the author.

Guénon was a cerebral and fragile being, thirsty for the fin-de-siècle Occultism that permeated the Masonic groups around Papus (Gérard Encausse), Stanislas de Guaïta and Oswald Wirth. His star shone quickly in this milieu, and he was even ordained Bishop in a reborn Gnostic Church (his episcopal name was Palingenius, and he was said to be the reincarnation of an ancient Gnostic hierophant of the same name). As in a frenzy, he accumulated Masonic, Rosicrucian, Martinist, Taoist, Sufi and Vedantic Initiations. In this first period Guénon could be classified as a typical cercleux of the Occultist Parisian groups. However, our author spent the rest of his life as a violent critic and sometimes as a simple clarifier of the nebulous ideas of this specific milieu. As Saint Augustine, his stern criticism will be as intense as was his former involvement (in Saint Augustine's case, with the Manicheans). His later work will gain much flavour derived from his Occultist past, the latter being a source of much material for his meditations (and criticism). At the end of his life, in Cairo, he will put his intellectual efforts in the project of resacralizing Freemasonry... He would not have the stuff for that endeavor if he had not been early in life a Mason himself, and a Mason that had been raised to high degrees by none other than Papus.

Guénon's thought, besides being a closed system (like other paradigmatic thinkers or philosophers such as Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and other monomaniacs), intends to be propedeutical, a rectification of the reader's mental categories in order to clear the way to the next step, namely true Initiation. This Initiation is, however, beyond Guénon's jurisdiction. It pertains to the traditional organizations named by him: Taoist, Vedantic, Buddhist, Christian Orthodox and Islamic secret societies, among others. He is like John the Baptist, for he announces and prepares.

Reading Guénon is a fascinating experience. His text exudes some curious atemporality and impersonality, as if its author had been given the difficult task of clarifying our spiritual vision before "the end of this world as we conceive it" (his expression). It is quite seductive to read Guénon as his style calls for the fragile child inside us, a child that wants others to think for her, to give her truths, compasses, to hold her hand. As Pascal would say, we need a fixed point, a safe port. Paradoxically, the Guénonian text is quite demanding, it is not an easy reading, it is rigorous in its rational concatenation, almost scholastic, Thomist, laden with distinctions, careful definitions and caveats, in sum it denotes a rather spidery spirit. As spidery as Kant, to tell the ironical truth.

Guénon did not like at all the political appropriations of his work, especially in France and Spain by Monarchists and in Italy by Fascist thinkers such as Julius Evola. Common politics did not interest him, and neither did erudition, source references and academicism; his footnotes always refer to other parts of his own work, to other books of his pen. His aimed readers seem to have been some particular intellectual/spiritual élite inside the various traditional religious forms and who would presumably understand him "by the inside", who would intuitively and spiritually understand his revivifying message to their respective traditions. For the doctrine transmitted by Guénon would be nothing less than the Matrix Mataphysics of all these traditions, it would be the Mother-Tradition, the Primordial Trunk.

Guénon's books have some divisions that originated either from historical events or from their specific pedagogical intent, and also from their organic function inside the Guénonian corpus. Grosso modo, Guénon started his literary career denouncing "fake spirituality" clothed either in Scientificism (L'Erreur Spirite, 1923) or a product of sheer bad faith and charlatanism (Le Théosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo-religion, 1921, 1925). It seems to his readers that he failed to write a book on Papus' Occultist Pseudo-Freemasonry, but after all he had been a Mason himself and there are things one might think but not necessarily publish.

His following books deal with symbology and one can already sense some doctrinal features (Le Roi du Monde, 1927, L'Ésotérisme de Dante, 1925). Finally Guénon writes his great metaphysical trilogy, which can be seen as the nucleus of his work: L'Homme et son Devenir selon le Vêdânta, Le Symbolisme de la Croix, and Les États Multiples de l'Être (respectively 1925, 1931, 1932).

At last, after exposing the errors of others and presenting what would be the true Metaphysics, Guénon writes a voluminous yet allusive work dealing with the practical aspects of Initiation: Aperçus sur l'Initiation (1946). This work is allusive in two senses, one derived from the fact that the author delegates to the various Initiatical traditions the effective task of conducting this praxis; the other due to the obviously secret character of Initiation.

Beyond this skeleton of the Guénonian opus there are other interesting works by the author that aim at criticizing Modernity in all its forms (Le Règne de la Quantité, La Crise du Monde Moderne, respectively 1945 and 1927). These 'minor' works will be noticed by a certain post-WWI intelligentsia: an older Gide, Breton and some Surrealists; but the Guénonian opus as a whole will interest a different sort of reader: the poet René Daumal, European Islamic converts such as Titus Burckhardt and Frithjof Schuon, a certain Catholic prelate that later became a Cardinal, Masonic writers and ideologues, followers of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, a real hotch-potch... From Cairo, Guénon stood quite aloof from the diverse appropriations of his writings.

One must be honest: even acknowledging the final validity of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Guénon is extraordinary. His thinking is hypnotically convincing, logical and rational - and it is logical and rational in order to point beyond the logical/rational domain, to take its reader to the proximity of the Transcendent by means of what Islamic Medieval Aristotelians named Intellective Intuition, that is, the Object's direct apprehension that bypasses rational-discursive mediation, an immediate apprehension that somehow melts or unites the Object with the apprehending Subject... Something palely alluded by the young Hegel as he wrote in the Phenomenology on a final Dialectical Synthesis where the In-Itself would melt with the For-Itself in the bosom of Absolute Spirit. The Object and the Subject are One, Creation is the manner found by the Creator in order to Know Himself (as would say the great Sufi Ibn Arabi). Such is, as Guénon liked to point out, the pure Doctrine of Non-Dualism as exposed for example by Vedantic thought and indeed by all Traditions derived from the Primordial Trunk.

Islam was Guénon's final destination, his final arriving port, but not only in his personal case... A whole post-WWI French intellectual élite became infatuated by Islam: the Père de Foucauld, Henri Massignon, D. Masson, Henry Corbin. One can try to understand this phenomenon from a historical perspective, as illusions were lost with the horrors of the Great War, with the debunking of the ideology of Western civilization's indefinite Progress and Perfectibility, in sum with the revelation of the other side of the coin... These intellectuals constituted a sort of denunciation in loco colonialis of 'civilizing' European Colonialism... It is not fortuitous that Breton was so enchanted by Guénon's denunciation of the profane and decayed West. These intellectuals were immune by the budding phenomenon of Fascism, by the speed of the machine... They thought History as a Circle, Platonically, and our times as decadent, the end of a cycle, the end of times, the end of a Manvantara as Guénon would write. They looked back, back to pre-Capitalist Civilisations that had stronger Solidarity ties, a Communal or Communitarian Solidarity that was completely diverse from a Socialist one. They were not interested by Western Politics and its battling ideologies. They wanted to go back to the roots, to the desert, to tranquility, to the typical étiquette (the Arab Adab) of traditional societies. Social problems were to be cared for through Solidarity and almsgiving, for the absence of Social Justice does not primarily derive from Class issues but rather from the progressive absence of the Divine in daily life, of Transcendence in Immanence... What lacks in the Western world is Dhikr, the Remembrance of God. Guénon was a great midwife of religious vocations, and not at all Islamic vocations only. He kindled and confirmed the respective faiths of his many readers, be they Freemasons, Catholics, Jews, or even Native Muslims. It is in this sense that there exists a Guénonian legacy. Notwithstanding the efforts of certain political groups at appropriating his work (notably Monarchists, Evolians, and Integralists of all sorts), by its very own nature Guénon's message makes them fail or makes their appropriation be merely superficial and decorative, altogether foreign to the spirit of his work.

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