Vintage Guénon

“Insights into Christian Esoterism” contains articles by René Guénon, the “founder” of the Perennialist or Traditionalist school. The articles are vintage Guénon, meaning that they are extremely difficult and obtuse. The most useful piece is probably “Christianity and Initiation”. Many of the other articles deal with esoteric symbolism in a very “esoteric” manner. Unfortunately, I sometimes get the impression that Guénon saw cerebral comprehension of symbols as the be-all and end-all of real spirituality! I admit that I didn't read all of the material, due to its hard-to-digest character.

Guénon argues that the Knights Templar, the Provencal troubadours, the Fedeli d'Amore, Bernhard de Clairvaux and Dante represent an initiatic-perennialist stream within Christianity. He previously dealt with the same issue in “The Esoterism of Dante”. I don't rule out that Guénon might be on to something, since Hermetism probably did influence “really existing” Christianity, just as it influenced Judaism and Islam. Obviously, I cannot judge his concrete examples, but some of them are interesting.

Controversially, Guénon argues that the Christian sacraments no longer have initiatic efficacy, and that Christianity is a purely exoteric religion. These statements angered Guénon's Catholic readers (presumably Catholics with esoteric inclinations – regular Catholics are of course purely “exoteric” and happy with it). However, the writer is hardly “anti-Christian”. Rather, he believes that Christianity was deliberately created as an exoteric religion (although it initially also had an esoteric core for an elite few) as a concession to the masses, who “due to cyclical conditions” (the Kali Yuga) no longer understood the esoteric-perennialist message. Christianity therefore “exteriorized” the esoteric tradition, and in this fashion saved the West from degeneration for another millennium or so. Guénon doesn't doubt that Christianity offers “salvation” through the sacraments, but it no longer offers any “Gnosis”. This, apparently, goes for Western Christianity in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. Guénon concedes that the Eastern Church might still be initiatic in the form of hesychasm.

As already noted, the fact that Christianity (or its Western form) isn't initiatic-esoteric, doesn't mean that such groups cannot be found within it, unofficially as it were. Indeed, these groups are very important to the author, so important that he dates the West's degeneration to the attack on the Knights Templar during the early 14th century. However, it seems that no proper Christian esotericism is around today, and Guénon eventually drew the conclusion from this, converting to Sunni Islam and moving to Egypt. How he squared his conversion to Islam with his positive attitude towards the Templars and Bernhard is perhaps an interesting question! On a less polemical note, let me say that it's interesting to note that Dante may have been influenced by esoteric-laden Muslim sources. See Miguel Asin's “Islam and the Divine Comedy”, a scholarly work referenced by Guénon and partially translated into English.

Despite his support for the esoteric traditions, Guénon sharply condemns the Gnostics as heretics, and he doesn't mention Ficino, Pico, Boehme and other Hermetic luminaries usually mentioned in this context. The reasons are somehow connected to Guénon's emphasis on “traditional forms”, anti-modernism, a hierarchic society and the need for esoteric traditions to have an exoteric-orthodox shell. Thus, the Knights Templar or Dante are acceptable, since they worked within the confines of (seeming) Catholic orthodoxy, while the Gnostics are not, having broken with the Church and embarked on a purely antinomian path.

The idea that the Templars were somehow esoteric is presumably the hardest to swallow, not least because of all the cranky conspiracy theories based on this notion. Guénon, of course, makes a distinction between heresy and esotericism, the Templars being the latter, not the former. This, admittedly, makes his case more interesting, since Christian mystics presumably had ideas difficult to understand for the multitude, ideas nevertheless not condemned as heresy by the Church (rightly or wrongly). Thus, Bernhard de Clairvaux uses an intensely erotic imagery in his mystical writings, an imagery similar to Tantrism/Shaktism within Hinduism. Saint Bernhard was also the main inspiration behind, surprise, the Order of the Temple. Guénon claims that Shaktism and the Kshatriyas are connected, which (if true – I'm not sure if it is!) would make the parallel even more obvious. Guénon further claims that the symbolism of Solomon's Temple and the idea of being “Guardians of the Holy Land” are esoteric, connected to various ancient notions about the axis mundi, the center of the world, Agarrtha, etc. He claims that the Assassins (a secretive Muslim group which the Templars attempted to contact) also called themselves “Guardians of the Holy Land”, which in their case couldn't mean Palestine… Overall, however, I must say that the inner message of the Knights Templar (if such it was) is irretrievably lost.

Due to its impenetrable language, I'm almost tempted to give this book two stars, but in the end I give it three with the caveat that this isn't for the general reader, and not even for most specialist readers! Personally, I'm more “heretical” than Guénon (and somewhat “pro-modern”, too, not to mention “feminist”), and consider his perspectives to be constricting. In many ways, they are narrower than even those of his close spiritual cousin Frithjof Schuon. But yes, if ultra-hard esoteric symbolism is your chosen path to the One, I suppose you will be forced to wrestle with Guénon's “Insights into Christian Esoterism”…