EDITORIAL NOTE

The past century has witnessed an erosion of earlier cultural values as well as a blurring of the distinctive characteristics of the world’s traditional civilizations, giving rise to philosophic and moral relativism, multiculturalism, and dangerous fundamentalist reactions. As early as the 1920s, the French metaphysician René Guénon (1886–1951) had diagnosed these tendencies and presented what he believed to be the only possible reconciliation of the legitimate, although apparently conflicting, demands of outward religious forms, ‘exoterisms’, with their essential core, ‘esoterism’. His works are characterized by a foundational critique of the modern world coupled with a call for intellectual reform; a renewed examination of metaphysics, the traditional sciences, and symbolism, with special reference to the ultimate unanimity of all spiritual traditions; and finally, a call to the work of spiritual realization. Despite their wide influence, translation of Guénon’s works into English has so far been piecemeal. The Sophia Perennis edition is intended to fill the urgent need to present them in a more authoritative and systematic form. A complete list of Guénon’s works, given in the order of their original publication in French, follows this note.

The present volume consists of articles collected and published posthumously, to which has been added Guénon’s separate study Saint Bernard. When first published as an article, ‘Christianity and Initiation’ (second chapter here) gave rise to some controversy because Guénon here reaffirmed against certain other traditionalist writers and various Christian intellectuals his denial of the efficacy of the Christian sacraments as rites of initiation, a point he had made in other books. Some closely related articles can be found in the companion volume The Esoterism of Dante. Apart from this and his monograph on St Bernard, Guénon devoted no single work to Christianity. His reserve in this respect is closely related to the role he assigns, in East and West and The Crisis of the Modern World, to the Western elite. It was incumbent on the spiritual elite of the Christian West, Guénon believed, to show that the intellectual and spiritual degeneracy of the West was not total and irremediable. It was only natural therefore that Guénon restricted himself to providing certain ‘keys’ and pointers for further research, as far as the Christian tradition is concerned. Guénon often uses words or expressions set off in ‘scare quotes’. To avoid clutter, single quotation marks have been used throughout. As for transliterations, Guénon was more concerned with phonetic fidelity than academic usage. The system adopted here reflects the views of scholars familiar both with the languages and Guénon’s writings. Brackets indicate editorial insertions, or, within citations, Guénon’s additions. Wherever possible, references have been updated, and English editions substituted. The present translation is based on the work of Henry Fohr, edited by his son Samuel Fohr. Also consulted were translations by Jacques Philippe and Tony Brown. The text was checked for accuracy and further revised by Patrick Moore and Marie Hansen. For help with selected chapters thanks go to John Riess, John Champoux, Brian Latham, John Herlihy, Hubert and Rohini Schiff, Charles Upton, Brian Keeble, Rob Baker, and William Stoddart. A special debt of thanks is owed to Cecil Bethell, who revised and proofread the text at several stages and provided the index. Cover design by Michael Buchino and Gray Henry, based on a drawing of a fifth-centry mosaic in the Baptistry at Albenga, by Guénon’s friend and collaborator Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.