Excerpt from the article "The Universal Tradition" by Philip Sherrard

The following is an excerpt from the article  "The Universal Tradition" by Philip Sherrard

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What, though, is less convincing about Guenon's presentation of Tradition is the idea that behind the various forms of religious tradition as we encounter them in the world stands, what he calls, a primordial and universal—purely metaphysical—Tradition of which the various re ligious traditions are as it were but local and partial expressions. The idea appears to involve a kind of circular argument. You can only obtain true metaphysical knowledge, Guenon claims, by means of initiation into it through a particular tradition in which this knowledge is en shrined or embodied. You cannot, that is to say, while standing outside all traditions, survey them as it were impartially and come to the conclu sion that this one rather than that one enshrines the Truth to a greater degree, because a capacity to recognize and realize the Truth presup poses that you have already attached yourself to a tradition and been initiated through it into the Truth. This means that your idea of the Truth, in the absolute sense, is dependent upon the degree to which the Truth, in the absolute sense, is enshrined or embodied in the tradition through which you have received your knowledge of it.

Having received your knowledge of the Truth in this way—and it is, according to Guenon, the only way you can receive it in an authentic fashion—it is surely illegitimate for you to take a further step and say that the tradition through which you have recognized and realized the Truth enshrines the Truth in a way that is more complete than the way it is enshrined in other traditions, so that this tradition—your tradition— represents the primordial and universal Tradition, the Tradition par ex cellence, while other traditions are but adaptations made in order to cater for the limitations of the capacities and temperaments of the par ticular groups of humanity to which they are addressed. To do this is, as I said, to argue round in a circle, which is a game that anyone can play at. 

Yet this is what Guenon does in identifying the metaphysical Trad ition in a primordial and universal sense with the tradition of the Ved anta, seen in the perspective of interpretation given to it by Shankara, and in using the criteria provided by this tradition in order to judge the status, with respect to metaphysical Truth in its purest form, of other traditions. 

Moreover, to say that Vedanta represents the primordial Tradi tions, and is therefore the purest and most perfect of the traditions, be cause it is the original tradition of mankind in a purely chronological sense, is only to repeat the circular argument in another form. Here there are two things to be said. The first is that this assertion about the chronological priority of the Vedanta doctrine itself begs an absolutely vital question. Because although you may say that Vedanta is the oldest spiritual tradition known to mankind, you cannot avoid the question of who you choose to acknowledge as your guide and master in the matter of the interpretation of this tradition. Guenon in fact chose Shankara (rather than, say, Ramanuja); and Vedanta in the extreme non-dualist or monist form given to it by Shankara dates from the 8th century A.D. or thereabouts. 

Yet apart from this, you can only say that Vedanta enshrines most fully the primordial tradition because it is the original spiritual tradition of mankind in a purely chronological sense if you have already accepted a theory of time according to which man's highest state of spiritual re ceptivity, and hence his most pure and perfect form of metaphysical knowledge, coincide with the opening cycle of the great cosmic cycles; and this theory of time, and of the progressive degeneration of the cy cles, is of course part and parcel of the Hindu tradition and is taken from that tradition. If you take your theory of time from, say, the Christian tradition, there is nothing to support the idea that the original state of mankind, chronologically speaking, is the most perfect state. A certain condition of spiritual vacuum is needed in order to locate the most per fect and purest form of things in the remote past, just as it is needed in order to locate it in the remote future, in the manner of Karl Marx or Teilhard de Chardin. 

You can have an idolatry with respect to the past, just as you can have an idolatry with respect to the future. If the second leads to a kind of iconoclasm in which you destroy all inherited traditional forms be cause they represent so many obstacles in the way of man's progress into the future, the first can lead to a kind of stagnation which so ties the human spirit to the revolving wheels of the accumulated habit of cen turies that it becomes impossible for it to embrace new visions, not of the future but of the ever-renewing eternal realities themselves. This is the negative, the mechanical spirit of tradition, and it is in its own way as materialist as the dreams of a Utopian future. It is blindly pious, but not spiritual. It shuts the door of prophecy and consequently of the fa culty which is the correlative of prophecy, the Imagination. Is not this why the Ishopanishad says: "Truth is both finite and infinite at the same time; it moves and yet moves not; it is in the distant, yet also in the near; it is within all objects and without them"?

Also it may be said that Guenon's idea of metaphysical realization gives virtually exclusive pride of place to the intelligence, and, as one would expect from a disciple of Shankara, he regards knowledge as the primary means of deliverance. He does not, for instance, attribute to love any place in the process of transforming the human being into the likeness of God. In fact, for Guenon, love has no metaphysical status whatsoever. As he declared at a discussion in 1924, when he had already reached full maturity, love is merely something "sentimental and in con sequence secondary". That is to say, by definition love cannot for Guenon be that by means of which man can attain perfection, or that without which he cannot achieve wisdom—because love is inseparably bound to wisdom—or that in which he rises to the heights of true con templation. I cannot believe that this typifies Hinduism in general, however much it may typify certain forms of Hinduism. 

Indeed, behind Guenon's presentation of metaphysical doctrine I think one can discern a very distinctive principle at work, one which he applied to the formulation of metaphysical doctrine with extreme rigour. This principle is evident in the status he accorded with respect to such formulation to the human reason and its logic. Put in its simplest terms, for him metaphysic, although it stands above reason, cannot con tradict reason. This is to say that, when it comes to the question of repre senting metaphysical doctrine in terms that are accessible to the human intelligence, if you can demonstrate in purely logical and rational terms that a certain metaphysical principle is and must be superior—more all inclusive, less limited and determined—than another, then this first principle on that account must stand higher in the metaphysical order than the second. Since it can be demonstrated in a perfectly logical and unambiguous manner that the metaphysical principle which is totally unqualified, impersonal and does not admit any particularization or participation is and must be more all-inclusive, less limited and less de termined than any other principle than it is possible for the human mind and its logic to conceive, then, according to this view of things, that prin ciple must be the metaphysical Absolute.

Hence, in this perspective, any tradition which does not identify the metaphysical Absolute with a principle that is totally unqualified, im personal, and so on, must be of a lower order, metaphysically speaking, than a tradition which does identify the Absolute in this way. This, as I said, is quite unambiguous, given the assumption that underlies it. What is ambiguous is why one should accept in the first place the principle of rational and logical demonstration that leads to such a conclusion. The only intelligible answer to this question is to say that you accept it be cause it is an axiom of the tradition to which you have given your adher ence, and hence it determines the manner in which metaphysical know ledge is formulated within that tradition. But this is merely another example of the same circular argument about which I have been speak ing. Because, had you given your adherence to a tradition in which this particular idea of the relationship between logic and metaphysic—the idea, that is to say, that metaphysic cannot contradict reason—is not taken as axiomatic, you would be under no compulsion to reach the con clusion which it imposes.

Yet if this concept, of a primordial Tradition in the way in which Guenon envisages it, is so hedged about with a priori assumptions that it must be seen either as an act of faith or as purely arbitrary, this does not invalidate his idea of what constitutes the main features of Tradition as such. What it does mean, on the other hand, is that the claim to speak in the name of the Tradition, whether one calls it 'universal' or 'metaphysical' or 'primordial', must be treated with considerable care; and that correspondingly the idea of a universal religion, or the propos ition that 'all Truth is one', in itself neither resolves the question of which tradition enshrines the most total revelation of the Truth, nor es tablishes the equal authority and authenticity of all the traditions. 

One must not forget that the significance that a certain tradition has for one, and the degree and firmness of the assent one gives to it, depend not so much on its demonstrable probabilities, as on the strength of one's attachment to it, or faith in it, in the first place. This by no means exempts one from the necessity of the acceptance of, and faith in, a par ticular tradition, which fulfils the conditions, as described by Guenon, that constitute a tradition, if one is to realize the spiritual potentialities that lie in the depths of each one of us; nor does it exempt one from the necessity of directing one's primary loyalty towards the tradition of one's choice and to deepening one's experience of it. Yet it also imposes on one the obligation to respect and honour signs of wisdom, sanctity and grace wherever and whenever they occur, and whatever the tradi tion that has nourished them.