The chapter’s decentering of Guénon raises interesting questions. Mukhopadhyay focuses instead on the Coomaraswamy-Eliade relationship, drawing extensively on Eliade’s long 1979 review of Roger Lipsey’s three-volume Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1977). This review, naturally enough, focuses on Coomaraswamy rather than Guénon. It also makes a comparison between the two to Guénon’s disadvantage: “contrary to René Guénon… Coomaraswamy developed his exegesis without surrendering the tools and methods of philology, archaeology, art history, ethnology, folklore, and history of religions.” One has to admit that Eliade’s judgment is justified, but one still wonders what Eliade would have said had he written at equal length on Guénon, which he did not.
So, who mattered most for Eliade, Coomaraswamy or Guénon? Perhaps it was indeed Coomaraswamy, as Mukhopadhyay’s treatment suggests. Alternatively, Coomaraswamy might have replaced Guénon. Eliade might have learned his perennialism from Guénon and then found Coomaraswamy’s more scholarly version more satisfying. The order may still have been Guénon to Coomaraswamy and Eliade, then, not Coomaraswamy to Guénon and Eliade. One can in fact see both Eliade and Coomaraswamy as adding a rigorous use of the tools and methods of philology, archaeology, etc. to Guénon’s basic schema.
Mukhopadhyay has an unusual view of the origins of Guénon’s thought:
Both Guénon and Coomaras¬wamy’s orientalist aesthetics are rooted in a select mix of orthodox Catholic doctrine and Protestantism, Oxford Idealism and Cambridge Neoplatonism, Bradleian Idealism and German Transcendentalism (whose dialectical philosophy of art follows from the same orthodox sources of Thomism, Spiritualism and the preceding Geistwissenschaft).
To some extent for Eliade, perhaps, but certainty not for Guénon.
