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.
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Well, if we were to answer the question, it is very clear that Eliade was very strongly influenced by Guénon. This can be demonstrated from Eliade’s books written during the period when he was still in Romania, in the 1920s and 1930s (see the volumes Fragmentarium and The Ethenasius Island, as well as various articles and reviews). He was very fond of Guénon’s work Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion, and he mentions it in two or so articles from 1926 (at that time Eliade was only 19 years old). He even calls Guénon “a true master.”
After his departure for France, however, he would never cite Guénon again (perhaps because the French and Western European academic milieu was hostile to Guénon), and Eliade certainly did not want to risk his university career. For this reason, he kept silent about any reference to Guénon and the Traditionalists, with the exception of Coomaraswamy (who was viewed more favorably by the academic world) and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
Eliade would cite Guénon again only toward the end of his life, after settling in America, in a study on occultism and witchcraft published in 1976, once again expressing his appreciation for Guénon’s work, especially Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion. It seems that, exactly 50 years after the first article in which he mentioned this work (1926), Eliade was still attached to it.
Let us also not forget that in 1957 Eliade published a book entitled The Sacred and the Profane, while Guénon had previously published an article under this title. Guénon’s article later served as Chapter XI of his first posthumously published book, Initiation and Spiritual Realization, published in 1952, five years before Eliade published his book. Could it be a coincidence?
Furthermore, if we read Eliade’s works carefully, we will see that there are influences of Perennialism, even though he never directly identified himself with this school of thought, with Guénon, or with Schuon—again, so as not to risk his academic career. There are a few articles in Romanian on this subject, but Claudio Mutti also wrote about it.
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