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.
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.”
ReplyDeleteAfter 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.
“Like René Guénon, Evola presupposed a ‘primordial tradition,’ in whose existence I could not believe; I suspected its artificial, ahistorical character. […] Restricting the hermeneutics of European spiritual creations exclusively to their ‘esoteric’ meanings repeats, in the opposite direction, the materialist type of reduction so successfully exemplified by Marx or Freud.” Mircea Eliade, Les Moissons du solstice: Mémoire II, 1937–1960.
Delete“I read René Guénon rather late, and some of his books interested me greatly, especially L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vedanta, which I found very beautiful, intelligent, and profound. But there was a whole side of Guénon that irritated me: his excessively polemical streak, and his blunt rejection of all modern Western culture—as though simply teaching at the Sorbonne were enough to lose any possibility of understanding anything. […] As for tradition, or Tradition, the subject is both complex and delicate. […] Nowadays, the term ‘Tradition’ quite often denotes esotericism, a secret teaching. Consequently, anyone who declares himself an adherent of ‘Tradition’ implies that he is an ‘initiate,’ the possessor of a ‘secret teaching.’ At best, this is an illusion.” Mircea Eliade, L’Épreuve du labyrinthe: Entretiens avec Claude-Henri Rocquet.
“What Guénon and the other ‘hermeticists’ say about ‘Tradition’ must not be understood on the plane of historical reality (as they claim). These speculations constitute a universe of systematically articulated meanings; they should be compared to a great poem or a novel. The same applies to Marxist or Freudian ‘explanations’: they are true if we regard them as imaginary universes. The ‘proofs’ are few and uncertain; they correspond to the historical, social, and psychological ‘realities’ of a novel or a poem. All these global and systematic interpretations are, in reality, mythological creations, extremely useful for understanding the World; but they are not, as their authors believe, ‘scientific explanations.’” Mircea Eliade, Fragments d’un Journal, 1: 1945–1969.