Diversity and unity of religions

Introduction

On the strength of common symbols and metaphysical generalities, it has been possible to speak of the “transcendental unity of religions”. But this poses a number of difficulties, raised by Jean Borella on various occasions over the last thirty years¹.

The elements that follow, after Jean Borella, propose to consider more appropriately an analogical unity of religions, and to specify what the notion of “religio perennis” cannot be.

The Religion that Names the Others

The very word “religion”, the Latin religio, originally served only to designate piety, with no reference to the worship of divinity² and no language prior to Christianity had a specific term for religion, so much so that the term came to be used in many languages³.

This concept did not appear at the time of Alexander, despite contacts with what we now call Buddhism and Hinduism, but was born with Christianity, as if the Christian religious “form” revealed the supra-formal essence of all religion!⁴. What’s more, this Christian concept of religion, which was not used in China, India, Buddhism, Egypt, Israel, Greece or Rome, has served to identify and name the world’s religions: Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, even Judaism, are all post-Christian, and some (Hinduism, for example) are very recent. However, the adjective “Christian” appeared in Antioch around 45 A.D.⁵ and the noun “Christianity” (christianismos as opposed to ioudaïsmos) is widely attested⁶ and in common use at the end of the 1st century⁷.

Denomination Leads to Comparison

Or the other way around. In any case, Christianity has three combinable ways of situating itself in relation to other religions:

• diversified remnants of primitive revelation,
• purely human creations,
• the work of the devil.

Each of these hypotheses appears both true, in some respects, and false:

• the last recalls that no religion escapes the devil’s attacks (cf. the parable of the wheat and the chaff), but assumes that God can allow himself to be worshipped and prayed to using forms taught by the devil (“a deceiver so powerful that he can satisfy, through an invincible and undetectable illusion, the deepest religious need of all mankind since the beginning”);
• the second hypothesis recalls that all religions are certainly rich in human creations and affected by the cultural conditions of their development, but it “confers on human nature a creative capacity out of all proportion to the scale of religious phenomena and the specific originality of each religion”;
• the first recalls that all religions “bear primordial elements, as demonstrated by the universality of certain truths and symbols”.

However, over and above their common primordial elements, certain religions appear, without question, to have been founded by a revelator, such as Buddha or the prophet Muhammad. This cannot simply be seen as the effect of an imposture. The thesis of primordial revelation must therefore be complemented by that of divine intervention, whether direct or indirect (angelic). Acknowledging this “divine origin of (authentic) religions does not of itself entail relativism or syncretism, since each remains unique and, in a way, incomparable”.

On the other hand, there are irreducible contradictions:

• Buddha teaching the impermanence of the atman (the “self”), in opposition to Hinduism, which affirms its permanence and transcendent reality.
• the Koran rejecting the Christian Trinity in the name of Divine Unity (IV, 171; V, 73), as well as the divinity of Christ (IV, 172; V, 17, 72-78; IX, 31-32), which is inseparable from it.

This contradiction, in particular between the Koranic “God has no son” and “the Word made flesh is God”, as it stands, is insoluble. All that remains is to seek its meaning.

Rather than juxtaposing religions, it seems necessary to accept the idea of a hierarchy of revelations: the revealing Word expressing the divine Mystery more or less explicitly. For example, Christianity does not reject the fundamental dogma of Islam (no God, apart from God), but on the contrary affirms it (credo in unum Deum: “I believe in one God”), whereas Islam does not “understand” Christ, the Son of God. More precisely, it only recognizes what fits its perspective: Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary, messenger of God, but in such a way that “it could be said that Islam represents what pure Abrahamism can accept of the Christic mystery, and which Judaism had rejected”.

Comparison Enriches Teaching

This semi-negation – which is also a semi-affirmation – of Christ by Islam (an explicitly post-Christian religion) is undoubtedly a terrible ordeal for a Christian, but it is rich in teaching: it reminds us of “the irrefutable force of the monotheistic demand” (witnessed by Islam); it teaches us “the unfathomable depth of the Christian mystery, unfathomable because everything happens as if God had had to tolerate his merciful – and momentary – veiling in the eyes of some of the ‘believers'”.

This is because the Christic mystery “is ‘parousiac’: in it is realized the perfect immanence of the divine to the human, an anticipated and saving realization of the final moment when ‘God will be all in all'” (Col III, 11). In other words, accomplished Christians already belong to the “eighth day” of the world, and Islam realizes a certain “de facto truth” of the attitude of certain Christians towards Christ, that of the Arian heresy. This is why “it was somehow impossible for Christianity to be the ultimate religion, the religion of the end of time”. What is definitively accomplished in the person of Christ is not equally accomplished in the Christian religion, whose task of christifying the world is only “in the process of being accomplished”; otherwise, if this task were accomplished, the Christian religion would have ceased to exist.

Thus, Christianity is both more and less than a religion: “more than a religion, because it is centered on the mystery of Christ, the transcendent unity of all revelations”, in the sense that the Christian “form” surpasses all forms and thus reveals “the religious form” as such; “less than a religion, because this surpassing entails a kind of relative inability to constitute itself truly as a historically existing form”. Its prophetic nature – which “announces the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Cor., XI, 26) – “authorizes” the terminal existence of a religious form: a minimal, stable synthesis of the religious form as such, religion reduced to its essentials.

Christianity is terminal and unsurpassable, in that today it reverberates the eternal, parousiatic light: “the supernatural light of the future Apocalypse”; and Islam is terminal because it represents the simplest form of the original sacred theism⁸.

The Limits of Religious Unification

We cannot ignore the conjectural nature of these considerations, nor the fact that “there is in the plurality of religions an impenetrable mystery, the secret of God”. However, we can’t avoid trying to think about it, even if “to think is always to put oneself in God’s place”. But then, the very unification of the concept of religion becomes problematic:

• if it’s a question of an “apophatic unity of revelations” (apophatic for ineffable and superintelligible), we’re simply affirming the divine origin of manifestations of the sacred, or, for the atheist student, we’re merely endorsing a common designation of religious facts;
• if it’s a question of a “cataphatic unity of religions” (cataphatic for positively formulable statement), we commit ourselves to defining the intelligible content of such a supra-religion or inter-religion.

This is where insurmountable difficulties arise for Christianity. For, while it is always possible to disregard the particularizing contingencies of the various religions (the way in which they are phenomenologically distinguished), what is not possible would be to ignore what each one says is essential. For example, leaving aside the historical facts of Shakyamuni for Buddhism and Muhammad for Islam, it can be admitted that these religions come together: “nirvana being basically nothing other than the extinction (al-fanā’) of all that illusorily asserts itself as real apart from the only Real: there is no God but God”. Yet Christianity cannot be subjected to the same treatment: its message is the messenger himself; “particularizing historical contingency as such is given as the absolute of revelation. All Christianity consists in believing that Jesus Christ is the unique incarnation of the unique Son of God”; all religions have said, in one form or another, that God is Father or that He is Spirit, but none has ever said: God is Son.

This “God is Son” means that, through the Trinity revealed by the Son, God “becomes” Father, not only of men and of the world, but above all as God eternally begets God; moreover, since Christ is not a messenger among others, but the Word itself, he “becomes” the Exegesis of the Father (Joa., I, 18).

Whereas other religions, as far as we know, do not “determine” the divine Essence in its essentiality, but content themselves with the “Face” necessary to our relationship with God (the One, the Being, the pure Reality, the Creator and the Rewarder…), the Trinitarian mystery is a “Christianization” of the Absolute, which “extends the Christian ‘form’ beyond the man-God relationship”, which “dogmatizes” Christianity at the level of the Absolute itself.

This is what makes Christianity unintegrable in the positive concept of a unity of religions, except, of course, to reduce it to Arianism.

As such a reinterpretation is incompatible with the data of Tradition and Scripture, we must reject the cataphatic conception of a unity of religions and stick to an apophatic one. Nevertheless, there is still a way to speak of unity.

An Analogical Unity of Religions

Philosophically speaking, we can distinguish different kinds of unity.

• Generic unity is where we find a single genus common to several species, such as the genus animal, common to oxen and man (man is no less an animal than the ox, but adds a reasonable specific difference to this common genus); “according to this type of unity, the term religion would designate a common genus of which each religion would be a specification, no religion being more or less religion than another, any more than any animal is more animal than another: here, the term religion has a univocal meaning”.
• Purely nominal unity occurs when there is no common genus between the animal “dog” and the constellation Dog; here, the term dog has an equivocal meaning, it’s a simple homonym.
• There is a third type of unity, which is neither univocal as in generic unity, nor equivocal as in nominal unity. This is the case where the same denomination can be applied “to different realities, not because these realities share a common genus, but because they bear a determined relation to a primary reality where the essence signified by the denomination is manifested in a more appropriate and perfect manner”. The classic example of such a case is that of “healthy”, which is properly and par excellence said of the animal, but also, and indirectly, of the remedy or physician that procures health, or of the urine that is the sign of it. This unity can be called an analogical unity – the medievals so named it – in the sense of an analogy of attribution: the same term is attributed to different realities in a way that is neither univocal (no generic identity or equivalence between these realities), nor yet equivocal, for, here, “the community of name has its raison d’être in that there is a certain nature that manifests itself in all (the) acceptions” of this term⁹. But this community of nature manifests itself more or less perfectly, and so this nature will be named only after the reality in which it most visibly makes itself known, and to which it most properly belongs. It will therefore be attributed to other realities “by reference to a first reality”, says Aristotle.

These principles can be applied to the case of religions, on the one hand, since there can be no unity of religions and, on the other, since humanity ignored the general notion of religion until the appearance of Christianity, which named them all.

All naming distinguishes and separates, but in so doing, it also accomplishes the truth of the multiple by revealing the singular identity of each being. […] In order to achieve self-awareness, and hence awareness of religion as such, Christian thinkers had to experience, through the Christian message, something that surpassed everything they could know in the order of the sacred, i.e. not only the Greek, Roman or Jewish sacred, but also the Indian, Egyptian or Celtic. For the other religious forms to be constituted in their very formality, ceasing to be spontaneous modes of living, blind to themselves, like Monsieur Jourdain who made prose without knowing it, they had to be defined by what limited them in their very order, in other words, what transcended them. […] By its very appearance, Christianity reveals all religions as religions. In its light, or rather in Christ’s light, the religious nature of other forms has effectively been revealed, whether they know it or not. This is not to say that he is religion as such, for the simple reason that this quintessential Religion does not exist. In fact, few religions are as intimately aware of their formal imperfection as the Christian one: what is most transcendent in it – Christ – does not belong to it and never will.

From then on, this precarious, ill-defined religion, which may even contemplate with some “envy” the formal splendor or vigorous simplicity or perfume of serenity of the manifestations of the sacred on the face of the earth,

also knows that it is the repository of a unique message which consists simply in the coming of God into our flesh, not of the divine, but of God in person, not the “descent” to earth of a divine aspect (avatāra), but the assumption of human nature by the hypostasis of the Word. […] And this is the reason for the secret weakness of the Christian form¹⁰.

We can even see the “importance of the Church – a unique phenomenon in the history of religions – as a substitute for this form which, in certain respects, is lacking (hence also a certain lack of a sense of sacred forms, which seems congenital to Christianity)”¹¹.

The Christian message, entering the history of mankind, could not fail to take on forms, like any other religion, and this has been Christianity’s great problem from the outset to the present day: Jewish forms, pagan forms, modern forms, postmodern forms and so on. Constant reformation means searching for new forms and not settling on any one. Stable in space, Christianity is in perpetual temporal wandering. But this is also how it retains the power to reveal the formal nature of manifestations of the sacred. As you can see, it’s not easy to be a Christian, or even to think of Christianity in itself. And I’m not talking here about the sublimity of Christ’s commandments, which can be summed up as: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt., V, 48), I’m talking about existing as a Christian at the most elementary level. A Jew or a Muslim feels Jewish or Muslim when he performs the rites of his religion, even if he is not a saint. A Christian always lives in extreme uncertainty as to the Christian truth of his conduct.

“Christianity is certainly not the unity of religions, it is not the Religio perennis (which is merely the mythological and illusory projection of a concept (cf. the respective theories of Guénon and Schuon)), but it is historically the primary form by reference to which only the other forms have been able to be named according to the truth of their nature. This is why we can well say that the unity of religions is an analogical unity whose primary analog is the religion of Christ”¹²

“Primordial Tradition” or Religio Perennis?

If the Schuonian notion of religio perennis is associated with Guénon’s notion of primordial Tradition, it’s because both fulfill “more or less the same function”. Nevertheless, because of some major differences, we have to agree that they are not the same notion¹³.

• Guénon’s “Primordial Tradition” refers to “the first Revelation that Heaven sent down to earth at the dawn of human history”. It preceded all other divine manifestations, is placed under the guardianship of a World King located in Agarrtha and “all authentic traditional forms must remain in effective communication with this Agarttha, which guarantees their full regularity, as well as the presence within them of a true esotericism”.
• Schuon first refutes the “King” of the world and the Agarrtha¹⁴ and then breaks with the Guénonian notion of “tradition” to return to the term “religion”, moreover associated with the use of perennis, borrowed from the modern, Western syntagm of philosophia perennis.

Schuon’s perennial religion (or wisdom) is not an event at the dawn of human history; it is a timeless metaphysical “reality” that designates the transcendent essence of religion as such, and thus of all authentic religion. Its deposit is not entrusted to an “administrative” function that would guarantee the regularity of sacred forms. It can be known by any “gnostic” intellect, at the same time as it embraces and dominates historical religions, being beyond their inevitable formal limits.

This conception of the religio perennis “evacuates”, as it were, the need for divine revelation, identifying gnosis and revelation¹⁵, a conception which “comes close to what the philosophy of religion says about the concept of religion in general”. But is thinking about the notion of religion as such really any different from thinking about the concept of religion?

We can accept the idea that there is a divine and revealed fund in non-Christian religious forms¹⁶. Three joint considerations contribute to this:

• It is inconceivable that divine goodness could have left millions of men, not only in ignorance of the true religion, but also in the absolutely undetectable illusion of a false religion. “This argument is not sentimental, it is semantic: the religious behavior of men over the millennia cannot in reality be devoid of the meaning that men attribute to it in good faith.
• The testimony of saints and sages, transparent models of the divine in man, who in every place and time “speak expressly of their awareness of God’s presence within them”, is irrefragable.
• Each religion, considered in its principal forms (artistic, ritual, theological, spiritual), presents itself in a style all its own, homogeneous and stable, and humanly uninventable. Thus, “neither the French Revolution, nor so-called industrial civilization, nor Hitler’s, Stalin’s or Mao’s totalitarianisms” have succeeded in eradicating these “flowerings of the Holy Spirit”.

Religio Perennis, Sophia Perennis

Is it not possible to posit, apart from and above the great religions, a religio perennis “whose content would be identified with that of universal metaphysics, itself defined as ‘absolute esotericism’, and in relation to which other religions would be no more than ‘saving mirages’, or, at most, ‘liturgical frameworks'¹⁷ of only practical necessity? I don’t think so.

Regarding religio perennis and sophia perennis, it would probably be better to speak of religio and sophia “primordialis“, insofar as (Guénon’s thesis) this refers to the religion practised by Adam in Paradise and to the knowledge that was then his.

This religio adamica is defined by a double positive commandment (to cultivate and guard the “Garden”) and a prohibition (to eat the forbidden fruit). This means that Adam’s state of knowledge, in which being and knowing are inseparable and constitute a single “knowing how to exist”, is a function of one act, the observance of the Lex primordialis. Very precisely, it is to the extent that Adam actively ignores the science of good and evil, that his knowledge is united with his being and with beings, in short, that he is true wisdom. This sapiential union, this “Sophianic fusion” of the knowing being and the known being, does not imply any confusion¹⁸.

From Paradisiacal or Adamic Knowledge…

Like all human knowledge, Adamic knowledge does contain a “specular”, “representative” element, but this element does not appear as such.

Adamic knowledge is like a mirror that reflects beings and things, yet actively ignores itself as a condition of possibility for this reflection: the intellective mirror “forgets” itself in its very intellection, absorbing itself entirely in the act of its vision; such is one of the meanings of ignorance (willed by God) of the “fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, by which is meant the consequence of an actualization of duality as such, i.e. of its separative potentiality.

If knowledge cannot unite the knowing being with the known being, it is only because, “in its very act, it is neither the one nor the other”. We don’t become rose because we know it. We must not forget, in Aristotle’s famous phrase: “the soul is (…) all that it knows”, the most important word is “in a certain way” (πωϛ). This so-called “intentional” (Scholastic) mode of identity is a cognitive identity, not an ontological identification of the realities identified. There is a “seizure of an essence, abstracted from the thing known by the intelligence in the act of intellection”.

Knowledge is, precisely, the miraculous possibility of such a mode of identity, a possibility specifically linked to man’s presence in the world. Thus, in knowledge, the known being and the knowing being each leave their own existential situs (since to exist, for a being, is to be situated in a world, i.e. to be subject to the determining conditions of a milieu, or state, whatever that may be); they open up to each other in a “place” that is existentially nowhere, whose very nature is to be a “non-where”, a “non ubi“: knowledge, in the act of knowing, is what brings about – in the tightly woven fabric of this world where everything is always “somewhere”, i.e. existentially situated (or conditioned) – an opening, a “day”, in the light of which beings and worlds can miraculously free themselves from their ontological solitude and exist for one another.

If knowledge, as such, is insituated, it occurs, is situated, in the being in which it is actualized. Depending on whether this “situation” is actively assumed or passively undergone, knowledge thus situated is operative and practical, or merely speculative and theoretical, i.e. effective with regard to the knowing being and the being known, or not.

“To actively perform one’s existential situation for a being is to exist in accordance with the law of one’s being”. The Lex primordialis, in the terrestrial Paradise, is the law of maintenance in the state that conforms to it: “To perform the Adamic situs is to refuse knowledge of the lower states, it is to maintain the human state in an act of contemplation, turned towards Heaven and the beings of its world.

… To Knowledge After the Fall

Any desire to “situate oneself in relation to the lower degrees, to see oneself as one degree among a multiplicity of others, would imply leaving this human state to consider it objectively and from the outside. This up-and-down gaze, which measures existential situs, belongs only to God, because only the Absolute can truly know the relative”.

Such is original sin, which is the desire to know infra-human (infra-paradisiac) states, in order to be able to measure and appreciate the human situs and its relative superiority. Adam does not lose his human nature, but he ceases to actively assume it, he ceases to live up to his theomorphic nobility. He becomes obliged to endure his own nature as a determination and destiny alien to himself. In this vertical fall, he loses the Sophianic key to knowledge, which ceases to be operative.

What remains of this knowledge is its specular dimension, the representative capacity of intelligence. Already present in the Adamic state, but then “assumed” and delivered from itself by absorption in its transcendent content, this specular dimension of knowledge now appears as such, and is reduced to itself. Sophia primordialis thus subsists, but only in a speculative and reflective mode, as an intellective, direct and intuitive memory of metaphysical principles and elements, and this is what we call philosophia perennis :

• philosophia because this knowledge yearns for lost wisdom, or because this metaphysical knowledge, connatural to the intelligence, is accompanied by the awareness that this knowledge, this memoria sui of the intelligence is, as such, only speculative: per speculum in aenigmate, says Saint Paul (1 Cor., XIII, 12) ;
• perennis on the other hand, because this memoria sui, this metaphysical knowledge that the intelligence, solicited by an object (natural or cultural) discovers by reflection within itself, persists through (per) years (annos) and millennia.

Knowledge is then reduced to its speculative mode, since “original sin consists precisely in the will of the conditioned being to know itself as such, and thus to reduce itself to that which conditions it”. Knowledge does not disappear, however, being existentially “delocalized”, insituated, without ontological ubi, but, ontologically untied, it floats, objective and almost useless, in any case ineffective, “like a light that the knowing being would carry with him but which would only ever illuminate inaccessible places”. Such metaphysical knowledge can therefore never again constitute a religio.

The Religio Perennis is Not a Religion

“To restore knowledge’s operative virtue and salvific efficacy, we need a new ontological rooting. We need a new situs“.

Fallen man is still at the center, but an eccentric center: he has kept his centricity, but lost his centrality; the world is no longer concentric with him. Man no longer has his place, and only God can bring about this superintelligible determination, overcome the indefinite contingency of universal existence, and, “pitching his tent among us” (Saint John, l, 14), tell us:

Here and now is the place of the truth of your life; here and now I have traced the cross that fixes the new garden of your existence, the one where I have built the ecclesial Paradise that you will cultivate and keep. If you remain in this new state, the state of merciful grace, if you drink of this water, if you eat of the fruit of the Tree of Immortal Life, then your knowledge will regain its transforming power, then the pneumatization of your intellect will take place, then you will know, by entering into the more than luminous Darkness of Good Friday, by agreeing to close the eyes of speculative intelligence, the Light that is beyond all darkness, and whose Dawn Adam himself never saw.

It is therefore impossible to speak of a religio perennis in the proper, operative sense, unless we endow sophia perennis (de facto reduced to a philosophia, as Pythagoras expressly teaches) with a saving and deificating efficacy that belongs only to instituted religion.

This is so because the philosophia perennis or universal metaphysics – whose exposition, moreover, is nowhere to be found as such, but is always caught up in particular conceptual configurations – subsists in humanity’s intellectual memory (intelligence and its languages) in a speculative, abstract, symbolic, “deontologized” mode, and can therefore only recover its ontological operativity by the grace of a new “situation” in the order of existence. We have to start somewhere, from a consecrated existential ground that is here and not elsewhere, whereas by cosmically decentering man, sin has established the universal equivalence of all “heres”, which are therefore also “elsewheres”, being reduced to the pure contingency of their punctuality.

In other words, what is perennial is what Guénon calls theoretical metaphysics. In itself, this theoretical metaphysics cannot be operative: it only becomes so on condition that its (abstract) universality is grafted onto the singularity of a new tree of life planted by God on the soil of our existence. From this point of view, the expression religio perennis appears to be a deceptive mirage. It is thought to designate a mysterious reality, both underlying and supreme, the operative quintessence of all religion, the “secret of the King”, the sacramentum Regis, spoken of in the Book of Tobit (XII, 7), and in reality, we find ourselves only in the presence of the concept of religion in general. But the concept of religion doesn’t save, any more than the concept of fire burns. And the beauty or prestige of the formulas with which the concept is clothed will do nothing to change that. The religio perennis of which perennialism speaks cannot be considered a true religion.

Footnotes

1. “Intelligence spirituelle et surnaturel”, in Éric Vatré, La Droite du Père, Enquête sur la Tradition catholique aujourd’hui, Trédaniel, 1994 ; “Problématiques de l’unité des religions”, afterword to Bruno Bérard, Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens, L’Harmattan, 2005; “La religio perennis n’est pas une religion” in, collectif, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon. Héritages et controverses, L’Harmattan, 2023.[↩]
2. “a set of observances, rules, prohibitions, without reference either to the worship of divinity, or to mythical traditions, or to festival celebrations”, cf. Brelich.[↩]
3. German, English, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Estonian, Indonesian (religiusitas), Latvian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian, Swedish…[↩]
4. From this point of view, a doctrine of the unity of religions is properly Christian: other religions are “more or less perfect forms of the one religion, which, as St. Augustine says, has existed since the beginning of the world and has finally revealed itself in Jesus Christ”; cf. Jean Borella, “Intelligence spirituelle et surnaturel”, in Éric Vatré, La Droite du Père, Enquête sur la Tradition catholique aujourd’hui, Trédaniel, 1994, p.48. .[↩]
5. Acts of the Apostles, XI, 26[↩]
6. S. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistles to the Magnesians, X, 1, 3; to the Romans, III, 3; to the Philadelphians, VI, 1[↩]
7. Jean Borella, “Problématique de l’unité des religions”, afterword to Bruno Bérard, Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens, imprimatur du diocèse de Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005.[↩]
8. “Intelligence spirituelle et surnaturel”, op. cit., pp.48-51.[↩]
9. L. Robin, La théorie platonicienne des Idées et des Nombres d’après Aristote, p. 151; “Problématique de l’unité des religions”, op.cit., p.267.[↩]
10. “Problématique de l’unité des religions”, pp. 266-270. Emphasis added.[↩]
11. “Intelligence spirituelle et supernaturel”, op.cit., p.54.[↩]
12. “Problématique de l’unité des religions”, op.cit., pp.270-271.[↩]
13. cf. “La religio perennis n’est pas une religion” in, collective, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon. Héritages et controverses, L’Harmattan, 2023. Text summarized in the following paragraphs.[↩]
14. A term unknown both in Sanskrit and in the Tibetan tradition, cf. the decisive article by Tibetologist Marco Pallis in Pierre-Marie Sigaud’s collection René Guénon, Dossier H: “Le Roi du Monde et le problème des sources d’Ossendowski”, l’Âge d’Homme, 1984, pp. 145-154.[↩]
15. Whereas Guénon’s “primordial Tradition” can be put in correspondence with the Adamic Tradition of Judeo-Christianity”.[↩]
16. “while remaining convinced that nowhere is there anything equivalent to the Trinitarian doctrine or to the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ, any more than there is anything equivalent to the sacraments which prolong the sacrificial incarnation of the Word ‘until the consummation of the age’ (Mt., XXVIII, 20).[↩]
17. Schuon’s expressions[↩]
18. Adam, in knowing the essence of paradisiacal beings, also recognizes that none is like himself (Gen., Il, 20), and so he distinguishes himself from them.[↩]