East and West

René Guénon (1886-1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization.

In East and West, Guénon diagnoses the fundamental "abnormality" of Western civilization vis-à-vis the traditional civilizations of the East, suggests avenues by which the West might be "re-oriented" towards the fundamental metaphysical principles it has largely abandoned, and outlines the possible role of a restoration of true intellectuality in this task. Of course, East and West are no longer what they were in Guénon's time. The aggressive rationalism and materialism of post-Christian Western culture has become a worldwide phenomenon and no longer corrodes the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the West only: it has infiltrated distorted forms of Eastern spirituality and metaphysics, incited fundamentalist reactions the world over, and, thanks to the pervasive internet, wields previously unheard-of influence. And so today we have an East largely inflamed with a desire to surpass the West in materialism, and a West sodden with moral and spiritual degeneracy. Nonetheless, fruitful exchanges between traditional Christianity and Eastern religions have also taken place on an unprecedented scale, although marred by an ongoing temptation to ill-informed syncretism. In such a milieu, Guénon's East and West, read with an eye to events of recent decades, delivers a stunning intellectual punch. But the East is always the East: the place where the sun rises, the point of recollection and return to the Source. And the West is always the West: the place of the full manifestation of possibilities (including the most degenerate), of the tendency to dissipation and dissolution; the point where the sun sets. Since in postmodern, global culture we are all more or less forced to be "Westerners" outwardly, our only recource under these circumstances may be to become "Easterners" within.

In short, this book investigates differences between East and West in connection with the preservation of traditional principles, with a special view to envisioning how such differences affect the possibilities for the restitution of such principles in each domain. Special attention is given to various aberrant 'spiritualities' in the West, and how they might be overcome by reference to teachinigs still extant in the East, and a rejuvenation of what remains in the West of organizations retaining at least a core of the metaphysical teachings that were in full bloom in the medieval West.