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918 Journal of the American Academy of Religionologies will be a
wonderful resource to recommend to students and belongs onthe shelf
of every serious scholar of wom en and religion.
Pamela Cooper-WhiteSeabury-W estern T heological S eminaryThe
Transfiguration of M an. By Fr i th jo f Schuo n . W or ld W isdom
Books ,1995. 125 page s. $12 .00.
George Santayana once wrote to a colleague, "The concept of
Spirit doesnot interest me, except as a technicality: it is the
life of Spirit that I'm talkinga b o u t . . . " In a similar vein,
in The Transfiguration of Man Frithjof Schuon wa rnsus against the
abando nm ent of the life of spirit. In a refreshing contrast to
muchof academic w riting on religion th at asserts either a species
of redu ctionism orissues an anem ic plea for the reasonableness of
belief, Schuon boldly states hisposition. Having dropped out of
academia several decades ago, nearly instan-taneously upon entering
it, Schuon feels no need for "professional" acknowledg-m ent. He
simply ignores both the projectionists, who see in religious
experiencean exclusively psychological or sociological source , and
the responsivists, wh o viewthe various religious traditions as
particular cultural responses to a noumenalreality. And instead he
invites the reader to take seriously the possibility of dr ink -ing
directly the same waters from which the wo rld's scriptures are
draw n.
Those w ho have read Schuon's earlier works, such as The
Transcendent Unityof Religions or Esoterism as Principle and as Wa
y, know the ordered mannerin w hich he usually writes. They may be
surp rised to find that The Transfigurationof Man is quite
different. This later work does not systematically develop
itsthemes, nor does it attem pt to argue for much at all. It reads
instead as a com pila-tion of loosely related thoug hts, perhap s
from jou rna l entries or shor t essays writ-ten over the years and
pu t together for publication. There is a certain unpo
lishedquality to this boo k. The lack of polish, however, renders
sharper Schuon's manyinsights.Schuon's writings can be placed with
in the context of the Sophia Perennis tra-dition which he, along
with Huston Smith and others, has helped keep verdant.According to
this tradition, the Self's two primary features of hiddenness
andmanifestation upon the same instan t rest first of all up on the
Self's being un quali-fied, which accounts for its hiddenness, and
secondly upon its objectifying itselfas the persona. This duality
in un ity sets up an interplay and tension between th eeternal an d
tem poral or, more specifically, between the self as unqualified
and selfas persona. Th us, as Schuon p uts it, "M an is as if
suspended between Heaven andEarth, or between the Divine Principle
and universal Manifestation, so that hisdestiny is to live in two
di m en sio ns ..." (87).
Ultimately, Schuon tells us, The Transfiguration of Man was
written to helprectify and restore our picture of human nature.
"[W]e want to correct and per-fect the image of man by insisting on
his divinity; no t that wewish to make a godof him; we intend
simply to take account of his true n ature , which transcends
theearthly, and lacking which he would have no reason for be ing"(v
ii).
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920 Journal of the American Academ y of ReligionIt is the
sophists, with Protagoras at their h ead, Schuon con tends , who
arethe true precursors of m odern thought; "they are the 'thinkers'
properly so called,in the sense that they limited themselves to
reasoning and w ere hardly concernedwith 'perceiving' and thus
taking into account that which ' is'" (4). But ultimatelyit is Kant
who seals the fate of mo dernity. Schuon argues that despite the
appear-ance of complete rationalism and inaccessibility to the
emotions, Kant's startingpoint o r "sentim ental dogm a" is
reducible to a gratuitous reac tion against all thatlies beyond the
reach of reason. The source of Kant's philosophy is thus an
apriori, instinctive revolt against truths that are rationally
ungraspable. "All the
rest," Schuon con tend s, "is no thin g bu t dialectical
scaffolding W hat is crucialin Kantianism is not its pro domo logic
and its few very limited lucidities, butthe altogether 'irrational'
desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumani-zation of
the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations
ofour century " (12).From such a beginning we have today come to
demand of reality that itbe manageable, that it no t exceed the
expected o r hold imperatives unyielding tothe collective's supp
lications. The sentimentalist tide tha t broug ht forth the m
od-ern era has left us cu t off from the living waters of Truth
where we now com fortourselves and each other with narrative and
story-telling. The way of life andthoug ht that we con struct, n
egotiate, institutionalize, and finally end up calling"reality" is
not an attempt to understand the world but rather an attempt
torespond to, and integrate our own and past stories. We no longer
feel ourselvesto be living beings at home in the world but rather
epistemologists who havegradually come to appreciate that we are
acting not directly on the world but onbeliefs we hold about the
world.
As a result of our absolutization of the historical over the
transcendent,our abso lutization of reason (consciousness) over
"Intelligence" (awareness), wehave forgotten that existence always
has the first move an d instead a ttem pt to useour ideas of
reality as a measure. We have forgotten, Schuon argues, because
itno longer belongs to "our time," that "the Church must examine
the signs ofthe times and interpret them in the light of the
Gospel"(39). Instead, it is the exactopposite that is being done;
we read and interpret the text according to the times.Frithjof
Schuon's concern is always to remind us that the life of spirit is
thefountain from which the scriptures we study have come. We can
remain aca-demically detached and s tudy the scriptures for
conceptual coherency, or we canbecome explorers and trace the
scriptures upstream, so to speak, attempting tounderstand them
throu gh their source. "It is not enough," concludes Schuon,
"toknow that Brahma is Reality, the w orld is appearance; it is
also necessary to knowthat 'the soul is not othe r than Brahma .'
This second tru th rem inds us that we areable to tend towards the
Supreme Principle not only in intellectual mode, butalso in
existential m od e" (99-1 00). At the esoteric or highest level
each of theworld's religious traditions seeks the "incarnation."
Each seeks the timely em-bod iment of the unqualified or divine. It
is a nontransitive movem ent; it is, asSchuon says, "to rebecome
what one is"(49).
Bruce K. Han sonFullerton College
