Book Review – A Sufi Master's Message: In Memoriam René Guénon

Northrup Frye (U of Toronto † 1991) “Trends in Modern Culture,” The Heritage of Western Culture (1952), 110: on “Contemporary [American] Deism” “Wisdom is the human capacity to apply knowledge, and since knowledge is progressive, wisdom must be progressive too, so that the wisdom of the past derives its validity from its relevance to the present.” George Grant (Dalhousie and McMaster † 1988) from Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969). Charles Taylor (McGill & Oxford, born 1931) from The Malaise of Modernity (1991). Kant († 1801), Hegel († 1831), Marx († 1883), Nietzsche († 1900), & Heidegger († 1976). James Doull (Dalhousie † 2001), “Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?” (1970): “In antiquity Prometheus could be subdued and taught to live under the power of Zeus. But now he has captured the citadel of Zeus and founded technology on the sovereign right of the individual. The principle of the modern age is the unity of theoretical and practical. A more dangerous principle there could not be.” Frye writes: “liberal education, the pursuit of truth for its own sake … is an act of faith, a kind of potential or tentative vision of an end in human life.” (114) B. WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS: AN ALTERNATIVE STORY In 1997, we first started lectures on Plotinus († 270) and Neoplatonism. The lectures included not only blacks like St Augustine († 430; his mother, St Monica, was a Berber), but Persians: Al-Farabi († 950) & Ibn Sina († 1037); Syrians: Iamblichus († 330) & Dionysius (6th century); Jews and Moslems writing in Arabic in Spain: Moses Maimonides († 1204), Ibn Tufayl (12th century), Ibn Rushd (12th century); the greatest Neoplatonic syncretizing philosopher, Proclus († 485), was from Asia Minor, a religious and racial melting pot. As the Odyssey begins, Poseidon is visiting the pious Aethiopians for relief from the ever quarrelling Greeks. In the 4th century, Iamblichus used the Homeric types to mutually characterize Hellenes and barbarians. The old ‘pristine’ Eastern cultures give weight and wisdom. The Hellenes are “experimental by nature and eagerly propelled in all directions, having no proper balance,” they endlessly alter “according to [their] inventiveness and illegality.” Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, VII.5. I Hellenism in Arabic and Persian, our Forgotten Heritage. II. Jewish and Christian Hellenisms in Greek and Their Successors III. Bringing in the Latins IV. The modern western civilization of secularised Protestantism George Grant from Technology and Empire: “The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent.” Dr Eli Diamond on “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age” (2007) in 2010: The ‘buffered self’, “is defined by its sense of self-completeness, invulnerability, being author of our own laws and master of the meaning of things. On the side of the self, through a gradual discipline, there emerges a rationality disengaged from powerful feeling and bodily processes, a narrowing of our sphere of intimacy and the emergence of an ideal of polite and civilized behaviour. On the side of the world, there is disenchantment of the world, a mechanized view of the universe, a view of time as homogeneous, and a leaving behind of a Platonic world of hierarchical complementarity. The result of this buffered self is the modern sense of power, an ability to self-govern, a feeling of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.” C. HOPE WITHIN AND WITHOUT I. Prince as the “Dionysian Christian”: an Itinerarium corporis in deum In “Prince as a Dionysian Christian” Dr Diamond says: “Dionysus is the God of the transgression of boundaries. And you see in Prince, embodied in his lyrics and his music and his person, the transgression of every single boundary imaginable. Between the sacred and the secular, and the body and the spirit, man, woman, racial divides and especially every single musical genre. … Prince, from the beginning, is intensely spiritual. But there’s a sense with him that you’re blocked from God if you’re living in the political, if you’re living in the social according to conventions, according to all these repressive binaries, and that it’s really by entering into and listening to our corporeal bodily nature that you actually have a feeling of self-transcendence through sexuality into the divine. II. The old west and Indigenous spiritualities Five aspects:1) Story and myth are essential and contain what reason cannot find or say on its own. 2) Philosophical or scientific reason is absolutely necessary and has its own laws, but it is not the highest form of knowing because inspired theologians tell the stories of spirit. Thus, reason and religion are different, but mutually necessary. 3) Effective healing and union with divinity comes through practices that cooperate with the natural rhythms, sacred places and times of the cosmic order, implanted by the Creator. Theory is not enough. The one who discerns and can invoke these realities is demanded, be she, or he, called priest, theurge or medicine man. 4) The cosmic mediating and animating spirits are manifold: saints, heroes, and daimonic beings. 5) Finally, the modern Disenchantment of the material cosmos is blindness. The cosmos is, as Thales, the first philosopher, said, “full of gods”. It is the living appearance of divinity, theophany, not dead matter. III. Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary Augustine, Confessions: “The three aspects I mean are being, knowing, willing. … Knowing and willing I am. I know that I am and I will. I will to be and to know. In these three … contemplate how inseparable in life they are: one life, one mind, and one essence, yet ultimately there is distinction, for they are inseparable, yet distinct. The fact is certain to anyone by introspection.” Jean Trouillard (Sulpicien † 1984) judged: “The danger is … to reduplicate the distinctions inherent in created spirit in order to found them in the Absolute. One of the weaknesses of the Augustinian tradition is … not to have understood that the requirements of criticism and the necessities of religious life converge in order to liberate Transcendence from all that would draw it back within what we can know. Without this transcendence we perpetually risk the quiproquo [exchange], as it results in the Hegelian dialectic where no one is able to say if this is of God, or this is of man, and which plays upon this ambiguity.” Stanislas Breton (Passionist † 2005), De Rome à Paris. Itinéraire philosophique (1992), 154: “What they inaugurated under the appearance of a return to the past was well and truly a new manner of seeing the world and of intervening in it, of practicing philosophy, of comprehending the givenness of religion, both in its Christian form and in its mystical excess; since, and I hasten to add, they reconnected the old West to its Far Eastern beyond.” IV. Eriugena’s Neoplatonism: A cultural miracle Philosophy turned from seeking rest and security above change and fate to the most radical creativity and humanism. What is before thought and being, the Nothing by Excess, Uncreated Creating, founds reality by creating itself in the human as its workshop. All things were created in the human. This optimistic unity, of physics, psychology, and theology, & of East and West, became the underlying assumption of every future western total system. A freedom within Neoplatonic western civilization opens it to the spirituality of the indigenous in this land where we can only live if both live in harmony. The Middle Ages seemed to be an end of civilization, in fact, there contemplation built a new one. Silence is the place where hope opens.

A truly innovative and original work, comprehensive, balanced, and relevant to any investigation into and understanding of modernity. The author does a remarkable job of drawing from Western and Islamicate philosophy in a comprehensive and rigorous manner that exposes the reader to an intense, descriptive analysis of the problems encountered in interpreting history. His methodology is cohesive, and the evidence adds to the high quality of his argument...[O]ne of the most scholastic and ambitious undertakings I have ever encountered, extremely well-written...I stand in admiration of this work. The students of history, philosophy, theology, and religious studies would have a deep interest in this book. Geran F. Dodson University of North Georgia This fascinating book adopts a radically interdisciplinary approach in order to sort out modernity by questioning that which we call philosophy...delighted by the wealth of insights and connections unraveled by the author...genius. Mohammad Azadpur Professor of Philosophy San Francisco State University Anthony Shaker has written an extrordinary rich book exploring modernity, tradition and civilization. Drawing on the learned tradition of Islamdom as well as the work of Qunavi, but also many others, Shaker identifies the pitfalls of thinking about tradition and modernity in isomorphic terms. There is more to Islam than merely text. He draws our attention to personhood, history and the project of civility and shows a hopeful path forward. This is compulsory reading for anyone who agonizes about the world we are living in and seeks inspiration from the past that can be usefully used in the present. Ebrahim Moosa Professor of Islamic Studies Keough School of Global Affairs University of Notre Dame Digging deep into the roots of our modern ideas of civilization..., Shaker says ‘what we call modernity cannot be fathomed without making [the] historical connection’ between our times and ‘the spirit of scientific investigation associated with a self-conscious Islamicate civilization...’ This is not a book for casual reading. [But] despite some of the material being beyond my own scholarship, it is not at all difficult to see that the approach of the book is unique, that the level of inquiry and argument is clear, concise, and well-supported by source material. It’s certainly clear enough for me that I was able to follow the argument...I recommend it highly...This truly is a monumental work, and so far as I know there is no comparable work. I really do think this is a work of genius. Paul Richard Harris, Editor Axis of Logic Abstract The modern concept and study of civilization have their roots, not in western Europe, but in the long tradition of scientific and philosophic inquiry that began in a self-conscious Islamicate civilization. They emerged—as Heidegger would say—within a “region of being” proper to systematic science. Western European thought has introduced new elements that have completely altered how collective and personal identities are conceived and experienced. In this age of “globalization,” expressions of identity (individual, social and cultural) survive precariously outside their former boundaries, and humanity faces numerous challenges—environmental degradation, policy inertia, interstate bellicosity, cultural rivalries. Yet, the world has been globalized for at least a millennium, a fact partially obscured by the threadbare but widespread belief that modernity is a product of something called the West. One is thus justified in asking, as many people do today, if humanity has not lost its initiative. This is not a historical, a sociological or an empirical question, but fundamentally a philosophical one. The modern concepts of identity and personhood have come under heavy scrutiny because there can be no human initiative without the human agency that flows from them. Given their present inscrutability, and at the same time profound importance to us, Dr. Shaker brings to bear a wealth of original sources from both German thought and Ḥikmah (Islamicate philosophy), the latter based on material previously unavailable to scholars. He shows why posing the age-old question of identity anew in the light of these two traditions, whose special place in history is assured, can help clear the confusion surrounding modernity and civilization—i.e., the way we, the acting subject, live and deliberate on the present and the past. Proximity to Scholasticism, and therefore Islamicate philosophy, lends German thought up to Heidegger a unique ability to dialogue with Ḥikmah, as scholars since Max Horten and Henry Corbin (the first French translator of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit) have been discovering. Two fecund elements common to Heidegger, Qūnawī and Mullā Ṣadrā are of special importance: logos (utterance and speech) as the structural embodiment of the primary meaning of a thing, and the unity-in-difference that Ṣadrā finally formulated as the substantial movement of existentiation. Heidegger, who occupies a good portion of this study, questioned modern ontology at a time of social collapse and deep spiritual crisis not unlike ours. Yet, that period also saw the greatest breakthroughs in modern physics and social science. With the waning of the old naïvetés of biologism, psychologism and social evolutionism, our very conception of time and space as measurable determinations was overturned. Dr. Shaker thus concludes with a few chapters on the theme of identity renewal in Western literature and Muslim “reformism.” The roots of the latter point to a civilizational point of convergence between the Eurocentric worldview, which provides the secular aesthetics roots of modernism, and an intellectual current originating in Ibn Taymiyyah’s epistemological reductionism. Both expressed the longing for pristine origin in a historical “golden age,” an obvious deformation of the commanding, creative oneness of being that has guided thought for millennia.

Review of Religion and Chinese Society

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2012

During the last few years two major volumes have been published, both greatly revised versions of earlier Gifford Lectures: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) and Raimon Panikkar's The Rhythm of Being (2010). The two volumes are similar in some respects and very dissimilar in others. Both thinkers complain about the glaring blemishes of the modern, especially the contemporary age; both deplore above all a certain deficit of religiosity. The two authors differ, however, both in the details of their diagnosis and in their proposed remedies. Taylor views the modern age-styled as "secular age"-as marked by a slide into secular agnosticism, into "exclusive humanism", and above all into an "immanent frame" excluding theistic "transcendence". Although sharing the concern about "loss of meaning", Panikkar does not find its source in the abandonment of (mono)theistic transcendence; on the contrary, both radical transcendence and agnostic immanence are responsible for the deficit of genuine faith. For him, recovery of faith requires an acknowledgment of our being in the world, as part of the "rhythm of being" happening in a holistic or "cosmotheandric" mode. In classical Indian terminology, while Taylor's emphasis on the transcendence-immanence tension reflects ultimately a dualistic perspective (dvaita), Panikkar's holistic notion of the rhythm of being captures the core of Advaita Vendanta. Keywords Crisis of modernity • Immanent frame • Exclusive humanism • Advaita Vedanta • Secularism • Cosmotheandric vision At least in the Western context, our age is commonly referred to as that of "modernity"-a term sometimes qualified as "late modernity" or "postmodernity." Taken by

2007

The Axial Age (800-200 BCE), first described by Karl Jaspers, was characterized (among other important changes) by accelerating technological innovation, political instability, intensified warfare (as an outcome of general intercultural interaction intensification), and the emergence of new spiritual conceptualizations in four largely separated civilizations: Greece, Israel, India and China. The result was a transformation in the nature of these civilizations, including the rise of the “national” state and the spiritual traditions that continue to dominate contemporary life throughout most of the globe – Greek philosophy, monotheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. The present authors examine the thesis that the world has been experiencing a second Axial Age (AA II) since the Renaissance in Western Europe and especially since the mid-18th century in Europe and North America to the present. The acceleration of technological innovation, as well as intensification of warfare upon the background of and direct interrelation with the rise of the modern civil society and crucial transformations in the sphere of spiritual over the last 250-500 years has been undeniable. Historically and culturally, the great difference between these two transformational ages is that AA II began locally in Western Europe, but has eventually become global. It can be argued that globalization is not a recent process but almost incipient for human history, and while both AAs were important steps on the way to the global world, the difference between them in terms of their results is that, contrary to those decisive of the AA II, the results achieved on this way in the AA I turned out reversible. The authors will examine these parallels and then speculate on the issues of an emerging spiritual/philosophical response and a post-national state.

The modern world understands itself as being something entirely new in the history of mankind. Modernity describes itself as the age in which mankind reaches adulthood and in which man becomes free and emancipates itself from external constraints and determination. The present-day world was born due duet o a new understanding of man, world, society, and due to the development of technology and afterward sciences. This development is presented as a continuous march toward inescapable progress, and as asteadly increase in rationality which will lead to the complete and total emancipation of man. But modernity is not the product of only reason and technical and supposed moral progress. The tools to understand the real forces behind this development that created modern world can be find in the works of Pierre-Andre Taguieff and in the sociology of Jacques Ellul. The first offers a deep analysis of a concept that undergirds modernity, the concept of emanicpations, and the other author describes the development of modernity as amounting to the total suversion of reality through the technological system.The forces fueling this state of affairs are greed and lust for power. The wish of total emancipation can be seen as another expression of what psychoanalysis called the infantile wish to omnipotence.