FOREWORD

Indisputably, Frithjof Schuon ranks among the foremost representatives of the perennialist current. He is certainly the major spokesman for this school in the United States, whereas his main predecessor, who heralded the movement and brought it to a head, is René Guénon (1886-1951), the best known perennialist writer in Europe, especially in France. Common to the proponents of the perennialist point of view, also sometimes called the “traditionalist school”, is a belief in the existence of a “primordial tradition”, which runs throughout the apparent diversity of religions, and in a “transcendent unity of religions”, which is understood to overarch the various spiritual traditions of the world. Derived from the Latin phrase philosophia perennis, or “perennial philosophy”, perennialism may be traced back to the Renaissance, but it was not until the nineteenth century, and mostly and mainly in the twentieth, that it developed to the point of becoming a widespread approach to the history and essence of “religion(s)”. Over the last several decades it has been the object of debate among various religiously oriented people, as well as among philosophers and historians of religions, both secular and non-secular. In the late 1980s, I had the privilege of participating in a series of such debates with James S. Cutsinger and other scholars, including Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Huston Smith. These discussions, which were held within the framework of the American Academy of Religion, gave me the occasion to familiarize myself with the works of these writers and to develop a long-standing friendship with Professor Cutsinger. In asking me to write a Foreword for the present anthology, he honors me all the more since he knows that, as a historian with a secular approach to the study of religions, I am not myself a proponent of perennialism. I have accepted his invitation as a token of his intellectual honesty, and I see in it an opportunity to state the reasons why I welcome this publication. This is not the first anthology of Schuon’s work—Professor Nasr’s collection of The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon is a must