Correspondence Cairo-Amiens (7): unpublished letters of René Guénon

By René Guénon · May 31, 2021 · 8 min read

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Unpublished letters of René Guénon

Throughout his life, René Guénon kept up a very abundant correspondence, chiefly with French-speaking people who had taken an interest in his work. The passages we publish here are extracted from a correspondence comprising 73 letters written between 1932 and 1950. The recipient of these letters was a Frenchman living in Amiens, an assiduous reader of Guénon’s works, who played an important part in the emergence of a Sufi way on Western soil. Through the answers and clarifications Guénon offers his correspondent, one can glean elements of information on doctrinal points, but also certain practical aspects and counsels for the use of those drawn to an attachment to a Sufi way while living in a non-Muslim country such as France.

I rather thought that H. had not renounced his project (concerning masonry), but I understand that this way of envisaging its realisation for a distant and indeterminate time cannot be very encouraging to others. It is all very well not to be in a hurry, and one may even say that he is right ‘in principle’; but what I do not quite understand is that, while continuing to keep this in view if he deems that in the end it must not be labour lost, he envisages nothing else in the meantime, if only for himself personally, since masonic initiation has this advantage of being in sum incompatible with no other… I find that D. is not wrong in the conclusions he draws from all this, which moreover conform well to what I had already told you. One must therefore hope that he will succeed in putting himself in the requisite dispositions for an attachment to islam, for that would assuredly be the best solution; but it was good all the same to give him the occasion to realise for himself the possibilities he might find elsewhere…

The news you give me of A. is really not good; if it is fortunate in one sense that he found a position, it is all the same most regrettable that it should be such as not even to leave him the possibility of accomplishing the rites; like you, I hope that this hindrance will not last, but decidedly life in a Western environment is full of difficulties of every kind!

[…]

The sentence on ‘the hard-to-obtain human condition’ is met with quite often, and is in sum very easily explained if one considers its ‘central’ position in our state: the being who passes into another state, even a superior one, has little chance of finding itself in the corresponding position, and much more chance of having a condition analogous to that of animals or plants, whence an evident disadvantage for obtaining deliverance from such a state. Without this, besides, what interest would there be in maintaining the being as far as possible in the posthumous prolongations of the human state ‘usque ad consummationem saeculi’?…

Letter to L. C., Cairo, 10 November 1938

I too have just had a strong bout of influenza accompanied by a violent sore throat, and although it has passed now, a certain fatigue remains with me; this has not helped advance my work these days!

Apart from the physical causes that may have played a role, the detachment you speak of does not seem a bad thing in itself, for there is surely always advantage in ‘simplifying’ in many respects; as for the tendency to increase the share of the ‘operative’ (in the occupation of your time), I can only wholly approve it.

It is exact that books can serve as the support of certain influences, especially, it seems, old books that previously belonged to other persons who may have left something of themselves in them…

I accept (your proposal to send me) the book on ’Abd al-Karim al-Jili, which I do not know, and of which I shall gladly speak in the ‘E.T.’.

[…]

On the recitation of the divine names (a given number of times), these apparently complicated numbers (I have seen other examples) generally have some symbolic significance, though it is not always easy to determine exactly; this is above all the case when they are composed of simple factors like the one you cite (185856 = 29 × 3 × 112). Generally speaking, it is only in special cases that a name must be repeated a great many times; otherwise, one most often advises not going beyond 1,000 times.

[…]

As for D., I gather that for the moment he wants above all to see whether he will be able to practise the rites in a sustained manner, for otherwise I do not see what result he could expect of it in these ‘provisional’ conditions. Regarding the shedding of certain habits (such as the drinking of alcohol), many think it is better to proceed only gradually; but in such a case, if any untoward reaction should occur, it would be preferable to interrupt the rites until further notice…

Letter to L. C., Cairo, 30 April 1939

Concerning the possible placing of my books on the Index, the thing cannot affect me in any way personally; I do not think, besides, that it is likely to diminish much the number of readers of my books (the decisions of the Index do not make much impression today, even in ecclesiastical circles), nor on the contrary to increase it appreciably, as sometimes happens for works of another kind (novels for example, or historical works). At bottom it would be regrettable only for the Church itself, in the sense that it would prove that the incomprehension of its present representatives is truly incurable; there have surely already been a great many abuses of ‘jurisdiction’, but none so evident as that one would be; note besides that I intentionally took care to specify this question of ‘jurisdiction’ at the end of ch. XLV of the Aperçus. It is well understood that it is certainly not I who, to avoid a business of this kind, will ever make the slightest concession to the detriment of doctrinal truth; it is true that very often it is enough to be clever enough to find appropriate formulas, for in sum all this is hardly more than subtleties of language: but for my part I have little taste for these subtleties.

[…]

There are questions, mathematical and philosophical for example, with which I really have not the time to occupy myself, since I have not even enough of it to reach what I consider far more important, I mean what concerns questions of the properly esoteric and initiatic order, to which I shall no doubt be obliged to limit myself ever more strictly…

[…]

As for Meister Eckhart’s proposition (‘There is in the soul something that is uncreated and uncreatable; if the whole soul were such, it would be uncreated and uncreatable: and this is the intelligence’), the rapprochement you make with the notion of the ‘uncreated Sufi’ is rather justified indeed; besides, what this proposition expresses is certainly very true, and, from our point of view, there is only the use of the word ‘soul’ that could raise an objection, the word ‘spirit’ being preferable in the circumstance. I believe Eckhart never had any other fault than being sometimes imprudent in his expressions; surely that man cared little for the subtleties dear to ordinary theologians and philosophers!

[…]

You ask whether it would be erroneous, speaking of man, to say ‘his spirit’; it would indeed, because the use of the possessive in such a case would imply a sort of reversal of the relations between the spirit, insofar as it is the very essence of the being, and the individuality, which is only a contingent manifestation of it. It would be in sum the same error as consists in speaking of the ‘human spirit’, as if the spirit could be ‘specified’, which is still more evidently false than for the intellect (I say more evidently, for of course it is no less false for the latter than for the former: Buddhi, forming the link between all the manifested states, cannot be said to belong to any of them).

Letter to L. C., Cairo, 20 May 1947

In islam, the qibla was first towards Jerusalem before being towards Mecca (the 2 orientations are still indicated in the first mosque, which still exists in Medina); some say that the first qibla will be restored by Christ himself when, at his new coming, he presides over the prayer.

[…]

Feminine initiation is not possible in certain initiatic forms, but not in all indiscriminately.

Letter to L. C., Cairo, 28 December 1948

Nobody has and nobody will ever have any document from me authorising him in any way to consider himself my successor, which would besides seem to me altogether devoid of sense. If I once said that the tariqa was ‘the only outcome of my work’ (which was true, incidentally, at that time), it must be well understood that what was thereby meant was the tariqa itself, which has absolutely nothing to do with ‘the work of S. A.’; I still thought that it had to be a ‘normal’ tariqa, in which he should have had nothing else to do than fulfil the function of ‘transmitter’ and conform strictly to the traditional teaching, without introducing any innovation of a ‘personal’ character.

Letter to L. C., Cairo, 17 October 1950.

(c) image: Sara Choudhrey.

Work by the artist Sara Choudhrey