I
“The saving manifestation of the Absolute is either Truth or Presence, but it is not one or the other in an exclusive fashion, for as Truth It comprises Presence, and as Presence It comprises Truth.”[1]
As long-time readers of my writings will know, Frithjof Schuon has had a profound influence on my philosophy and faith. I am indebted in a way I will never be able to repay. While David Bentley Hart made me into a general Christian Platonist, Schuon introduced me to a more detailed Neoplatonist way of viewing reality, a way in which my faith could be bolstered by my interest in so-called “intellectual” things, things that in my context, are often seen as at odds with faith and spirituality. Till today I am very uncomfortable with any maligning of Schuon. I did not encounter a conscious racist when I read his essays, even if in some areas his lack of knowledge might enforce certain tropes regarded as racist. This is not because I agreed with everything he wrote. I was already leaning left when I encountered him, and this did not stop, even if I did retain certain conservative opinions at the time. Schuon gave me a philosophical context through which I have appreciated a lot of DB Hart’s writings, a lot of which I would have never gotten otherwise. He opened up in me the realization that I am very attracted to the Virgin Mother, and that she calls me, to herself and (maybe for now) to her Son. His writings were the source of my eventual desire to learn more about Neoplatonism, and the reason I could even read it with any enthusiasm, considering how easy it was for me to translate what was being written into Schuon’s Islamic Neoplatonism/Vedanta hybrid. He and DB Hart are the biggest reasons I remain Christian, their disagreements and Hart’s dislike of him notwithstanding.
This is why it might be puzzling to some why I now hold to a philosophy that is possibly antithetical to everything metaphysical he believed about the world. That is, why I identify as a philosophical polytheist, an interpretation of Platonism you can find explained with precision by Edward Butler. I have cut contact with at least one acquaintance because of this, sadly. Perhaps that can be mended, perhaps not. But here I want to give my reasoning, and why I think, in “Spirit”, I am carrying forth what Schuon inspired in me. I will give my explanations of how, from Schuon’s own metaphysics, I can arrive at this position. Although this is not the way it organically happened, the spirit of Schuon’s synthesizing impetus is still with me, and I want to show how, by going beyond Schuon, I can continue with “the one thing needful”. From there, I can show how I view Schuon at this point in time. I hope to never be antagonistic with this part of my life. I hope to redeem it in whatever faults it had or still has. This blog and the one that preceded should be seen as growth. I will disagree with myself on occasion, and I will try to synthesize as much as I see possible and as ethical. I hope never to become stuck in a box such that I cannot open myself up to the infinite.
II
“…the Self has no complementary opposite; It is pure Subject, that is to say It is its own Object at once unique and infinite”[2]
Schuon lays out the details of his Islamic Neoplatonic Cosmology in his essay “The Five Divine Presences”. It isn’t original to him, but every philosopher puts their own spin on a system (emphasis mine):
“The various degrees of reality contained within the Divine Principle, enunciated now in Vedantin terms—though adding other equally possible designations—are in ascending order the following: first, the gross or material state, which can be designated also as corporeal or sensorial; secondly, the subtle or animic state; thirdly, formless or supra-formal manifestation, namely, the celestial or angelic world; fourthly, Being, which is the “qualified”, “self-determined”, and ontological Principle and which for this reason we may call, paradoxically but adequately, the “relative” or “extrinsic Absolute”; and fifthly, Non-Being or Beyond-Being, which is the “non-qualified” or “non-determined” Principle, and which thus represents the “intrinsic” or “Pure Absolute”.”[1]
To simplify, we have matter, Soul, Intellect (Nous), Being, and “the One”. I really could go on to focus on each of these and how I understand them now, but I want to focus on his first principle, “the One” and how, in his own logic, there is a latent bridge to Proclus, and his polytheism, which he (and other traditionalist perennialists) never really appreciated.
The thing about “Beyond Being” is that it is not “one thing”. The cause of things as “things”, that is, anything that is “intelligible”, and ontological in that sense, is “Being”. This is quite in keeping with Proclus and what drew me to Proclus in the first place. It was easy for me to read about Proclus in certain respects because of this Schuonian understanding of Islamic Neoplatonism. But the question to ask is “what is ‘Beyond Being’ a principle of?”
The answer is pretty simple. “Beyond Being”, “the One” is the cause of unity. Neoplatonists distinguish Unity from Being. Schuon is also very interesting here:
“…the fourth, “Unicity” (Wâhidîyah), namely Being, the world of ontological possibilities; and the fifth, “Unity” (Ahadîyah), Beyond-Being.”[1]
While “Being” is the cause of Unicity, “Beyond Being” is the principle of Unity. The difference is also pretty simple. Unicity pertains to “objects” that we can count. This is the unity of intelligible entities. We can refer to them. Unity, on the other hand, pertains to (to use a problematic word) subjects. There is a “type” of subject in Platonism which is more familiar: Intellects. But, the principle of the reversion that characterizes the “subjectivity” of Noetic Intellect is even prior to Being; as Labecki says, “A being belongs to being as a part while a one belongs to “The One” as itself”. This is so because “…conversion to the One in no way entails a simple union whereby all things eschatologically collapse back into the principle. Such a collapse is, in fact, structurally impossible. Since the One is “itself” – each thing in becoming “one” becomes itself.”[3]
This is quite clear in Schuon, who says that “Indeed, the 'servant' (abd) as such can never cease to be the servant; consequently he can never become the 'Lord' (Rabb). The 'servant-Lord' polarity is irreducible by its very nature”[2]. While, as “things”, as “beings”, the “Servant” reduces to “the Lord”, insofar as that is the ontological source of his “being”, the Unity of “Beyond Being” does not reduce all things in this fashion. Indeed, for Schuon, despite the language he uses at times for symbolic purposes, “Beyond Being” is not on any hierarchy of Being or beings. That is what it means to be Beyond Being. However, the reversion and subordination of the Servant to the Lord is important in establishing the servant itself. It is such that through the subordination of the Servant ontologically, the servant’s Self is established beyond all ontological hierarchies. This is his other name for “Beyond Being”, “the Self”.
“What” the Self is in Schuon is not always clear, but what is clear is what it is not. It is not like Being, a dissolution of all individuality, you don’t cease to exist here when you “realize” the Self; and yet, for Schuon there is just “one” Self. This ambiguity is one reason many don’t think he is making a lot of sense, and think he is at odds with even his own Islamic faith, not to talk of the Christian. I will not say this issue is resolved discursively in Schuon. I don’t think he resolves it like this. He would probably say the only way to resolve this is to realize the Self beyond all knowledge. Schuon believed that “understanding does not, and cannot, depend upon a literal grasp of conceptual terms. Meanings, of course, are immanent to a text, but they can be accessed, as the case may be, with minimal support from the text. The text is a symbol and not merely a discursive repository.”[4] But this is where I think the bridge to Proclus exists, and to Butler’s understanding of Proclus’ Polytheism. This precisely Schuonian understanding of the text should be applied to Schuon’s own texts, and is one of the reasons I do not think of myself as repudiating him.
Recall that for Schuon, the “Servant”, in subordinating himself to his Lord, establishes his own individuality as a Servant. But, there is nothing in “Being” (the highest principle in the role of “Lord”) that explains the unity as Self of the Servant. “Being” is itself unified by “Beyond Being”, and does not explain its own unity as Self. This polarity shows something about “Beyond Being” in Schuon. It shows that it establishes the individuality of the elements in this relation, and even all relations. Individuation in Schuon is mostly “negative” in the sense that he refers it to the division of matter and sometimes “evil”, but Schuon also believed that distinctions between religions and persons are of the divine will, and this testifies to some of the positive roles he gives individual people and traditions, refusing to collapse the Abrahamic religions into one another. But this is also an underdeveloped part of his philosophy, which is somewhat ironic given his particular brand of perennialism. We might ascribe this to the “universalizing nature” of the perennialist position, but I also think that perennialists are sufficiently different that we should consider most of the major thinkers on their own terms.
To return to our subject, we see that “Beyond Being” is the principle by which both the Servant and the Lord are themselves individuals, and have “realization”. It is not the case that the Lord is “more” of the Self than the Servant. The Self is not measurable, and is not beholden to the logic of Being. From Schuon’s explanation of realization, we see that the Self’s “causation” of individual existence is unmediated. It is the “cause” of the entire hierarchy’s existence at once, preserving every element as much as it is possible in its individuality.
But the implications of this are very startling if the traditionalist takes note of the fact that because the Self does not “cause” like Being, with an intelligible distance between cause and effect, there is no “distance” between the Self (Unity) as cause and “selves” (Unities) as effects. Even better, because the individuality of the individual is established by a principle “prior” to Being, its individuality is not reducible to Being, and so its individual self is “Beyond Being” in this manner. Lastly, and most importantly, because each individual as an individual is not reducible to Being and its distinctions, one cannot say they dissolve into a singular cause in the manner that the individual’s being – which we can see is posterior to its individuality – resolves into a singular cause like “Being”, we cannot say that these individuals resolve into a real singular “Unity”, as the highest exclusive transcendent and “distant” singularity is Unicity, which is Being. There are evidently individuals, but their individuality does not resolve into sameness, and the resulting “difference” of individuals as individuals – because of the very “nature” of Unity – cannot be the negative difference of Beings. In fact, because they are Unities, we have to say they unite each other without the sameness and difference of beings and the mediation of Being as a third term.
These implications show quite simple results: Through the reasoning of cause and effect applied to unity, we see that Cause (Unity) and Effects (Unities) are indistinguishable. They collapse into each other. The “Self” is in fact each Self, and each Self includes and is the unity of all other-selves without mediation and without sameness of identity. Unity as such is Unities as such. Because they are “Beyond Being”, they cannot reduce to the same self or be negatively distinguished. Because they are Unities, they must “contain” each other (and all the infinite Cosmoi) in the manner of Unity beyond being. In Proclus’ words, Unity and Unities are “Connascent”, thus all we ascribe to “Unity” we ascribe to each unity, including (for the more in-depth Neoplatonists reading) “imparticipability” and “ineffability”.
This shows, through Schuon, how we can derive the equivalent of Proclus’ Henads, which at least one traditionalist has unfortunately called “ad hoc”[5]. Here, we see how the Self can name the individuality of the elements of a system inexhaustible by even the highest ontological principle of said system. Here we see how to counter Guenon’s statement that “The conception of a 'plurality of infinites' is absurd because these 'infinities' would mutually limit each other, and so in reality none of them would be infinite”[6]. For if the first principle is above the sameness and difference of Being, then it is not beholden to that logic. Guenon, and Schuon in many places, still uncritically apply ontological logic to realities that are prior to the ontological. What is the experiential evidence for the kinds of entities we are describing here as Henads? The answer is quite simply, persons[7], especially divine persons, Gods. With this way of viewing “Self”, we can see Schuon’s words differently when he says “the Self has no complementary opposite; It is pure Subject, that is to say It is its own Object at once unique and infinite, and innumerable on the plane of a certain diversifying relativity.”[2] For each Self is unique. This is not a negative uniqueness of beings qua beings, divided from each other, but the positive uniqueness of each person as the unity of all that is[7], including other persons. Each individual is the “singularity” from which all Being bursts forth, and within this lies the seeds of a reorganization of Schuon’s understanding of “Being” along these more “Polytheist lines”, a subject for another day.
III
“There is indeed only “one thing needful”, and it is impossible to avoid it within the framework of the human vocation, given on the one hand that our intelligence is made for the Truth and on the other hand that we have a soul to save.”[8]
The results of my analysis are what generate my current disagreements with Schuon. The multitude of things ascribed to one God and One self, I would instead ascribe to many Gods (in the absolute sense) and many Selves. I would give Proclus as an example of how this works in the Greek tradition. Neoplatonism studies have made great strides in the years since the death of the major 20th century perennialists, and I think we should reflect on what our current understandings say in comparison to what the older perennialists say concerning Neoplatonism, and adjust accordingly.
For me, it has shown me that Schuon’s perspective is just that, a perspective, the perspective of a 20th century Sufi who thinks within a tradition that has excluded a vital dimension of the Neoplatonism it inherited[9]. As such, it reflects its localities. It doesn’t mean that I reject the system wholesale. In fact, one important implication of the subordination of ontology to henology/henadology is the possibility of multiple ontologies, which are normally incommensurable with each other, but have their roots in the all in each of the Gods that constitute them. A God not limited by Being can play different roles in different ontologies or religious universes. We can locate Schuon’s as a particular ontology or a particular system or collection of ontologies from the perspective of a universalist Muslim, while acknowledging other related and unrelated ontologies that are themselves valid. In Petter Hubner’s words:
“There is no perennial doctrine. The doctrines, the centers of values, the presupposed social structures, and the specific kind of “mental equipment” that elaborated them are happily destined to collapse. But the metastable normative structure that connects Gods and Devotees remains as a criterion that guides their own movement, there is no flow outside the formal conditions that allow for fluidity.
What would this structure be if not the way in which a God continually reveals his uniqueness as activity ( energeia )? It is through this means that the superiority of the henads in relation to the nous is re-signified.”[10]
Despite the language, this is still close to what Schuon considered the “one thing needful”, which is simply salvation, no matter where it comes from. Of course, Schuon had his preference and limits to his own meanings, but his own understanding of texts should implore a Schuonian to read his texts the same way, and not reject any revealed truth one sees. If in Schuon, “God” names “the First Principle”, which I now understand as each God, then I can indeed critically accept his words concerning many things, thus my current position:
There are many mountains – whose tops are Gods that fill the slopes with their presence – and there are many mountain ranges: the Pantheons, where every “peak”, from the little mound hill to the tallest mountain, is a God, supra-essential, infinite, unique, and sufficient to “salvation” and “realization”. These tops open up to the nothingness of unity that is not reducible to any mountain top in particular and is not a reduction to sameness, whether of person, or of essence. The unity of God in Schuon, for me, is transformed into the unity of the first Principle, which is each God, for each God is the Cosmos and "all things are full of Gods". Nothing essential is lost, but a lot more is gained. The "one thing needful" remains, even in disagreement with the one who coined the phrase.
Pax Christi.
[1] Schuon F Form and Substance in the Religions
[2] Schuon F 1985 Dimensions of Islam
[3] Labecki A 2006 The One and the Many: Part I: The One Dionysius 24 75–98
[4] Laude P 2020 Keys to the Beyond: Frithjof Schuon’s Cross-Traditional Language of Transcendence (SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions) (SUNY Press)
[5] Studies in Comparative Religion - Commemorative Annual Edition - 1968
[6] Guenon R 2004 The Multiple States of the Being (Sophia Perennis)
[7] Butler E P 2014 On the Gods and the Good 20
[8] Schuon F Letters, Statements, and Texts 1–53
[9] Riggs T 2017 On the Absence of the Henads in the Liber de Causis: Some Consequences for Procline Subjectivity Proclus his Leg. 289–310
[10] Hubner P 2021 Autoskhedon #004: “Contra-Apofaticidade” Noopositive