Posted on 01/05/2014 7:19:21 AM PST by markomalley
Isn’t this Guenon guy one of the inspirations of the anti-Semitic “New Right” in Europe? Didn’t he become a moslem of some kind?
Guenon freely admits he is of the perennial philosophy tradition. However, the purpose of his book, “The Spiritist Fallacy” is not to draw us into his tradition but to refute many central Spiritist (from spirits) ideas flooding the West such as reincarnation, spiritual evolutionism, communication with the dead, depictions of the afterlife, the plethora of psycho-technologies being advanced by New Age gurus and subtle but far more dangerous ideas.
In other words, Guenon is warning us away from what Western modernists such as William James and a bevy of Western theologians partook of and what you were caught up in.
Amazon’s review of The Spiritist Fallacy:
“The doctrinal expositions that accompany his astonishing account offer extraordinarily prescient insight into many deviations and ‘psychological’ afflictions of the modern mind, and will be as valuable to psychological practitioners and spiritual counselors as to historians of esoteric history. It also offers a profound corrective to the many brands of New Age ‘therapy’ that all too unwittingly invoke many of the same elements whose nefarious origins Guénon so clearly described many years ago.”
Though his book is not for everyone and must be read with discretion and discernment Guenon was trying to help us, not harm us.
You are asking the wrong person, ZC. I only heard of this guy a few days ago. And my only info about him thus far is from Wikipedia.
Wiki does report that Guénon (d. 1951) had an a/k/a: Abd al-Wahid Yahya. And famously, that the last word he uttered from this side of the Great Divide was: Allah!
So go figure.
What I find interesting is that there is another "Yahya" running around right now, in Turkey. Maybe pure coincidence.
Anyhoot, from what I can tell, he is a self-confessed great man of letters, a deep Muslim scholar, scientist and philosopher who goes by the name of Harun Yahya. [For details see: "Did Life on Earth Begin Suddenly and in Complex Forms?" in Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution, J. Seckbach & R. Gorden, eds., Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2009.]
This particular Yahya has been running around with a Theory of Creation that is deeply disturbing to the secularizing tendencies of the Turkish university of recent times. Turkish society in general had been "secularizing," ever since Attaturk. I gather he wanted to see Turkey reincorporated into the orbit of Western civilization. Thus it wouldn't surprise that "modern biology" in Turkey subsequent to this transformative figure has been gradually embraced pretty much in the Western forms of Newtonian and Darwinian theory.
Haroun Yahya evidently disputes all such notions. He has a Creation Theory: It is to be found in the Cambrian Explosion (c. 500 million years B.C.)!
Suffice it to say Turkish Darwinists are in a tither. Where Attaturk "secularized" an Islamic society, Ergodan seems hell-bent on restoring Turkish society to its ancient, tribal roots in Islam....
But I surely digress. Thanks for your patience, dear Zionist Conspirator! And so much for writing!
Like Guenon, Pember focuses on the influx into Christendom of Spiritism, Theosophy and Buddhism. Unlike Guenon though, Pember actually witnessed the influx. On page 243 he said,
"(as) we glance at the world of to-day, we see the men of this nineteenth century returning to the wisdom of long past ages, and modern thought sustaining its flight upon the wings of ancient lore. Nay, almost every characteristic of antiquity seems to be reappearing. Open intercourse with demons is being renewed on a vast scale in the very heart of Christendom (along with)magical practices...ancient Mysteries...mesmeric healings...astrology (and) countless other practices of primal and mediaeval times are once more becoming common. And, impossible as it would have seemed a few years ago, all these 'superstitions' are floating back to us upon the tide of 'modern thought.' They come no longer veiled in mystery...but, in accordance with the spirit of the age, present themselves as the fruit of science (p. 243)..as the advances of Modern Science, and especially of evolutionary philosophy" (p. 245).
In his book, Pember extensively examines the role of demonic forces from the pre-flood world up through his own time. He provides authenticated instances of the reality and nearness of the spirit world, demonic teachings regarding God (usually presented as the sum total of the universe; cosmic consciousness),the structure of the universe (matter and psychic energy), the acquisition of powers, and so on.
Pember was classically educated, thus he knew that many of the vaunted results of modern (natural)science and evolutionary philosophy were included in the instruction given to the,
"initiates of the Hermetic, Orphic, Eleusinian, and Cabalistic mysteries, and were familiar to Chaldean Magi, Egyptian Priests, Hindu Occultists, Essenes, Therapeutae, Gnostics, and Theurgic Neo-Platonists." (p. 244)
Like Guenon, Pember was greatly concerned by widespread contact with spirits (spiritism):
"Direct communications with demons, whether by writing, clairvoyance, clairaudience, or in other ways, is now becoming universally prevalent." (p. 163)
With respect to James, it was his lengthy involvement with spiritist practices that concerned Guenon and which eventuated in James seeing God as a finite,
"cosmic consciousness, a pooling or weaving together of all individual consciousness." (Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey, p. 425)
BTW, although I am anti-islam, I am not among those conservatives who advocate "enlightenment" philosophy so long as it is afflicting someone else.
With this in mind and with respect to Harun Yahya, my determination based on reading much of his scholarly work is that he is of the 3rd group.
Though I disagree with his creation theory, this does not prevent me from discerning his great concern for the welfare of his people.
Though Guenon's perennial philosophy and eventual embrace of Allah are rather repugnant to me, this does not prevent me from seeing Guenon's great concern for the welfare of Westerners.
His book,"The Spiritst Fallacy" is his attempt at warning Westerners of the infiltration into their culture--and their consciousness---of demonic ways of thinking induced by ideas from spirits.
With respect to Guenon's observations regarding William James, who Guenon sees as but one member of the progressive or modernist movement, his conclusions have their counterpart in Scripture in 1 John 5:19... "the whole world lieth in the wicked one..."
If we are offended by Guenon's observations then surely 1 John 5:19 will be just as offensive. So will Dostoevsky's book "Demons. (1872)"
The theme of Demons is the arrival in Russia of supposedly rational, scientific ideas from Western Europe that turn out to be demons. The demons cannot be seen since they are ideas that 'eat' their thinkers
The common nature of the "ideas" is demonic because all are types of naturalism which on one hand deny the existence of the supernatural dimension hence the living, personal God, heaven, hell, angels and demons, while on the other positing either eternally existing or spontaneously generated matter. So rather than "did God really say?" we now have "does He really even exist?"
Karl Marx's dialectical materialism, Darwin's materialist theory, and James radical empiricism for example, reduce everything to matter. All are types of naturalism.
Here is what Hans Jonas has to say about 'matter' in "The Gnostic Religion," his full-scale study of the heretical world of Gnosticism. From the time of the ancients the origin of all things has been from watery chaos:
"Sea or waters is a standing gnostic symbol for the world of matter or of darkness into which the divine has sunk. Thus the Nassenes interpreted Ps. 29: 3 and 10, about God's inhabiting yje abyss and His voice ringing out over the waters as follows: 'The many waters is the multifarious world of mortal generation into which the god Man has sunk and out of whose depth he cries up to the supreme God, the Primal Man, his unfallen original.." (p. 117)
With respect to negation of the supernatural personal God, James adheres to radical empiricism...a type of Gnostic naturalism that denies the existence of God. But he crosses over into Gnostic idealism with his hope that a source for being will eventually emerge (liberate itself from) out of matter.
The same pattern can be seen in Teilhard's Gnostic system. He begins with Darwin's methodological materialism (total negation of supernatural God and reduction of everything to matter) after which he posits the emergence of a nature god from matter.
The Mormon god is another example of a nature deity that emerged and/or created itself from pre-existing matter.
Hans Jonas compares ancient Christian-era Gnosticism to its' 'modern scientific' counterpart. With the former,
"Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, anti-divine, and therefore anti-human nature..."
Yet the hostile, demonic world of physical matter is still anthropomorphic, familiar even in its foreignness, and the contrast provides some direction, negative direction to be sure, but one,
"that has behind it the sanction of the negative transcendence to which the...world is the qualitative counterpart." (pp. 338-339)
Modern Gnostic man however, is thrown into a completely indifferent world of matter. This case represents,
"the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit."
Unlike the former case, radical empiricism, methodological naturalism et al strip matter of even the least bit of anthropomorphism. Not even this antagonistic quality is granted,
"to the indifferent nature of modern science, and from that nature no direction at all can be elicited." (ibid)
To me, William James is a representative figure of the human catastrophe that began during the Renaissance, redoubled its breadth and scope during the Enlightenment, found its voice in Nietzsche's declaration of God's death, eventuated in an explosive orgy of genocide and mayhem during the 20th century, and continues to unfold, entrap and doom the unwitting in our own time.
My compassion for James does not prevent me from seeing that at the bottom of the way of thinking he espoused is the "absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit." Nor will it prevent me from trying to warn people away from the abyss though I know that no human can save another from himself.
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