Returning to the Essential: Selected Writings of Jean Bies [Paperback]

Jean Bies (Author), Deborah Weiss-Dutilh (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2004

Bies introduces readers to metaphysical, esoteric, and spiritual teachings from diverse scared sources. His words are rooted in the inechaustible ground of the Perennial Philosophy, the language of the Essential to which this book invites us to return.

Editorial Reviews

Review

I have the utmost esteem for Jean Biès who, being among the Christians 'awakened' by René Guénon, has contributed to -- Jean Hani

Jean Biès brings a new genre to Traditionalist literature characterized by a freshness, a humanity, and a lyricism all of -- Wolfgang Smith

Jean Biès: pilgrim, poet, perennialist philosopher, scholar, teacher, and author of an elegant body of work hitherto little-known in the -- Harry Oldmeadow

This is a unique anthology collecting biographical memories, doctrinal insights and unpublished fragments. Jean Biès thus reveals a little known -- Patricia Reynaud

World Wisdom publishers continues to offer works of uncommon merit in the realm of traditional thought. Returning to the Essential, -- Alvin Moore, Jr.

From the Publisher

In the last few decades, the family of thought that has come to be known in the English-speaking world as the "perennialist school" has generally been designated in the French-speaking world by the two adjectives traditionnel and traditionaliste. These latter two terms have had the important merit of underlining a deeper and richer understanding of the devaluated and flattened word "tradition," highlighting both its sacred and integral implications by contrast with the all too common view that equates tradition with stifling custom and lack of imagination. One of the signal contributions of this school has been to introduce contemporary readers to a definition of Tradition that is indissociable from its divine and supernatural origin, and which emphasizes the imperative need of the sacred means that it provides in view of returning to the Essential. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that these two terms—especially traditionaliste—can be somewhat ambiguous or even misleading since they also routinely refer, at least in France, to that portion of the Catholic Church that has radically rejected the dogmatic and liturgical innovations of the Council of Vatican II. Be that as it may, while the perennialist school has often been characterized in the Anglophone world as stemming from a triad of philosophical fathers comprised of René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, the école traditionaliste has tended to be more emphatically and exclusively considered, in the Francophone world, as springing forth from René Guénon’s seminal works alone. This holds true for a variety of reasons, all more or less related to Guénon’s privilege of anteriority, and to the specifically French modality of the mindset through which he distilled universal principles. As has sometimes been implied, Guénon’s work has the somewhat paradoxical characteristic of expressing the substance of Shankaracharya’s teachings in the language of René Descartes, a language that has been associated—for better or worse—with a sense of rational clarity which is particularly fit for metaphysical and philosophical exposition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: World Wisdom (August 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0941532631
• ISBN-13: 978-0941532631
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,499,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The return to the essential consists essentially to a return to Unity, May 17, 2006

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This review is from: Returning to the Essential: Selected Writings of Jean Bies (Paperback)

In this book which includes essays written over almost half a century, Deborah Weiss-Duthilh introduces the reader to a French traditionalist author so far largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Bis was born in Bordeaux in 1933, in the Southwestern part of France, a region still permeated with the memory of the Occitania civilization and of Catharism. The repository of a genuine esoteric Christian tradition, it had been eradicated by the armies of the King of France, not long before the destruction of the Templars, which, according to Ren Gunon, marked a decisive step in the genesis of the modern world. Bis' writings are fraught with the sweet and our flavor of this land. This is why his book deserves a most original place within the perennialist school, not to mention its formal beauty. To our knowledge, only in Schuon's works does the reader witness a comparable poetic quality.
While most perennialist thinkers have chosen the Islamic way after Gunon and Michel Valsan, Bis while Christian, has insisted on the complementary nature of Christianity and Hinduism within the  One and Only Tradition.  The spiritual and intellectual road which Bis invites us to travel is symbolically located between the Mount Athos and Shri Ramana Maharshi Ashram. Bis' first book was devoted to Mount Athos, a place Gunon considered a truly initiatory Christian center. Eastern Christianity plays a considerable part in Bis' writings: as a true haven of a Gospel mistreated or misread over and over again since the beginning of the Modern world, it remains an inner path centering on the recitation of the divine Names, a path particularly adapted to men at the end of the Kali-Yuga and a merciful invitation for the Western Church. "During this rediscovery of the Prayer of the Heart, it is superfluous to say how useful and opportune it would be for disoriented Western Christians to renew ties with the Orthodox Church, guardian of this prayer (...). The entirely positive sign of the times needs to be seen in the philokalic advent, in this revelation of the last school of noticeable and accessible metaphysical realization in Christiandom." (233)
What Bis has remembered from the Orthodox Church is precisely the image of a Christ transfixed and conqueror over death rather than the agonizing Christ of our Latin churches. For him, Orthodox Christianity, born at the crossroad between Christ revelation and Greek Intellectuality, expresses most adequately the paradox and the Mysteries of the God-Man: "The Christian East has managed to maintain the plan of syntheses, of systemic vision, under the light of intellective intuition, of that `supramental' (hypernoetos) that Gregory Palamas spoke of before Aurobindo; faithful to the Divine himself, who includes in the himself the manifested such as the unmanifested." (114)
He adds: "Whoever has understood the fundamental role of paradox in Christianity has understood Christianity. The paradox is the source, the essence and the meaning. This is why it is not surprising to find it in this country of the paradoxical, Orthodoxy. A paradox, this mingling of an outer appearance of robustness among numerous monks and their inner state of tenderness; a paradox, this marriage of the immanent and the transcendent through a savage and inhospitable nature and these oases of culture that monasteries are; a paradox of thunder, sign of elementary violence, in a smooth blue sky, sojourn of serenity". (121)

The second major inspirational source of Bis is of course India, with her light, both informal and primordial. The refuge of Adam after the Fall according to the Islamic tradition and the depository of the most direct heritage of the Great Primordial Tradition, identified by Gunon as the Sanathana Dharma, India is personified today by Ramakrisna, the Mother's devotee or by Ramana Maharshi. It is to India that Bis refers to for some of his most abstruse doctrinal statements or simply to draw the ideal portrait of the spiritual master.
"The spiritual master is equally indifferent to poverty and the luxury in which he is forced to live, to the affluence and rarity of disciples. His simplicity makes him flee all ostentation, all effects, never imposing his opinion. His contagious inner force inspires the wish to savor God, inaugurates the `itching wings'that Plato spoke of, is the stimulator of triggering energy, and maintains fervors. His joy, entirely within, radiates through his laugh, like that of Swami Ramdas, gifted with this virtue of youthfulness that made him resemble the `small child' of the Gospels, able to answer the most difficult metaphysical questions like child's play."(147)
Of crucial importance to Jean Bis is his meeting with Swami Siddheswaranda and his reading of Ramakrisna's Gospel. In Returning to the Essential, Bis writes at length about his discovery of India and about the trip he took there in 1973. In his writings he surprisingly adopts a quite positive attitude about Aurobindo whereas Gunon and F. Schuon had been quite reserved, especially at the end. Bis, different from other perennialist thinkers of the first generation, shows a remarkable benevolence and a total absence of dogmatism. From Aurobindo's he will only consider traits of orthodoxy as he particularly insists on the importance of his exegesis of the Vedas:
"Likewise, one sees the Brahman Sutra in Hinduism give rise to interpretations of a symbolic nature by the successors of Shankaracharya, as the Dialogues of Plato had done with the Neoplatonists. Along the same line of ideas, one would cite the different interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita, which followed one another from Shankara to Aurobindo, according to new intellectual standards and without altering orthodoxy." (212)

These geographical travels between Greece and India are but the symbol of another one, inner and vertical. Bis is not afraid to make reference to his own spiritual journey. It is a rather unusual thing for a perennialist that is worth noticing. Another element is the fact that a few women have played in his life the part of true emissaries of wisdom. His work is less centered on a single tradition than in the case of Michel Valsan or Jean Borella and less impersonal than that of Gunon's. He mingles traditional references and shares personal accounts without ever resorting to complacency or narcissism. The biographical and even impressionistic touches of his never confuse the reader nor make him/her lose track of the transcendence of the doctrine exposed, no more than the multiplicity of theophanies should make one forget the essential unity of the transpersonal Absolute.
On the question of Christian esotericism, Bis opposes to the exotic ecumenism of "branches and roots" the "ecumenism of flowers" as the coming together of the various traditional forms from a common soil: the Philosophia Perennis, a true universal language of the man of the last days whose dis-occultation is a compensation for cyclical gravity.
"Universal Esotericism is the systemic vision of the Spiritual, linking together these religions (whose main role is to link together) and tracing between their different doctrinal points, over the artificial demarcations, henceforth abolished, an entire network of lines similar to those linking together the stars. For universal Esotericism, the veritable reality is a whole made up of several revelations communicating with each other at the keenest level, that of the `Transcendent Intellect'."
Bis thus reminds us: "Christ himself proclaims `in my Father's house there are many mansions' and they `shall come from the east, the west, the north, and shall sit down in the Kingdom of God'"(242). A Christian, Bis is hoping for the regeneration of a Christianity that needs to be more aware of its Hebrew heritage and receptive to the wisdom of the East. What he foresees may be a "Catholic" Christianity in the deepest sense, that is to say aware of the other manifestations of the universal Logos and of its common origin with the other traditions: the Great Primordial Tradition symbolized by Elias and Melchizedek in the Old Testament. In that perspective, Christ, as He is understood by Christian esotericism, would be a manifestation of the Logos coming directly from the temple of this Primordial Tradition.
"In fact, Christianity in crisis undoubtedly has a duty to work essentially in a double movement. The first consists of going back to its deepest roots contained in the Hebrew tradition.... Remember that this tradition is the esoteric explanation of this `transmission,' the whole of which constitutes the Torah, and for which Christ declares he never came to abolish; it is thus an integral part of the Christian heritage. The second movement consists of opening Christianity to the whole of the Eastern traditions, which, far from conflicting with it, confirm its authenticity, and in certain areas, complete it, stimulate it, make it develop. This double movement of deepening and widening is not at all contradictory when taken from the point of view of esotericism." (247-248)

Bis most valuable contribution is that his book enables the harmonics of unity penetrate the soul of the reader and make him/her feel in a vibrant manner some ideas whose beauty and existential proximity were hidden by the austerity of Gunon's scholasticism. To eternal truths, he conveys an almost familiar aspect without ever betraying their transcendence: of non-human origin, they nonetheless touch the heart of men and speak to him of himself and of his supra-sensible destiny. Reading this book, one senses the friendly and compassionate presence of a profoundly good man, a lover of divine Sophia. Never does one feel the imposition of a despotic "I" that St Paul identified as the very voice of the devil, but the benevolence of a friend to the truth whose... Read more ›