Customer Reviews

The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Quest Book)

5 star:		(8)
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This book clearly demonstrates the unity of all religions, although being different in their forms, from a metaphysical point of view.As such it helps to understand all religions, and their extrinsic orthodoxy, putting an end to the quarrels among some exponents of these religions, who feel to prove the validity of their religion, they must disprove the other religions.

This book is just fundamental. It is the kind of work which lasts forever, because what it teaches us is something which does not change with time. The reader who usually reads modern philosophy or scholarly works on religions will enter a different world when he takes the decisive step of reading Schuon.

Frithjof Schuon is an author whose knowledge comes from deepest intellectual and spiritual realization, thus he writes with authority on the subject in a style unmatched in recent times. A summit of spiritual and intellectual realization who should be read by anybody who searches for truth. His beautiful style seizes the reader from the beginning with the feeling that Schuon is no ordinary thinker and this feeling becomes deeper as one continues reading. His other works are recommended as well.

In my opinion, this is one of the most important books published in the 20th century, and there has never been a time when reading it is a must for every intelligent person out there than our present time .

I can not recommend this book more , nor could I agree more with what T.S. Eliot wrote about it: "I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion"

Huston Smith, probably the most eminent scholar of comparative religion studies in the US today and who wrote the introduction to this book, described Frithjof Schuon as: "The man is a living wonder; intellectually à propos religion, equally in depth and breadth, the paragon of our time. I know of no living thinker who begins to rival him..."

If you only read one book this year, this should be it

To find out more about Frithjof Schuon, visit URL: ...

Schuon has an ability to write from that rare place--in comparison to which most people writing on religious diversity simply do not have the requisite tools--to give the sacred its due. Schuon writes about religion as such in its profound depth and breadth, and this leaves the reader feeling as though they have made a journey to a place from where they can breathe something of the expansive mountain air which we all have a yearning for. Essential reading!

Simply put, this is the best book on religion I have ever read. Granted, I am not extremely well read in that area but this was nevertheless a paradigm shifting read for me. In a nutshell, it states that all the revealed religions(Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism) are all valid paths to God which were sent to different peoples at different times and for different reasons. According to Schuon's philosophy, God intentionally created the different religions to fit the spiritual temperaments of the different civilizations throughout the world. That being said, this is not a touchy-feely, we are all the same type of book either. According to Schuon, the separation of religious civilizations is God inspired and necessary to maintain purity and effectiveness. This separation being only on the exoteric level though whereas all the religions converge on the esoteric level into an overwhelming unity. Of course it is a bit more complicated than that but that is a concise summary. And frankly, this is probably not a new "theory" (this was published in the 50s) but I have never seen the subject matter articulated in such a way. Schuon was a giant in metaphysical thought.

The book is quite difficult as Schuon's language is extremely dense and his knowledge level is incredibly high. I had trouble following at times but it was so engaging and insightful that I couldn't put it down. Schuon was a member of the so-called Perennialist School and his knowledge of all the religions in question is remarkable. Both "fundamentalists" and "progressives" will probably find enough to disagree with (not to mention secularists) but if you are a spiritual person with an open mind, this will no doubt be a rewarding experience.

This is the rare kind of book that provides a genuinely new way of conceiving the world. As I read it, my categories were continually being challenged as well as the adequacy of my spiritual experience and knowledge.

Schuon's thesis is that while the great religions of the world appear to be contradictory on the surface level (the 'exoteric'), when considered according to the inner reality of the spiritual strivings they embody (the 'esoteric' dimension) they present a unity. This kind of reasoning is often put forward on a superficial level to say that 'all religions lead to God', but he has a far more profound awareness of the issues involved. A simplistic pluralism of that kind misses the point, because it is only through following a religious tradition all the way to its inner depth that one reaches the 'transcendent unity' that Schuon is speaking about. And he is not averse to making judgments between true and false religions, arguing that it is only 'orthodox' religions that provide this path, orthodox meaning that they are based on genuine spiritual realities in their fulness rather than a limited form that leads people astray. Essentially he provides a different perspective on the problem of particularity and universality with regards to religion. The large number of religions is often used to argue for their falsity, but Schuon would say that we only approach God through symbols which are appropriate to our time and place, and that there is a unified reality behind these various manifestations. So the most particular religion is also the most universal. In terms of providing worked examples, he is concerned mostly to discuss the inter-relationship between Christianity and Islam and between Western and Eastern religions, and he has a profound knowledge of the depths of these traditions.

I have some reservations about this book, however. The first is that I think he falls into an overly schematic approach, allowing the labels of different religions to to guide his writing too much. Rather than comparing 'Christianity' and 'Islam', it might be better for his purposes to compare their spiritual paths rather than their historical manifestation. This would allow for a bit more flexibility in his scheme to include discussion of the multitude of minor religions as well. I think that doing this, however, would uncover that not all esotericisms are the same, and that even at a transcendent level there may be different destinations on the spiritual paths that we walk. I also think that a book like this has a paradoxical danger of providing an illusion of knowledge for people who have not attained to a true esoteric level, and can lead to the situation where talking about a facile religious unity is put in the place of achieving it.

A description of this book can't give an indication of the depths of its argument and the unique perspective that Schuon gives. I think a true believer would go back from this more committed to their faith than they were before, if they were willing to understand the depths of that faith.

Schuon's book is a work of towering achievement. His esoteric/exoteric framework provides an important method of conceptualizing the world religions. The one omission by Schuon is the Baha'i religion. He does not deem it necessary to treat it as the latest in a line of Revelations beginning with Abraham in the Semitic tradition and the Vedas in the Indic tradition. It seems to me the Baha'i religion (I'm not talking about the validity of the beliefs of its adherents here, but merely its claims)is a Revelation aimed at bringing into Reality the "transcendent unity of religion." To omit a religion with such a claim from analysis is an oversight. I give the work 5 stars based on what it deals with: the religions of the world up to Islam.