René Guénon Quotes

There is an exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere 'becoming', leaving no place for the changeless and the permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this 'becoming', thus implicitly denying true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles.

During the Middle Ages there existed throughout the West a real unity, based on properly traditional foundations, which we call 'Christendom', but when these secondary unities of a purely political—that is to say temporal and no longer spiritual—order were formed, this great unity of the West was irremediably broken and the effective existence of Christendom came to an end. Nations, merely the dispersed fragments of what was formerly Christendom, false unities substituted for the true one by the temporal power's will to dominate can, given the very conditions of their origin, survive only by opposing each other and ceaselessly contending among themselves in all fields. Now spirit is unity, matter is multiplicity and division; and the more one removes oneself from spirituality, the more antagonisms are accentuated and amplified. No one can deny that the feudal wars, which were quite localized and subject to the moreover to restrictive regulation by the spiritual authority, were nothing compared to the national wars that have resulted, following the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, in 'armed nations', and we have seen in our own day new developments hardly reassuring for the future.

We are now in the fourth age, the Kali Yuga or 'dark age', and have been so already, it is said, for more than six thousand years, that is to say since a time far earlier than any known to 'classical' history. Since that time, the truths which were formerly within reach of all have become more and more hidden and inaccessible; those who possess them grow fewer and fewer, and although the treasure of 'nonhuman (that is, supra-human) wisdom that was prior to all the ages can never be lost, it nevertheless becomes enveloped in more and more impenetrable veils, which hide it from men's sight and make it extremely difficult to discover. This is why we find everywhere, under various symbols, the same theme of something that has been lost-at least to all appearances and as far as the outer world is concerned-and that those who aspire to true knowledge must rediscover; but it is also said that what is thus hidden will become visible again at the end of the cycle, which, because of the continuity binding all things together, will coincide with the beginning of a new cycle.

If the 'priesthood' is in essence the depository of traditional knowledge, this is not to say that it has a monopoly on it, since its mission is not only to conserve it integrally but also to communicate it to all who are fit to receive it, to distribute it hierarchically, so to speak, according to the intellectual capacity of each.

Matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this-be it said in passing-is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realized by consciousness of universal principles.

In civilizations of a traditional nature, intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality. Not only is this true of social institutions, but also of the sciences, that is, branches of knowledge bearing on the domain of the relative, which in such civilizations are only regarded as dependencies, prolongations, or reflections of absolute or principial knowledge. Thus a true hierarchy is always and everywhere preserved: the relative is not treated as non-existent, which would be absurd; it is duly taken into consideration, but is put in its rightful place, which cannot but be a secondary and subordinate one; and even within this relative domain there are different degrees of reality, according to whether the subject lies nearer to or further from the sphere of principles.

Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries.

The traditional spirit cannot die, being in its essence above death and change; but it can withdraw completely from the outward world […] We may see the 'beginning of the end', the preliminary sign of the moment when, according to the Hindu tradition, the whole of the sacred doctrine is to be shut in a conch-shell, from which it will once more come forth intact at the dawn of the new world.

Patiens quia æterna [patient because eternal] is sometimes said of spiritual authority, and rightly so; not of course that any of the external forms it may assume will be eternal, for every form is only contingent and transitory, but because in itself, in its true essence, it partakes of the eternity and the immutability of the principles; and this is why, in all conflicts that pit temporal power against spiritual authority, one can rest assured that, whatever the appearances may be, it is always the latter that will have the last word.

If an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it.

'Aristocracy', […] taken in its etymological sense, means precisely the power of the elite. The elite can by definition only be the few, and their power, or rather their authority, deriving as it does from their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical strength on which democracy is based, a strength whose inherent tendency is to sacrifice the minority to the majority, and therefore quality to quantity, and the elite to the masses.

[A]s one sinks deeper into materiality, instability grows and changes take place more rapidly; thus the reign of the bourgeoisie will be relatively short-lived in comparison with the regime that preceded it. Furthermore, as usurpation calls forth usurpation, it is now the Shūdras who follow the Vaishyas in aspiring for domination, such being precisely the significance of bolshevism.

[T]he revolt of the Kshatriyas prepares the way for that of the Vaishyas and the Shūdras; and so, from one stage to another, we descend at last to the lowest kind of utilitarianism, the negation of all disinterested knowledge (even of the lowest rank) and of all reality beyond the perceptible domain. This is precisely what one witnesses in our own time, where the Western world has nearly arrived at the final stage of this descent which, like the fall of heavy bodies, keeps accelerating.

The true function of the priesthood, then, is above all one of knowledge and teaching, and this is why, as we said above, its proper attribute is wisdom.

The dependence of the temporal power on the spiritual authority has its visible sign in the anointing of kings, who are not truly 'legitimized' until they have received investiture and consecration from the hands of the priesthood, implying the transmission of a 'spiritual influence' necessary for the regular exercise of their function.