The Cunning Secret of the Wise

Rene Guenon died in 1951 and his legacy has been carried forward by a religious movement known as Traditionalism or Perennialism. Traditionalists regard the world’s religious traditions, indigenous and revealed as so many expressions of a unanimous perennial philosophy. But this reservoir of salvific wisdom is off limits to those outside orthodox tradition. The notion of a secular spirituality is simply a contradiction in terms. Almost all the Traditionalists are Muslims or Muslim converts and the leading figures are Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings and S.H. Nasr. Their scholarship is profound and it has opened my inner eye to the grandeur and beauty of Islam. But they are, without exception implacably hostile towards Jung. The purpose of this chapter is to give a long overdue answer to their polemic against Jung and to find out what he has done to offend them. (From Chapter 4: Pneuma and Psyche: What did Jung do to offend the Gnostics?) The Sufi Shaykh Ibn ‘Arabi referred to transcendental absolute knowledge as unveiling (kashf), tasting (dhawq) or opening (fath or futuh). All these terms refer “to direct experiential knowledge of the reality of things, a knowledge that God gives his servant through self-disclosure (tajalli)”. (Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: 394, n.19) Ibn ‘Arabi took the way up and abandoned the darkness below. Jung and the Hermetic alchemists took the way down and sought the light of nature in the chthonic depths. Ibn ‘Arabi was known as the son of Plato while Jung was much closer to the pre -Socratic philosopher Heraclitus who declared that the way up and the way down were one and the same. He spoke from absolute knowledge - what better basis can there be for a dialogue between Jung and the Shaykh? (From Chapter 9: The Way Up and the Way Down are One and the Same)