By Frithjof Schuon, Translated from the French by G.E.H. Palmer
Pub Date: 1990
Publisher: World Wisdom Books
Binding: Paper, 128pp.
ISBN: 0900588136
Our Price $15.95

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Translator's Foreword

Man's most fundamental needs can be summed up as the need for Knowledge, the need for Love and the need for a Way to salvation. That these three needs have many degrees and modes and that they are closely related to one another is obvious. But man's external conditions and inner state combine to make less and less possible a full satisfaction of these needs. As heterodoxy, science and materialism claim increasingly to dominate attention and values, so more and more people feel cut off from any true meaning of existence, and are forced to make search for some fundamental basis of living, such as they fail to find in the normal terms of their environment.

This search often leads in the direction of a study of oriental or mystical traditions; but a great number of those who feel impelled to this search have little or no guidance or discrimination to rely upon. In these conditions many are virtually helpless to reach any but the most tenuous conclusions and may indeed lose heart or go far astray.

For such people, the writings of Frithjof Schuon can provide assistance of great value; while for those who are already on some real Traditional Way they offer a source of wise and powerful counsel. For here is a writer who has an outstandingly clear view of the transcendent metahysical truths underlying all the great Revelations embodied in the various Traditions now available to man, as well as a vivid understanding both of his spiritual necessities and of the widely differing conditions of their fulfilment, within man himself and within the differing frameworks of the various civilisations.

This rare combination of qualities, together with a power of forceful presentation of his themes, makes Frithjof Schuon one of the most significant spiritual influences in the western world today. Of the first of his books to be translated into English T. S. Eliot wrote: 'I have met with no more impressive work, in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental Religion, than The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Even those who cannot accept the author's conclusions must feel challenged by this book to produce an answer of their own. '

The book now translated was published in French as Sentiers de Gnose. The term "gnosis" as used here has no connection with the historical doctrines known as "gnosticism". It keeps its original meaning of Wisdom made up of Knowledge and Sanctity. Many passages in this book, and more particularly the sixth chapter, "Gnosis, Language of the Self", make clear the distinction, often nowadays obliterated, between knowledge acquired by the ordinary discursive mind and the higher Knowledge which comes of intuition by the Intellect, the term Intellect having the same sense as in Plotinus or Eckhart. This distinction is fundamental to an understanding of the author's writings.

The book closes with a remarkable section on the Christian tradition, especially under its more intellectual aspects, relating it to the general perspective outlined above.