This republication of Schuon’s “superlative” work on the unity of religions has a long, learned and enlightening introduction by Huston Smith, with a helpful diagram making even more precise Schuon’s thesis on the relation between religions
The dividing line is horizontal and occurs only once, rather than the distinction being between the religions themselves. For Schuon, existence—and, therefore, cognition—is graded. Hence, in God at the apex, religions converge; below the line they differ. So, too, religious discernment unites at its apex and divides below it.
Smith compares Schuon’s thesis with others, quoting the author himself in saying that there is “a unity at the heart of religions” that can be “univocally described by none and concretely apprehended by few.” Smith’s introduction concludes with a helpful description of the esoteric and exoteric distinction restated—a key, he says, to the understanding of the whole book. T.S. Eliot said of Schuon’s volume: “I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion.” From beginning to end, Schuon quotes Muslim and Christian, Hindu and other mystics alike to substantiate his valuable insights. He insists that the unity of the different religions is not only unrealizable on the external level, that of the forms themselves, but ought not to be realized at that level even were this possible, for in that case the revealed forms would be deprived of their sufficient reason. The very fact that they are revealed, he claims, “shows that they are willed by the Divine Word.” He uses the word “transcendent” in the title because it means that the unity of the religious forms must be realized in a purely inward and spiritual way and without prejudice to any particular form. “The antagonisms between these forms no more affect the one universal Truth than the antagonisms between opposing colors affect the transmission of the one uncolored light.”
