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ologies will be a wonderful resource to recommend to students and belongs on the shelf of every serious scholar of women and religion. Pamela Cooper-White Seabury-Western Theological Seminary The Transfiguration of Man. By Frithjof Schuon. World Wisdom Books, 1995. 125 pages. $12.00. George Santayana once wrote to a colleague, "The concept of Spirit does not interest me, except as a technicality: it is the life of Spirit that I'm talking about..." In a similar vein, in The Transfiguration ofMan Frithjof Schuon warns us against the abandonment of the life of spirit. In a refreshing contrast to much of academic writing on religion that asserts either a species of reductionism or issues an anemic plea for the reasonableness of belief, Schuon boldly states his position. Having dropped out of academia several decades ago, nearly instantaneously upon entering it, Schuon feels no need for "professional" acknowledgment. He simply ignores both the projectionists, who see in religious experience an exclusively psychological or sociological source, and the responsivists, who view the various religious traditions as particular cultural responses to a noumenal reality. And instead he invites the reader to take seriously the possibility of drinking directly the same waters from which the world's scriptures are drawn. Those who have read Schuon's earlier works, such as The Transcendent Unity of Religions or Esoterism as Principle and as Way, know the ordered manner in which he usually writes. They may be surprised to find that The Transfiguration of Man is quite different. This later work does not systematically develop its themes, nor does it attempt to argue for much at all. It reads instead as a compilation of loosely related thoughts, perhaps from journal entries or short essays written over the years and put together for publication. There is a certain unpolished quality to this book. The lack of polish, however, renders sharper Schuon's many insights. Schuon's writings can be placed within the context of the Sophia Perennis tradition which he, along with Huston Smith and others, has helped keep verdant. According to this tradition, the Self's two primary features of hiddenness and manifestation upon the same instant rest first of all upon the Self's being unqualified, which accounts for its hiddenness, and secondly upon its objectifying itself as the persona. This duality in unity sets up an interplay and tension between the eternal and temporal or, more specifically, between the self as unqualified and self as persona. Thus, as Schuon puts it, "Man is as if suspended between Heaven and Earth, or between the Divine Principle and universal Manifestation, so that his destiny is to live in two dimensions..." (87). Ultimately, Schuon tells us, The Transfiguration of Man was written to help rectify and restore our picture of human nature. "[W]e want to correct and perfect the image of man by insisting on his divinity; not that we wish to make a god of him; we intend simply to take account of his true nature, which transcends the earthly, and lacking which he would have no reason for being"(vii).

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Each of the great religions, Schuon asserts, mirrors this duality in unity. Thus, there is a unity at the heart of the various religions which is more than reflective of some common moral or theological proposition. There is a unity at the heart of the various religions since reality is itself fundamentally single. Intimations and realizations of reality appear in varying degrees of explicitness in all revealed religions; and yet they are intimations and realizations of reality which is itself undivided. The fundamental distinction, then, is not between religious traditions, as, for example, between Buddhism and Christianity or even theistic and nontheistic. Rather, the fundamental distinction is between the "esoteric" dimension of each religion (that dimension which recognizes the unqualified) and the "exoteric" dimension of religion (which emphasizes the formal career of the interplay of being and becoming). Existence is graded, according to Schuon, and so too is cognition. Schuon sharply distinguishes the "metaphysical" and the "philosophical" ways of knowing. Such a distinction may appear unwarranted to those who are accustomed to regard metaphysics as a branch of philosophy, but, in fact, Schuon argues, philosophy proceeds from reason, which is a purely individual faculty, while metaphysics proceeds from the "Intellect," which is not a personal possession. The rational mode of knowledge cannot extend beyond the realm of generalities and cannot of itself reach any transcendent truth. In the case of the Intellect, however, awareness is not possessed by the individual insofar as he or she is an individual but insofar as his or her innermost essence is not distinct from the Divine Principle. Read against this general backdrop of the Sophia Perenms tradition, Schuon's The Transfiguration of Man is also an indictment of the social and moral condition of modernity. Schuon's terseness of thought indicates an impatience with the times in which he finds himself; but the hardness of his words operates clinically, as a slap intended to awaken us from a deep slumber. And so, for example, in comparing antiquity with our own times Schuon remarks, ". . . we have the democratic excesses of our day, such as the reign of inferiors, the cult of mediocrity and vulgarity, the sentimentalist protection, not of the weak, but of weakness and defects,.. . and sincerity, stupidity and idle chatter masquerading as 'culture'" (21-22). The root cause of the social and moral condition of our times rests in philosophy's usurpation of place and near total rejection of metaphysics. Reality has been leveled to a single dimension, the historical, as we have sought to create a universe in which humans hold center stage and as reason has sought its foundation on the imagined surer ground of the empirical. Ironically, however, "in our time," Schuon argues, "man has lost the initiative and is now slipping into a universeor pseudo universewherein only the machine is 'real'" (13). And similarly reason finds itself increasingly edged offstage by imagination and sentimentalism. It is not surprising, at least not for Schuon, that reason would face a possibly mortal challenge from sentimentahsm and imagination since modernity, with its accompanying reign of reason, had its roots, so he contends, in a sentimentalism. By sentimentalism Schuon means any philosophy whose "point of departure is determined more by feeling than by objective reality" (24).

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It is the sophists, with Protagoras at their head, Schuon contends, who are the true precursors of modern thought; "they are the 'thinkers' properly so called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with 'perceiving' and thus taking into account that which 'is'" (4). But ultimately it is Kant who seals the fate of modernity. Schuon argues that despite the appearance of complete rationalism and inaccessibility to the emotions, Kant's starting point or "sentimental dogma" is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason. The source of Kant's philosophy is thus an a priori, instinctive revolt against truths that are rationally ungraspable. "All the rest," Schuon contends, "is nothing but dialectical scaffolding What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the altogether 'irrational' desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century" (12). From such a beginning we have today come to demand of reality that it be manageable, that it not exceed the expected or hold imperatives unyielding to the collective's supplications. The sentimentalist tide that brought forth the modern era has left us cut off from the living waters of Truth where we now comfort ourselves and each other with narrative and story-telling. The way of life and thought that we construct, negotiate, institutionalize, and finally end up calling "reality" is not an attempt to understand the world but rather an attempt to respond to, and integrate our own and past stories. We no longer feel ourselves to be living beings at home in the world but rather epistemologists who have gradually come to appreciate that we are acting not directly on the world but on beliefs we hold about the world. As a result of our absolutization of the historical over the transcendent, our absolutization of reason (consciousness) over "Intelligence" (awareness), we have forgotten that existence always has the first move and instead attempt to use our ideas of reality as a measure. We have forgotten, Schuon argues, because it no longer belongs to "our time," that "the Church must examine the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the Gospel"(39). Instead, it is the exact opposite that is being done; we read and interpret the text according to the times. Frithjof Schuon's concern is always to remind us that the life of spirit is the fountain from which the scriptures we study have come. We can remain academically detached and study the scriptures for conceptual coherency, or we can become explorers and trace the scriptures upstream, so to speak, attempting to understand them through their source. "It is not enough," concludes Schuon, "to know that Brahma is Reality, the world is appearance; it is also necessary to know that 'the soul is not other than Brahma.' This second truth reminds us that we are able to tend towards the Supreme Principle not only in intellectual mode, but also in existential mode" (99-100). At the esoteric or highest level each of the world's religious traditions seeks the "incarnation." Each seeks the timely embodiment of the unqualified or divine. It is a nontransitive movement; it is, as Schuon says, "to rebecome what one is"(49). Bruce K. Hanson Fullerton College