So you’re going to be leading a discussion of the great Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church for an adult Sunday school group at your church, and you write to ask whether I have any suggestions? NO! What else could the answer be to a question about apophatic theology?!

But in all seriousness, there’s no way to make the rarified truths of this classic book “user friendly” (your phrase), especially when the users are pious faithful whose relationship with their Lord is almost certainly founded upon images and comforting thoughts. Your audience will—or at least should—be suspicious from the get-go, given where I assume they’re coming from: a solid basis in Scripture.

What you might do, I suppose—speaking of Scripture—is to preface your discussion of Lossky by pointing out that the Name God gives Himself in the Bible—“I am what I am”—proves He is incomparable to anything else; as His own predicate, He conforms to no category: “If He is, we aren’t,” as certain Fathers were wont to insist; “and if we are, He isn’t.” Or again you might try opening your students’ hearts to the operative implications of Philippians 2:5-7. We’re to have the “mind” of Christ, says St Paul, who, “because”—not in spite of the fact that—He was in “the form of God” emptied Himself. One could spend a few decades pondering that single admonition.

In any case, there’s no way to make this dense and demanding text unconfusing without depriving it of its intended effect. The whole point is to be amazed—using that too-often-used word with its full etymological force—by what the Areopagite calls “the unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth”, which, he koanically declaims, “lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty”.

The “problem”, of course—I speak now with a serious playfulness!—is that once a person has drunk deeply at this apophatic well and started adopting Christ’s mushin no shin, it’s a slippery slope to becoming … a Christian perennialist! It’s surely no accident that Lossky’s dissertation was on Eckhart, however unfairly critical he may have been of the Master, and there’s a reason Metropolitan Anthony Bloom was able to stump him with a few pearls from the Hindu tradition. Do you know that story? It’s recounted in the 2005 biography, This Holy Man: Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony.

It seems that as a young man the Metropolitan (then Andre) wrote out a list of eight quotations from the Upanishads and took them to Lossky with an apparently innocent inquiry: “Could you help me? I have some sayings from the Fathers here, and I can’t remember who said what. Can you identity them for me, please?” The biographer continues: “Lossky went through the list and without hesitation wrote beside each quotation the relevant name: St John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great, and so on. When the theologian had attributed them all, Andre dropped his bombshell, ‘It’s the Upanishads.’ From then on, he said, Lossky began to look much more sympathetically at other faiths and came to find in them truths he had never before been able to acknowledge” (p. 85).

The moral of this story is that you (and your priest!) mustn’t go blaming me if your Sunday school class decides the next book on their list should be The Transcendent Unity of Religions. 2 + 2 = 4.

In his book on the Shaykh Al-Alawi, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century, Martin Lings comments on one of the Shaykh’s aphorisms: “To demand increase showeth ignorance in a disciple.” According to Lings, this saying refers among other things to

the ignorance of supposing that things of the Spirit can be gauged like the things of this world, and that [a faqir] himself can judge whether or not he is receiving increase. A disciple of one of the Shaykh’s disciples [Lings is referring to himself in his own relation to Schuon] once complained to his Master: “I have regularly invoked the Supreme Name for more than ten years, but without any result.’ His Master replied: ‘If you could make in one moment all the spiritual progress you have gradually made in these ten years, it would cause a mortal rupture in your soul” (p. 209).

It is always a mistake to become distracted by the image in the rear-view mirror of our spiritual lives. Keep your eyes on the road.

You asked about current and upcoming courses.

Classes just started this week for me, and I’m offering two. First is an old standby I call “Faith, Doubt, and God”. Close to seventy brave souls have shown up to test my in-your-face promise to prove the existence of God. Or rather, since sheer cussedness has been known to take logic hostage, to show beyond all shadow of a doubt—quoting from the syllabus—that “the truly intelligent person, who is prepared to use his entire apparatus of knowing in the fullest possible way, will inevitably come to see that God exists”. Here’s a “flow chart” for how the course will proceed, and here’s a list of the readings from A Question of God, the course “Reader”.

The other course is a small honors seminar on “Yogis, Mystics, Monks, and Zen Masters”. As I explained to the students the first day, my aims are chiefly two: first, to provide some “data” for testing the perennialist thesis that there is a transcendent unanimity among the world’s religions, realized by the sages of those traditions in the “divine stratosphere” (Schuon) as distinct from the “human atmosphere”; and second, to challenge the prevailing academic consensus that religions are nothing more than beliefs, to be accepted by faith alone, whereas the empirical sciences are the exclusive purveyors of knowledge and certainty—an assumption widely shared, I noted, not only by skeptics but by religious people themselves. Here I quoted Coomaraswamy:

“It is mainly because religion has been offered to modern men in nauseatingly sentimental terms, and no longer as an intellectual challenge, that so many have been revolted, thinking that that “is all there is to” religion…. The severe discipline which any serious study of … religion and philosophy demands can serve as a useful corrective.”

I guaranteed my young charges that the readings I’d compiled for the course—on Yoga, Hesychasm, Zen, and Sufism—would, if nothing else, provide them with a large, demanding, and continuing dose of “intellectual challenge”.

As for up and coming attractions, I’m planning to teach a short course during my university’s “Maymester” later this spring. I’m calling it “Mysteries of the Christian East”, and it will include an off-campus trip to St Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in southern Arizona, one of several monastic communities established by the Athonite elder Ephraim, a former abbot of Philotheou Monastery on the Holy Mountain. As you know, my regular university offering on “Christian Theology” is taught from a decidedly Orthodox standpoint; nonetheless I’ve thought for some time it would be good to create a teaching context that would allow me to draw even more fully and directly on my pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain in 2007. Given the Athonite avaton (ban) regarding women, and given the fact that university administrators would no doubt look askance on a course only men could take, a pilgrimage to the Sonoran Desert seemed a good second best!

You’re “astonished”, you say, that Saint Thomas Aquinas should be so highly praised in Professor Oldmeadow’s book concerning the perennialist school: Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of Perennial Philosophy (soon to be republished by World Wisdom, in a revised and expanded edition, as Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy). Was the Angelic Doctor not the very epitome of “mere rationalism”?

Your surprise is certainly not surprising, but I’m obliged to tell you that Oldmeadow has very fairly represented the position, if not of all perennialists, then certainly of Frithjof Schuon. Needless to say Schuon was well aware of the limits of ratio or dianoia, and he wrote about these limits extensively. At the same time, however, he greatly valued the logical rigor of the Scholastic method and was the very first to prefer it to those flights of mere subjectivist fantasy which often masquerade as “mystical intuition”.

Indeed there is a recurrent theme in his writings to the effect that that there is nothing illogical about the spiritual life. We should never suppose that our grasp of the Truth is against reason, only beyond its exhaustive formulation. To speak of the effacement of thought in direct intellection is not to deny its pedagogical value. On the contrary, a rigorously logical attitude toward concepts and philosophical positions is the sine qua non of intellective adequation. Hence what we might call the “initiatic” importance of Schuon’s criticisms of false points of view, as in his (significantly titled) Logic and Transcendence, where he writes as follows:

“The Divine Essence eludes logic to the extent that it is indefinable; but as we are conscious of it, seeing that we can speak of it, it constitutes a premise which allows us to draw at least indirect and extrinsic conclusions. Everything that presents itself to our mind is therefore a premise in some respect, and as soon as there is a premise, whether direct or indirect, precise or approximate, there is the possibility of a conclusion and thus of logic. To speak of concepts which impose themselves on us while concealing themselves from our logic is pure and simple contradiction, and in fact no doctrine has ever rejected the logical explanations of any notion…. No religion has ever imposed on the human mind, or ever could have imposed, an idea which logic was incapable of approaching in any way; religion addresses itself to man, and man is thought.”

Schuon readily admits, of course—still quoting from Logic and Transcendence—that “there are in God aspects that are independent of all limitative logic, and it is from them that the cosmic play and the musical aspect of things arise; but there is nothing in God that opposes the principles of non-contradiction and of sufficient reason, which are rooted in the Divine Intellect.”

I once asked him for a list of recommended reading materials for the Christian esoterist, and I mentioned what I assumed might be some good possibilities: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and a few others in the East, and of course Jakob Boehme and Meister Eckhart in the West. Schuon responded by saying that there was “too much theology and moral sentimentality” in almost all of these authors. The Christian esoterist, he said, need read only “the purely metaphysical portions of Eckhart … and Saint Thomas Aquinas”! Like you I was at first somewhat surprised by this answer, but considering his advice in light of passages like those I have quoted above, it is easy to understand Schuon’s rationale, for there is certainly nothing “sentimental” about the author of the Summa! It is true of course that at the end of his life this saint’s thinking was transcended in vision, but this is hardly an excuse for the rest of us not to think!

For further discussion of these points, you might wish to have a look at my article “A Knowledge That Wounds Our Nature: The Message of Frithjof Schuon”, which can be found here.

You asked about the role—or perhaps better the “position”—of Christ in Christian prayer.

It is common among the Fathers of the Christian East, and thus among many Orthodox authorities, to say that one should pray “in” the Holy Spirit, “through” Jesus Christ, and “to” God the Father, though it is important to admit at once that, like Catholics and Protestants, the Orthodox do not always practice what they preach in this regard and often formulate prayers which are directed to the Son. One thinks above all of the “Jesus Prayer”. You will recall in this regard the point I made in my paper, “Disagreeing to Agree”, about the formulations “our God”/”God” in relation to Christ (see p. 11 of that article here).

As for traditional sources, the key Biblical text would almost certainly be Ephesians 2:18: “Through Him [Jesus] we have access in one Spirit to the Father”, though one could also mention Romans 1:8: “I thank my God through Jesus Christ”. Among the Church Fathers, Origen is quite insistent in drawing out the implications: “If we understand what prayer is, we ought not to pray to anyone born [of woman], not even to Christ Himself, but only to the God and Father of all, to whom also our Savior prayed…. For when he heard, ‘Teach us to pray’, he did not ‘teach’ them ‘to pray’ to Himself, but to the Father, saying, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’, and so forth” (On Prayer, 15.1). I might add that when Origen uses the word “all” in the phrase “the God and Father of all”, he doubtless has in mind the expression “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”, which recurs in Romans 15:6, 2 Corinthians 11:31, and Ephesians 1:3.

Again, though, it is important to underscore the fact that there is nothing systematic about such a practice in Christianity; indeed Origen himself ignores his own rule on a few occasions. There is nothing surprising about this, of course, given the “spiritual economy” of Christianity and its stress upon the Divine “presence”, and you will certainly wish to word the relevant section of your paper in such a way as to acknowledge the many Christian exceptions to the rule of “through” Christ “to” the Father.

No, I’d not in fact heard of the formulation you quote from Father John Romanides: “If the Church were a factory, its product would be relics.” And no, I wasn’t thinking of things in quite so osteopathic a way when I spoke in my last post about the “production of saints”.

It’s a clever line, of course, and it’s very attractive to think that there might be some empirical criterion for sanctity. I’m certainly in favor of finding (what you called) a “measure beyond religious and denominational politics”—assuming that “measure” is an appropriate term in this context. Nonetheless I would hesitate to draw the conclusions you have.

Incorruption may well be a proof of sanctity. Having venerated the relics of numerous fathers on the Holy Mountain, I’m among the very first to respect this possibility. But it doesn’t follow that corruption—or rather non-incorruption—is therefore a proof of non-sanctity. Let’s not be Father Feraponts, turning up our noses—or pinching them, as the case may be!—at all but the most obviously physiological manifestations of holiness.

Bodhidharma’s cautionary advice is apropos in this connection: “If someone strikes you as so holy that you are inclined to call him a saint, this is a sign that the person is not a true saint. For the true saint cannot be described in such terms: He breaks through the limits of all such conceptual categories.”

In the American South where I teach, the question comes up much less frequently, I expect, than in your part of the world. But yes, there are certainly a few people here, including the occasional student, who claim to be practicing “pagans”.

Obviously, the first question to ask is what exactly your interlocutors mean by “paganism”. For some it seems to be primarily a word of protest, signaling their rejection of all “institutional religions”, especially Christianity, and often accompanied by a smoldering resentment of “patriarchy”. On the other hand, the term may be used in a somewhat more learned and politically neutral manner to refer to the spiritual doctrines and practices of pre-Christian Europe, ranging from the Greco-Roman “mystery religions” through their medieval and early modern successors and parallels—doctrines and practices which, it is often claimed, were more attuned to the Divine Immanence than are those of their Abrahamic counterparts.

Given the context in which the question arose, my guess is that your inquirers are using the term in the second sense and that they may well be spiritually serious people who are searching for a genuine Path. If I were in your shoes, I think I would therefore begin by discussing the fact that religions have life cycles. While there are good reasons to think that the ancient Greek and Roman religions—those at least for which we have any historical record—were already in a decadent or degenerate state, I would be prepared to concede that in their own day they may well have been no less spiritually efficacious than Orthodox Christianity is in ours, and I would readily grant that the same might be said for the religion of the people (to take just one example) who constructed Stonehenge.

The problem, of course, is that these considerations are all quite beside the point from an initiatic or operative point of view. We can read about these religions in books, we can study their scriptural and archeological traces, and we can try to reconstruct what their theurgical rites might have looked like. But not being apostles or masters of the traditions in question, there’s no way for us to establish the necessary sacramental links to the originating revelation. Let’s just say—putting the matter in the best possible light—that contemporary paganism is in fact a distant reflection or last vestige of a truly valid religion. So what? Without an unbroken spiritual connection to this past, based upon the pagan equivalent of a silsilah or some other bona fide proof of initiatic filiation, the whole question is moot.

Let me repeat: I’ve no doubt that some of those who call themselves “pagans” are sincere and serious people. Others are clearly just in it for the novelty and exotic flavor, if not for the “protest” that I mentioned above, and others still may well have entered into contact (whether they realize it or not) with demonic agencies, and if so they are operating in a very dangerous state of spiritual delusion. One advantage of beginning your conversation with a discussion of this whole question of “apostolic succession” is that it should help you determine in which category your interlocutors fall. For anyone who is truly serious about the spiritual life will understand in his very bones the importance of sacramental continuity in the “production” of saints. And what’s the point of religion, any religion, apart from sanctity?

Yes, my students too are always quite puzzled—and often worried that I mean to undermine their faith—when I tell them there are some things even God can’t do. In my Theology course the issue first arises when, in lecturing on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, I underscore the important distinguo between two modes of necessity: extrinsic and intrinsic.

While it’s true, I explain, that God is extrinsically free in the act of creating, since He’s subject to no force or authority “outside” Himself, He’s nonetheless intrinsically obliged to create. He cannot but act in accord with His nature, and it’s in His very nature to be the Creator. God can therefore no more not create than He can lie or commit deicide. For all such actions entail contradiction, and as St Thomas says, “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God” (Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 25, Article 4).

But wait! my young charges counter. Why should mere contradictions prove to be such a problem in Heaven? Surely God can suspend the law of non-contradiction, in just the same way that He’s able to suspend other laws whenever He works a miracle.

Even though it’s mainly Christian students I teach—most of whom take the Bible seriously and who are therefore firm in their conviction that “the Logos was God” (John 1:1)—pointing out that the English “logic” is derived from the Greek logos usually doesn’t get me very far! So what I do instead, and I recommend you consider this strategy, is to ask them three questions of my own:

1. If God did “suspend” the law of non-contradiction, would it be false to say that He had not suspended it?

2. If it would be false, wouldn’t God still be acting in conformity with the law?

3. If it would not be false, then wouldn’t the law still operative?

It can take some minutes, but as soon as the smiles (or grimaces) of recognition begin showing up on a few faces, I step back from the reductio and propose the following moral: Saying that God can’t do something may sound a bit strange at first, but the alternative is madness.

I wish I could say that this whole business about the possibility of contradictions in Heaven was rooted in my students’ piety alone—in their wish to safeguard the majesty of God. I have little doubt, however, that they’re willingness (even eagerness) to credit the Divine with a tertium which is obviously non datur is rooted at least in part in their wish to avoid the hard edges of truly rigorous argument. If only the occasional A could also be not-A—if only they could have their propositional cake and eat it too—they wouldn’t have to think so hard!

But let’s not lay all the blame on the young people. Given the postmodern and other relativistic pseudo-philosophies by means of which our students’ minds are increasingly victimized, their attitude is hardly surprising. Contextualization can’t help but induce complacency in the face of contradiction.

What is my “political stance”? Students often ask me this question, especially around election time.

It’s clear to them, of course—as I’m sure it is to you—that I’m no liberal, or not at least in the way that describes the overwhelming majority of my fellow academics, whose opinions on such subjects as “diversity”, to pick only one especially egregious example, often strike me as complacently fatuous if not demented and diabolical. But the students are also reasonably sure that I’m not a conservative, or not at least in the sense in which this word is typically bandied about in the media—though, if pressed, I happily embrace the label with the meaning given it in Titus Burckhardt’s important essay “What is Conservatism?” (see The Essential Titus Burkhardt: Reflections on Sacred Art, Faiths, and Civilizations [World Wisdom, 2003], pp. 181ff). And in the same vein I’m often heard to commend Gai Eaton’s superb little book King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World (Fons Vitae, 1990).

In any case I generally respond—much to the chagrin of my earnest and often “socially conscious” young charges—by saying that I’m strictly apolitical and deliberately uninformed as to most current events, so that I have no opinion as to the relative virtues of who may be running for office. Sometimes I add a few words about Plato’s eventual disappointment with Dionysius (Epistle VII, 332d), in whom he had had such high hopes, a disappointment by no means unrelated to Socrates’s admission, near the end of the Republic (591e), that while “there is a pattern [of justice] set up in the heavens”, there can be no such thing as a just commonwealth on earth. A few more remarks as to the deplorable pressures of marketing and polls on contemporary “debates” between political candidates usually bring the brief discussion to a close.

A recent discovery, however, has finally given me an answer of the sort my students are likely asking for: something short if not sweet! I find that I’m a “radical traditionalist”, and I base this claim on the delight with which I’ve been reading a collection of pieces by the British essayist John Michell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist (Dominion Press, 2005). In order to deflect the criticisms that might otherwise come my way from the readership of Anamnēsis, let me add at once that I don’t necessarily agree with this author’s take on everything. (I’ll leave it to you and others, if you wish to undertake an investigation of this book, to figure out for yourselves where I probably part company with him). But much of what he says is excellent. Here’s just a taste:

“However many programmes you were to ban, you would not get to the root of television’s evil, which is the overall, insidiously degrading tone of the thing. This derives from the lugubrious, one-sided world-view which now prevails, fostered by the education system and faithfully upheld by the broadcasting authorities. Its influence is most apparent in the ‘serious’ TV items, from the crassly politicised, trivialised news to the dollops of Darwinian propaganda doled out with the nature programmes. The violence and vulgarity are merely by-products of that established world-view, which denies the existence of true standards or principles of life, thus confining communication to the level of opinion and empiricism” (pp. 157-58).

“I can’t stop wondering why the dealers and curators who comprise the art establishment believe in a world of ugliness and chaos, and encourage only those painters who see it that way. The answer, I think, is that these people are creeps. They are anxious to keep in step with the academic establishment, with Hawking of black hole fame, with Dawkins the zealous God-basher, with the disappointed Marxists, pandering politicians, pettifoggers, grievance-mongers, and atheistic bishops who set the tone in modern society. Instead of opposing these vulgar types by exhibitions of artistic beauty, the art professionals run along with them. I suppose they have to in order to get funding” (179).

“Talking the other day with a friend of west African descent who works for the Race Relations Board, I remarked that her activities seemed largely to consist of seeking out grievances and giving them a good airing. Could she not, I wondered, find a more idealistic basis for racial harmony? Sensing my drift, she told me about an old-fashioned book she had found in a library, the authoress of which compared the different races of mankind to the variety of flowers in God’s herbaceous border. My friend said that she found this distasteful and patronising and had recommended that the book be ‘de-shelved’.

“I looked up the lady’s book and enjoyed it, particularly her emphasis on the beauty of hybrids. Her perception was similar to Plato’s likening of the world to a dodecahedron made up of twelve differently coloured, pentagonal pieces of material. By that image he represented the traditional, orthodox belief that the twelve tribes of humanity, each placed under a different sign and with the corresponding tone, style, colour, temperament, and so on, form an ideal unity…. I could go on about this forever, but the point I want to hammer home is that every race, tribe, family, and human being has a particular aptitude and mode of praise, and this should not give rise to apologies but to joyful thanks for whatever gifts we have been allowed to bring towards the full expression of our common humanity” (243-44).

“People with a reputation for intelligence are often so misled or incapacitated by the false and elaborate doctrines they have been able to master that they might as well be stupid. Look at Bertrand Russell, for example. His clever reasoning led him to conclude that despair is the only justifiable attitude to life. H. G. Wells was clever enough to reach the same dead end and moaned about it in his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether. Wells was a victim of Darwinism, that virus of the intellect that afflicts so many good minds and displays its symptoms in the modern mind generally. I have broached this subject before, and readers do not always like it, but I write this column for the sake of truth rather than popularity….

“There is a secret behind this, but it is only a secret because modern science cannot live with it and the modern mind cannot bear to hear it: The universe has no particular form or character independent of human imagination. As Charles Fort put it, nothing will ever be explained because actually there is nothing to explain. There are an infinite number of ways in which you can see the world and an infinite range of data to support, or discredit, any of them. You can believe in black holes if you like, or you can believe in angels. I am not a believer, but if I had to choose I would take the latter because, unlike the holes, their influence has generally been for the good.

“The universe is like a reflector, so your experience of life depends largely on how you choose to see it. You can prove that for yourself by a dose of paranoia, when your fears and suspicions seem to be confirmed by everything that happens. The same can be observed, more usefully, through practical idealism. Use your cleverness to the advantage of yourself and others. Turn off the television; ignore the world-view of spite and confusion broadcast by the media; forget the grisly theorists; summon up the data which indicate that here and now is our natural paradise; establish that model in your mind by reason and then go out and test-drive it in the street. You may not achieve the vision of the Holy Grail in one day, but at least you will begin to see that there is such a thing, that happiness is the normal human condition, and that heaven on earth is not merely a religious delusion but signifies the natural order of the mind and of the world around it” (318-20).

You say you’ve felt a “fundamental resistance” to the Christian form, you’re “lukewarm” toward its theology, and you sense the teachings of Islam may conform more closely to your sense of the Divine Presence within the natural environment. But it’s unclear to me why you feel this way, and I would prefer to be able to address specific questions, such as they are.

For now, however, the most important thing I can do is remind you—or tell you if it wasn’t clear before—that an esoterist will by definition feel less than fully “comfortable” (your word) with any religion and will not “like” everything about it; all upāyas, even those of the relatively more metaphysical East, are colored in some way, and compared to the white light of the Truth they’re therefore inevitably limited and constraining. The following from a letter of Schuon’s is clearly pertinent:

A true metaphysician cannot unreservedly identify himself with a religious upāya and take pleasure in it with a kind of nationalism, but obviously he must identify with what is essential, hence both universal and primordial.

I want to give two examples of religious limitation. For Christianity man is a “sinner”; this is the definition of man, and it entails the idea that the entire world is bad and the only alternative is between the “flesh” and the “spirit”; it goes without saying that this perspective has a certain relative justification, but its disadvantage lies in the fact that it presents itself as absolute. For Islam, on the other hand, man is not totally corrupted by the fall—a total corruption would be contrary to the very definition of man—but he is totally a “servant” or “slave”, which is in fact an aspect of his nature but which could never sum up human nature as such; to believe the contrary is to deny the specifically human intelligence and dignity, and it is thus to deny what constitutes the very reason for the existence of homo sapiens.

In both cases theology tends to push the respective dogmatic image to the point of absurdity, and most mystics identify de facto with these pious excesses, something a consistent metaphysician—hence one who is aware of the nature of things—would never do. A true metaphysician could not possibly identify himself with such positions, and therefore he could not commit himself to what I call “religious nationalism”. With good reason Guénon defined the “religious point of view”—the word “religious” having for him the meaning of “exoteric”—as a “sentimental attachment to an idea”. And one should not forget all the secondary excesses, sometimes very troublesome, to which confessional sentimentalism gives rise.

When you say you are a “Muslim” or a “Christian”, you exclude an immense part of humanity; you separate yourself from it and reproach it for not being what you are; you proclaim before the entire world that only you have the truth, unless you speak with tacit Guénonian understandings that no one can presuppose a priori. Nothing of this kind is to be found with the American Indians: “The Great Spirit has given you your way of praying, and He has given us our way of praying”; and that is all.

Each of the two traditions in question—Christianity and Islam—is necessarily limited from a metaphysical standpoint or, if you will, from the standpoint of “the Great Spirit” and primordial Truth; the esoterist will acknowledge this fact from the start—without “sentiment”, and without expecting a religious form to be something other than what it is—and will seek to compensate for these limits by drawing greater spiritual nourishment not from the theology of another Semitic upāya but from esoterism as such or pure metaphysics.

Of course, I don’t know for sure—do you?—that you are in fact an esoterist, hence that you should, or even can, “feel” this way. Might it be that you’re instead an intelligent and inquisitive bhakta, whose temperament is such that she needs to “fall in love” with a religion before entering into it with total seriousness? I’m not presuming to issue a judgment on this matter; I’ve never met you and have only your one letter to go on. But this is a very important question and one that you need to be prayerfully asking yourself.