On The Transcendent Unity of Religions

Frithjof Schuon, a scholar and an authority on Comparative Religion and the Sophia Perennis, has written a book called The Transcendent Unity Of Religions. As its title indicates, the book is about the unity of religious wisdom. And as the use of the definite article indicates, this unity is unique. But it is essential to observe that this unity is also transcendent, i.e., the unity is in the spirit and not in the letter.

Schuon uses the terms esoteric and exoteric to distinguish the transcendent spirit of religions from their diverse formal expressions. A useful diagram can be made which helps illustrate the essence of this idea:

                                          _____Buddhism
Esoteric          |       Exoteric  _____/
                  |           _____/
                  |     _____/
                  |____/            __________Hinduism
            _____/|     ___________/
      _____/ _____|____/
_____/______/_____|___________________________Islam
     \_____ \_____|____
           \_____ |    \___________
                 \|____            \___________Judaism
                  |    \_____
                  |          \_____
                  |                \_____
                  |                      \_____Christianity

As Huston Smith writes in the Introduction to Schuon's book, " the defect in other versions of this [esoteric/exoteric] distinction is that they claim unity in religions too soon, at levels where, being exoteric, true Unity does not pertain and can be posited only on pain of Procrusteanism or vapidity. " Once we identify any particular thought system, no matter how comprehensive, as the truth, then we have excluded other thought systems and denied the Truth its unity and its infinite possibilities for expression. The unity of Truth must therefore be a Transcendent Unity. " The fact that it is transcendent, " Smith writes, " means that it can be univocally described by none. " Thus, while there is one and only one Truth, there are many expressions of it.

The following observation provides a suggestive illustration of the above idea. The natural numbers {0,1,2,3,...} have many different descriptions in mathematics. They can be described by the Peano axioms, or by von Neumann's recursive construction within set theory. They can also be described by the very abstract mathematical language of Category Theory, and in a variety of other ways.

But none of these descriptions is the description of the natural numbers. They are all different, but equivalent, descriptions of the same underlying unity. Nor can we ever pin down one description of the natural numbers as the description. The reason for this inability of description to grasp the natural numbers is not because our language is somehow ambiguous or imprecise. To the contrary, our descriptions are mathematically precise and unambiguous. The reason is that the natural numbers transcend any particular description or expression. That is what makes them of a universal nature.

The natural numbers themselves can not be known except through realizing directly that to which all these descriptions point. In particular, we can't uniquely describe them with some meta-descriptive synthesis of all the various descriptions. Their uniqueness and transcendent unity can only be known beyond any particular symbolic representations, no matter how abstract.

In my mind, this provides a valuable illustration of how language can fail to provide a unique description of something, and yet nonetheless uniquely determine it unambiguously.