The Mystery of The Two Natures by James Cutsinger

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Chapter 6
The Mystery of the Two Natures
James S. Cutsinger
The things we are going to say seem to some of the multitude to be
different from the Scriptures of our Lord. But let these know that
it is by the Scriptures themselves that these things live and breathe;
from them they draw their whole grounding, but from them they
take only the spirit and not the language.
—St Clement of Alexandria
From the very start it was clear that this was something extraor
dinary. As a college professor of religion, I had read fairly widely
and deeply before, and had made it my aim to assimilate many of
the greatest philosophical and theological works. But nothing had
prepared me for my first encounter with a book by Frithjof Schuon.
I vividly recall reading the opening page, and then reading it again,
and then a third and fourth time, before proceeding. The words
themselves were certainly not difficult, nor was the style at all com
plex. Indeed, compared to many a modern philosopher’s work,
Schuon’s books are noted for their simple, and often poetic, beau
ty. And yet for some reason I found myself unable to move with the
speed I was accustomed to. It was like running along the beach and
then into the ocean. Here was a new medium, no less able to sup
port my movement, but requiring an altogether different engage
ment. There would be no more running now. I would have to swim.
This initial sense that Schuon was different—that there is an
intensity or depth in his message unlike any other—has since been
many times confirmed, both in my continued study of his books and
through a number of personal contacts which I was privileged to
have with the man himself during the last decade or so of his life. It
is hard for me to know quite what to say, how to convey the signifi
cance of these encounters. Others have spoken about Schuon in the
most exalted terms. Comparing him to figures like Shankaracharya
and Meister Eckhart, they have said that he was a paragon among
religious authorities, perhaps the qutb or spiritual axis for our age,
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whose work was of a cyclic or Eleatic importance—a jivan-mukta,

blessed with the vision of the cosmic Intellect itself. While I have
seen no reason to discount such judgments, and many good reasons
to suppose them true, I myself prefer to be more circumspect. It
seems to me that Schuon’s books are not in need of any special
praise or promotion and can be left to speak for themselves, and I
heartily commend them to the attention of every serious seeker. As
for our personal relationship, I shall simply say that Frithjof Schuon
is one of the greatest men I have ever known, and I am profoundly
grateful to have had his friendship.
What is the most important thing that Schuon taught me? This
is the question I have posed to myself for the purpose of writing this
chapter. As soon as I ask it, however, I am struck by the extent to
which virtually everything I believe and think has been shaped by
his perspective. Someone has said that it was Schuon’s aim, not only
to promulgate a doctrine and teach a method, but to create a civi
lization, and as one who has endeavored to enter into that civiliza
tion as fully as circumstances permit, I now find that it is almost
impossible to recall my initial experience of its borders, or to rank
my many discoveries. I can say this, though: On the doctrinal side,
very few points have turned out to be more decisive or fruitful than
Schuon’s teachings on Christ, and it is upon these that I would like
to concentrate here.
I am myself a Christian, a member of the Eastern Orthodox
Church, and as a professor of theology at a large university in the
American South, I teach mostly Christian students. It is only natural
that other Christians should from time to time become aware of my
sympathy for Schuon’s perspective, and when they do so it is under
standable that many of them should be surprised, and in some cases
dismayed—especially those who learn that Schuon was a universal
ist and a leading exponent of the sophia perennis. They wonder what
I could possibly be thinking. How could I compromise my alle
giance to Christ and my fidelity to His Church by supposing that
other religions are equally true, and by looking to Schuon as a spir
itual guide? I do not here wish to go into the second part of this
question, except to say that when I once asked a very high ranking
and well-known hierarch of the Orthodox Church for his comments
on my friendship with Schuon, he replied by referring me to a pas
sage in The Way of a Pilgrim which permits the Christian, in the
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absence of an Orthodox starets, to seek direction “even from a

Saracen”. There is also this to be added: In my first meeting with
Schuon, almost his very first words to me were an admonition that
“Christ is your master”.
But what about the larger matter of other spiritual forms? How
in good conscience can a traditional Christian accept the idea that
there is a “transcendent unity of religions”?1 The first thing to stress
about Schuon’s answer to this question is that it requires no diminu
tion in our convictions as to the stature of Christ. Unlike certain
modernist theologians, who in the interest of fostering harmony
among the religions are prepared to jettison the Incarnation and to
reduce Jesus to purely human and historical categories, Schuon is
adamant in his defense of the traditional doctrine. “The mainspring
of Christianity,” he insists—borrowing as he so often does the famil
iar Patristic formulation—“is that ‘God has become man so that
man may become God.’”2 Indeed, “the whole of Christianity hangs
on these words: Christ is God.”3 As his readers know very well, he
had nothing but the most withering scorn for those who would call
into question this and other traditional doctrines by acting as if they
had in some way been ruled out by a currently fashionable, and
unreflective, materialism, and who have determined accordingly to
purge the Gospels of the supernatural. “Scientific discoveries prove
nothing to contradict the traditional positions of religion,”4 Schuon
writes, and many pages of his prose are dedicated to criticizing the
pretensions of modern scientism and historicism, and to chastising
1. I refer here to the title of one of Schuon’s earliest works, and perhaps his best
known, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Wheaton, Illinois: The Theosophical
Publishing House, 1984).
2. Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way, trans. William Stoddart (London:
Perennial Books, 1981), p. 37. “In Christianity, the Patristic formula of saving
reciprocity is a priceless jewel: ‘God became man that man might become God’;
it is a revelation in the full sense, of the same rank as scripture, which may seem
surprising, but which is a ‘paracletic’ possibility” (Survey of Metaphysics and
Esoterism, trans. Gustavo Polit [Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books,
1986], p. 116).
3. Schuon, Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, trans. G. E. H. Palmer (London: Perennial
Books, 1990), p. 108. Elsewhere he writes, “A Christianity that denies the
Divinity of Christ denies the reason for its own existence” (Transcendent Unity,
p. 99).
4. Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, trans. Lord Northbourne (Bloomington,
Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1984), pp. 37-38.
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those who feel obliged to reduce their religions in the interest of

making them relevant. As for a more recent and somewhat more
nuanced suggestion that we might as good Biblical critics nonethe
less allow for Christ’s having been a kind of shamanistic healer—
though still, of course, without His being God—there is this pointed
reply: “The miracles of Christ are not ‘occult powers’ (siddhis) that
can be exercised or not exercised, but Divine manifestations, there
fore facts that elude all psychological evaluation, and Christ is not a
man who became wise, but Wisdom become man.”5 My aim here is
not to defend these assertions against the objections of the
demythologizers. They have only to investigate such works of
Schuon’s as Logic and Transcendence, or perhaps the excellent chap
ter on “Orthodoxy and Intellectuality” in his Stations of Wisdom, to
discover why scholarly integrity in no way necessitates a sacrifice of
traditional faith. But my interlocutors for the moment are my fellow
Orthodox and other conservative Christians, and my aim is to
emphasize how fully traditional are this perennialist’s Christological
teachings.
Nor are they traditional by accident or inadvertently. As with
every religion about which he wrote, Schuon made it his business to
penetrate deeply into Christianity. He knew its scriptures, its litur
gies, its art, its leading authorities, the lives of its saints, its denomi
national divergences, and its conciliar formularies. And when it
came to Christian teaching on Christ, he always wrote with a full
knowledge of the early Church and its historical controversies. He
was well aware, for example, of the anathemas which Dyophysites,
Monophysites, Aphthartodocetae, Phthartolatrae, Agnoetae,
Akistetae, and Ktistolatrae hurl at one another over the question of
knowing whether Christ is of an incorruptible substance or
whether, on the contrary, his was like other bodies, or whether there
was a part of human ignorance in the soul of Christ, or whether the
body of Christ is uncreated while being at the same time visible, or
whether it was created, and so on. And Schuon was able, like the
Church Fathers before him, to find the essential balance between
these competing extremes. He realized, in other words, that Christ,
“as living form of God, had to show in His humanity supernatural
prerogatives which it would be vain to seek to enumerate, but that
5. Gnosis, pp. 56-57.
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inasmuch as He was incontestably man, He was bound to have cer

tain limits, as is proved by the incident of the fig tree whose sterility
he did not discern from afar”.6 We shall be looking more closely at
certain particulars later. My immediate purpose in citing this pas
sage is simply to show that Schuon’s Christology was by no means
uninformed by the classic Christian sources. On the contrary, he
was fully aware of what he called in one of his most important chap
ters “The Mystery of the Two Natures”,7 and he was tireless in
demonstrating its manifold implications.
But it is here precisely that a certain dilemma arises. If Schuon
really believed that Christ is God, how could he at the same time
have defended the “spiritual equivalence of the great revelations”?8
This seems to many a sheer contradiction. If Christ is both true God
and true man—if the early creeds are right that Jesus of Nazareth
was the incarnate, only-begotten, and eternal Son of God—then it
is surely impossible to condone those religions which ignore or dis
miss His Divinity. Is it not obvious that they must be rejected as false?
Or alternatively, if these other religions are true, does it not follow
that in order to honor them, we should reject instead the early
creeds? Must we not admit, no matter how grudgingly, that the doc
trine of the two natures was a bit of pious excess, a speculative lux
ury conditioned by the now outmoded philosophical categories of
late antiquity, and unjustified in any case by the life of the historical
Jesus?
The first of these alternatives—the repudiation of other reli
gions—has of course always been common among traditional
Christians, and it may take either of two basic forms. Some will say
that the non-Christian is necessarily damned, that there can be no
salvation apart from a conscious, explicit, and active faith in Jesus
Christ and membership in His visible Body, the Church; whereas
6. Schuon, In the Face of the Absolute (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books,
1989), pp. 65-66.
7. Schuon, Christianity/Islam: Essays on Esoteric Ecumenicism, trans. Gustavo Polit
(Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1985), pp. 55-66. It is important
to add that Schuon’s knowledge of Christianity came from more than just
books. His own brother was a Trappist monk, and his many other contacts
included the Orthodox Archimandrite Sophrony, a noted disciple of St Silouan
of the Holy Mountain.
8. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, trans. P. N. Townsend (London:
Perennial Books, 1987), p. 121.
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others will allow that the non-Christian may in certain cases be

saved, but only in spite of the religion he practices and only through
the mercy of a God who overlooks his ignorance in this life and per
mits him to submit to the lordship of Christ after death. As for the
second alternative—the repudiation of the early creeds—this as we
know is the more typical modern approach, an approach which pre
sumes that believing in the Divinity of Christ necessarily goes hand
in hand with religious prejudice and exclusivist bigotry. In recent
conversation with a prominent member of the much-discussed Jesus
Seminar, I was told that while the previous generation of scholars
was doubtless wrong in imposing an Enlightenment worldview on
the New Testament texts, they were nonetheless right in rejecting
the claim that Jesus is God. This is required in part for various tex
tual and historical reasons, the scholar claimed, but his admitted
first concern was to avoid causing offense to those of other faiths.
But are these really the only options? Are we obliged to choose
between an “exclusive dogmatism”, on the one hand, which has
admittedly become “untenable and dangerous in a universe where
everything meets and interpenetrates”, and a “blind and dissolvent
ecumenism”,9 on the other, which forgets that “the religions and
their orthodox developments are inalienable and irreplaceable lega
cies to which nothing essential can be added and from which noth
ing essential can be subtracted”?10 Schuon thinks not, and a large
part of his work was devoted to showing a way out of this dilemma.
The solution for him lies in an esoteric ecumenism—an ecu
menism which is based upon a sacred science of symbols and which
is designed to reveal the inward meaning of traditional religious
doctrines and rites. “When a man seeks to escape from dogmatic
narrowness,” he writes, “it is essential that it be ‘upwards’ and not
‘downwards’: dogmatic form is transcended by fathoming its depths
and contemplating its universal content, and not by denying it in
the name of a pretentious and iconoclastic ideal of ‘pure truth’”.11
A legitimate and spiritually profitable dialogue among the religions
9. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, trans. Peter N. Townsend (London: Perennial

Books, 1975), pp. 4, 5.
10. Schuon, “No Activity without Truth”, The Sword of Gnosis: Metaphysics, Cosmology,
Tradition, Symbolism, ed. Jacob Needleman (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1986), pp. 34-35.
11. Schuon, Stations of Wisdom (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books,
1995), p. 4.
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is one which recognizes, paradoxical though this may seem, that the
traditions are closest to each other and most alike at their centers,
not along their circumferences, and it will therefore always take as
its starting point those dogmas and symbols which are the most dis
tinctive or characteristic in a given religion. Instead of apologetic
and half-embarrassed dismissals, it will be noted for its serious and
sympathetic engagement with each tradition’s most essential and
original teachings, for “that which in each religion provides the key
for total or non-dualist esoterism is not some secret concept of a
heterogeneous character, but is the very presiding idea of the reli
gion.”12 In the case of Christianity, of course, no teaching is more
central or presiding than the Incarnation, and it was therefore
always in full view of this doctrine, understood in its own tradition
al terms, that Schuon wrote about the Christian faith, whether with
respect to some historical or denominational question, or in con
nection with metaphysics and gnosis.13 But what exactly does this
doctrine say?
*
* *
The Christian believes that God became man in Jesus Christ. It
must be understood at once, however, that the Incarnation is a con
siderably more subtle affair than this highly elliptical formulation
suggests—however much Christian piety may have sometimes
wished to simplify, and however often the modern critics have react
ed to this simplification with an equal disregard for the doctrine
itself. God became man, it is true. But as the Fathers of the early
Church helped to clarify, it was not just any aspect of God, or God
as such, who was incarnate in Jesus; nor was it some particular man,
but man as such, that He became; and in becoming man He never
ceased to be God. It is crucial that we not lose sight of these three
12. Esoterism, pp. 25-26.

13. Since “Christianity is founded on the idea and the reality of Divine
Manifestation” (Logic and Transcendence, p. 98), and since “for the Christian, the
overwhelming argument is the Divinity of Christ, and, flowing from this, the
fact that there is an intermediary between God and man in the form of God
made man” (Gnosis, p. 13), it follows that if there is to be a “Christian gnosis”, it
must find “its support a priori, and of necessity, in the mysteries of the
Incarnation and the Redemption, and thus in the Christic Phenomenon as
such” (Esoterism, p. 26).
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important distinctions. Let me restate them in the classic language

of the ecumenical councils.
The tradition teaches us first that it was the Son or Logos, the sec
ond Person of the Holy Trinity, who was incarnate in Jesus, not the
first Person of the Father. On the contrary, the Father is the aitia or
cause of both the Son and the Spirit, whether by filiation or spira
tion; He is the Unity, according to St Gregory the Theologian,
“from whom and to whom the order of the Persons runs its
course”,14 and He remains forever, therefore—despite the
Incarnation—a transcendent and inaccessible mystery. The three
Persons are indeed homoousios or consubstantial, all of them sharing
in the common essence of Divinity. But Christianity explicitly repu
diates the notion that they are therefore the same or interchange
able. To suppose that they are, to confuse or confound or equate
the Persons, is in fact a heresy—the heresy of modalistic monarchi
anism or Sabellianism.
The second distinction pertains to the human dimension of
Christ. According to many early Christian authorities, especially
those associated with the Alexandrian school, the Son’s human
nature is to be regarded as generic, not specific, for it was not the
historical particularity of an individual man, but the essence of man
as such, which was assumed into God when “the Word became
flesh” (Jn 1:14). The humanity of Jesus was in this sense imperson
al or “anhypostatic”—or perhaps “enhypostatic”, to use the techni
cal parlance of Leontius of Byzantium, who preferred to say that
while Jesus had no uniquely human hypostasis, His humanity shared
in the hypostasis of the Divine Son of God. In any case, although
Christ fully participated in every aspect of our physis or nature, sin
only excepted, He was unlike us in not having a human personality,
or substantial agency, as such. What He was, was both Divine and
human, but who He was, was the Logos—His Person being in fact
none other than the eternal second Person of the Trinity, who had
existed from before the foundation of the world. To suppose other
wise, to think that Divinity had been projected somehow into an
independent, and otherwise unexceptional, human being named
Jesus, is also a heresy—the heresy of adoptionism or dynamic
monarchianism.
14. Theological Orations, XLII.15.
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Finally a third point, equally essential to a correct understand

ing of the traditional doctrine, pertains to the relationship between
the two natures in Christ. While the first two distinctions have to do
with the parallel planes of Christ’s Divinity and humanity, the third
concerns the vertical junction or intersection between them, and in
this case the tradition explicitly forbids all attempts to confuse or
identify the Divine and the human. Because of the Incarnation, the
two natures are said to be “hypostatically” or substantially linked in
Christ’s Person, to such a degree that each shares the other’s prop
erties in a communicatio idiomatum. And yet it is impermissible to
think that either nature was effaced by the other in the Person of
the incarnate Word. To suppose that one of the natures could have
been subsumed or eclipsed, to act in particular as though the
humanity of Jesus had been overwhelmed by the Divinity that was
manifest in Him, is to court yet another heresy—in this case, the
heresy of monophysitism.
Schuon was well aware of these technical points. In fact, he
seems to have understood them much better than many traditional
Christians, including even certain doctors of the Church, who in
their zeal to insure our conviction as to Christ’s Divinity have often
risked merging or confusing the God whom “no man hath seen at
any time” (Jn 1:18) with the historical particularity of Jesus of
Nazareth. This remark will probably come as a surprise to some of
my readers, either because they were unaware of the subtlety in the
early Church’s pronouncements or because they are new to the
Schuonian vocabulary. Nevertheless, once one understands his
terms it is clear that Schuon’s teaching on Christ, while perhaps
controversial in certain particulars, is well within the bounds of
Chalcedonian orthodoxy. Let me try to substantiate this claim.15
Like every aspect of his message, Schuon’s Christology must be
seen in light of his metaphysics, and the place to begin is with the
15. My readers will understand that I do not pretend to be complete. What follows
is only a brief and somewhat elliptical sketch of essentials, touching on but a
few of the many relevant passages in Schuon’s work. The allusion above is to
the Definition of Chalcedon, promulgated in A.D. 451 by the fourth of the
Ecumenical Councils. In summing up the distinctions which were touched on
above, this classic statement of faith has since been a standard for the orthodox
understanding of Christ, “the only-begotten Son, who is in two natures, uncon
fusedly, immutably, indivisibly, and inseparably, without the distinction of
natures being taken away by the union” (The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed.
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principial distinction he so often makes in his work between the

Absolute and the Relative, or Âtmâ and Mâyâ. On the one hand
there is That which cannot not be, the necessary, but on the other
hand there is also that which need not be, the contingent or possi
ble. “All other distinctions and valuations derive from this funda
mental distinction.”16 As his readers know, this is a distinction which
gives rise above all to the polarity of transcendence and imma
nence. To know that there is an Absolute, and to understand what
It is, is to know that It is the only Reality. Only the Absolute is
absolute, and in Its utter transcendence It completely eclipses the
Relative, which in comparison is but an illusory nothingness. And
yet to know that this Absolute is the only Reality is to know also that
everything else is in some fashion It, for in Its independence and
freedom from limits, It is equally infinite, and by virtue of this
Infinitude It cannot but give rise to the Relative, in which It is imma
nent. Only Âtmâ truly is, but Mâyâ is the deployment and manifes
tation of Âtmâ. Nothing truly exists except God, and yet whatever
exists truly is God.
According to Schuon, a full grasp of this teaching will oblige us
to recognize that Relativity actually begins within the Divine
Principle Itself: hence what he calls “the key notion of Mâyâ in divi
nis”.17 This in fact is one of the most important and characteristic
features of his message. The Principle is not a monolithic Reality,
but comprises instead an inward or intrinsic differentiation
between two distinct degrees. There is on the one hand the
Henry R. Percival, Vol. XIV of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers [Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983], pp. 264-65). It might be added, for those familiar
with the early Christian schools and major Patristic figures, that Schuon’s per
spective is primarily Alexandrian, not Antiochene, and that his reading of
Chalcedon is largely along Cyrilian lines—in keeping, that is, with the teaching
of the Patriarch St Cyril of Alexandria. I do not however mean to suggest that
Schuon was operating deliberately or self-consciously in these terms. He was a
metaphysician and esoterist, not a theologian, and his point of departure was
the nature of things, not the exoteric doctrines of any given religion. Doctrines
were of interest to him insofar as they might serve as intellectual keys or
methodic supports for those who would know what is.
16. Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics, p. 7.
17. Survey of Metaphysics, p. 121. This “key notion”, which Schuon calls “apparently
absurd but metaphysically essential”, is a hallmark of his perspective. For a
fuller treatment of the idea of dimensions or levels in God, see Chapter 5, “The
Degrees of Reality”, in my Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching
of Frithjof Schuon (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997).
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Absolute as such, the Supreme Reality or “pure Ipseity”;18 but there

is also a second level of Divinity, wherein the pure Absolute, while
transcending all determinations and categories, makes Itself known
in a determinate way, thus anticipating or prefiguring the world. By
virtue of this determination, metaphysically necessary, the Absolute
becomes subject in that measure to Mâyâ; it is precisely this Divine
self-subjection to Relativity which gives rise to the difference, in
Hindu teaching, between Nirguna Brahman and Saguna Brahman, or
in Meister Eckhart’s doctrine between Gottheit and Gott. In Schuon’s
vocabulary it is the difference between Beyond-Being and Being, or
again between the Divine Essence and the Divine Person. But what
ever language we use, the distinction itself is universal and
inescapable. On the one hand, there must be an Absolute, utterly
independent and sovereign, conditioned by nothing, not even by
Itself; and yet, given the very nature of this Absolute, which cannot
but be Infinite, there must also arise a determinate, and subordi
nate, dimension within the Divine Principle, which, though
absolute with respect to the world, is nonetheless relative with
respect to Its Essence. However paradoxical the formulation may
seem, there must also be a “relative Absolute”.19
Even those with no experience in reading Schuon will quickly
see the implications which these distinctions have for Christology. If
one has understood the necessity of levels or dimensions in God, it
should come as no surprise to discover that these dimensions are
directly related, in Christian terms, to the Persons of the Holy
Trinity. Nor should we be surprised to discover that for Schuon it is
the First Person alone who is purely the Absolute, while the Son and
the Holy Spirit—called by St Irenaeus the two “hands” of the
Father—are at the level of the relative Absolute.20 What this means,
of course, is that a certain subordinationism is a necessary ingredi
ent in any adequate understanding of Christ’s Divinity. Even apart
18. This is a formulation to be found in a number of Schuon’s unpublished texts.

19. Schuon, The Play of Masks (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1992),
p. 35. See also Stations of Wisdom, p. 16.
20. St Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 4.20.1. Schuon points out that God the Father
may be pictured as a central point, the Holy Spirit as the radii projected out
from this point, and the Son as the resulting circle. See From the Divine to the
Human, trans. Gustavo Polit and Deborah Lambert (Bloomington, Indiana:
World Wisdom Books, 1982), p. 40. Since my interest here is specifically in
Schuon’s Christology, I must set aside an investigation of his teaching on the
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from His historical incarnation in Jesus, the Logos or Word of God

must be acknowledged as precisely God’s Word, His primal expres
sion and self-determination, and as such, says Schuon, this Logos
cannot help but partake of the metaphysically Relative. The Second
Person cannot escape being the second person. Although absolute
with respect to His creatures, He remains subordinate even so, from
all eternity, to the First Person of “God the Father almighty”
(Nicene Creed). Christ’s Divinity is that of the “lesser Absolute”.21
I realize that traditional Christians will at first be uneasy with this
line of thinking, especially when they hear the word “subordina
tionism”, which continues to this day to be associated with the
much-maligned Origen. It is only natural that upon reading this
exposition many will “hasten to deny Relativity in divinis with the
intention of safeguarding the absoluteness of God”22 and thus, they
suppose, the Divinity of the Son—in spite of the fact that neither is
under attack. But as Schuon often pointed out, in so doing these
Christians are forgetting their own scriptures, where the subordina
tion of the Divine Son is quite clear. It is certainly true that Jesus
proclaimed His Divinity: “I and my Father are one” (Jn 10:30), and
“He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father” (Jn 14:9); and the
Nicene Creed therefore obliges the Christian to affirm the consub
stantiality of these Persons. Nonetheless, the Son also asserted, in
no uncertain terms, that “my Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28),23
a relationship which we readily see, a multitude of other proofs
aside, in the Son’s frequent prayers to the Father. Clearly there is
Trinity as such, which is considerably more subtle than I have suggested above.
Here I have in mind only what he has called the “vertical perspective”, which
“envisages the Hypostases [or Persons] as ‘descending’ from Unity or from the
Absolute”. But there are also two “horizontal” perspectives. See Schuon,
Understanding Islam (Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, 1994), p. 53.
21. Face of the Absolute, p. 40.
22. Logic and Transcendence, pp. 106-107.
23. It might be well to remind the reader that I am writing as an Orthodox
Christian for other traditional Christians. I realize that the many quotations
from St John will prove of little value to modern Biblical critics, who question
the authenticity of many of Christ’s sayings in this Gospel and find it the least
reliable portrait of the “historical Jesus”. But one cannot do everything at once,
and a critique of these critics’ assumptions, alluded to earlier, lies beyond the
scope of this article. My specific aim in using John at this point is to accentuate
the fact that even in the Gospel with the “highest” Christology, subordination
remains.
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One who is greater than Christ, and we must therefore conclude

that there is a kind of hierarchy within God Himself.
Some traditional Christians, in hopes of protecting our faith in
the Second Person from the corrosive effects of the Arian heresy,
which denied His Divinity, have tried to make sense of this hierar
chy by identifying any hint of subordination with Christ’s human
nature alone. When reference is made to the superiority of the
Father, or when prayers are directed to the First Person, it is simply
“Jesus the man”, they contend, who is talking. But as the history of
Christian doctrine makes clear, this is to risk falling prey in turn to
the views of Nestorius, who divided Christ into two separate persons,
assuming falsely that the Son’s human “half” could act independ
ently of His Divinity, and it is to forget what the Council at Ephesus
so forcefully taught in response to this heresy: that the two natures
cohere undividedly in the single Person of the Logos. To put the
matter in less technical terms, the conciliar formulations require us
to say that whatever deeds Jesus may have performed, and whatever
words He spoke, were deeds done and words spoken by the eternal
Son of God. When Jesus was born, it was God the Son who was born,
so that the Virgin Mary may be addressed as the Theotokos or Mother
of God. Similarly when Jesus wept and when He died, it was the
Second Person who wept and died, albeit in a manner befitting
Divinity and hence impassibly.
Schuon is therefore perfectly orthodox in explaining that “if
Christ addresses a prayer to His Father, it is not solely by reason of
His human nature; it is also by reason of the Relativity of the uncre
ated Logos”.24 He continues:
The words of Christ announcing His subordination are often
attributed to His human nature alone, but this delimitation is arbi
trary and interested, for the human nature is bound by its Divine
content; if it is part of the Son, it must manifest that content. The
fact that this human nature exists and that its expressions manifest
its subordination, and by the same token the hypostatic subordi
nation of the Son, shows that the interpretation of the Son as the
first Relativity confronting the purely Absolute Father is not con
trary to Scripture and is inherently irrefutable.25

25. Logic and Transcendence, pp. 98-99.
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James Cutsinger
Nor is this interpretation in any way contrary to Patristic tradition,

which forbids (as we have seen) any modalistic confusion of
Persons, and which in so doing implicitly acknowledges that the
Persons are intrinsically different—different, that is, independently
of their extrinsic roles in the Divine economy. And if they are intrin
sically different, they must also be hierarchically different. For
unless words have no meaning it is absurd to think that the Son and
Holy Spirit could be as absolute as their cause, or that the two hands
could be on the same level as the person who wields them, or yet
again that a son should be as original as the one who begat him. It
is absurd in other words to suppose that the infinite simplicity of the
pure Absolute could be repeated in an equally infinite and absolute
duplicate. We must admit instead that Christ’s Divinity is derivative,
and that what one encounters in Jesus is not the Divine Essence
Itself, but Its self-determination at the level of Being.
I turn now to the second and third of our Christological dis
tinctions, which may I think be usefully treated together. Our task
at this point is to examine more closely the mode of Christ’s human
ity and the nature of its union with the Logos. As explained earlier,
two dogmatic points are essential to the traditional view on these
questions. When God the Son became man, say the Fathers, it was
not some particular man, but man as such, that He became, and in
becoming man in this sense He never ceased to be God. The Divine
humanity was not limited to the individual order, and yet the dif
ference between the two natures was not eclipsed by their union.
Here once more a careful reading of Schuon makes it clear that his
teaching was in full accord with the Christian tradition.
Before we examine the specific terms of that tradition, however,
another short metaphysical excursus is in order. I have called atten
tion to the distinction which Schuon makes within the Divine
Principle between the Absolute as such and the relative Absolute,
and have explained that the Divinity of the Son corresponds to the
latter. The Second Person takes second place to the First, and for
this reason the Logos must be situated below the Divine Essence at
the level of Being—a level which anticipates or prefigures the
domain of creation or manifestation. For “all things were made by
Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (Jn
1:3). A similar discrimination must now be established between two
additional degrees of Reality, this time within the formal or created
100
universe. This is a distinction, in the Schuonian vocabulary,

between the manifested Principle and manifestation as such. Even
as manifestation is prefigured in the Principle, so the Principle is
projected or prolonged in manifestation, and the result is “the
celestial order”, or simply “Heaven”. Finally, beneath this heavenly
level, there is a fourth and final degree, and this is the “natural” or
“profane” world, or simply the “Earth”.26 According to Schuon, any
metaphysically adequate understanding of the Incarnation will have
to take into account both of these manifested degrees. For in enter
ing the world of becoming as man, the Son of God became what we
are, but without in any way ceasing to be what He is, and it can
therefore be said that He was still in Heaven though He was present
on Earth. He was at once the Principle manifest, and the manifest
Principle. “It is not as man,” says Schuon, “that Christ is God; but on
the other hand the fact that He is man does not prevent His being
really God.”27 Let us look now to see whether the tradition says the
same thing.
According to the Bible “the Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14). But
just what does this mean? It means, the Fathers say, that the Divine
Son of God condescended to live the life of a real human being,
becoming “consubstantial with us as to His humanity, being like us
in every respect apart from sin” (Definition of Chalcedon).
Whatever additional fine points we shall have to insist on, any
attempt to deny this humanity must be rejected as heresy. Schuon
was well aware of this point, concurring fully—as we shall see
momentarily—with the Church’s repudiation of docetism and
heretical gnosticism. He too rejects the claim, in other words, that
Christ was a pure spirit and only seemed to be man. But at the same
time he was also of one mind with the Fathers in realizing that a
bare admission of Christ’s manhood still leaves open the important
question of its mode, and it was obvious to him, as it was to the early
Church, that however genuine the Son’s human nature might be, it
was nevertheless “of a different essence from that of the ordinary
man, and this by reason of the intimate penetration of all His
modalities by the Universal”. For the “very substance of the individ
uality”—the very thing which distinguishes each of us as human
26. Survey of Metaphysics, p. 19.

27. Eye of the Heart, pp. 153-54.
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James Cutsinger
egos and agents—was “transmuted by the Real Presence” of

Divinity.28
Thinking only of these and other similar passages in Schuon’s
writings, some Christian readers have charged their author with
ignoring the historical particularity of the Incarnation, and with
focusing too exclusively on the supra-temporal Logos or cosmic
Christ. But is this really fair? Schuon was doubtless less inclined
than many contemporary Christian scholars to emphasize the “his
torical Jesus”—but then so were the Bible and other orthodox
sources, with which he was in complete unanimity. One recalls, for
example, the words which Christ spoke to Nicodemus: “No man
hath ascended up to Heaven but He that came down from Heaven,
even the Son of Man which is in Heaven” (Jn 3:13). However else we
might wish to gloss this remarkable text, there is no escaping the
fact that a celestial Man, who could be simultaneously present on
two distinct planes of Reality, must have differed from the rest of us
in much more than degree. Or consider Christ’s miracles, especial
ly perhaps those involving His manipulation of material substances
and those effected by contact with His physical body. Here, too, it
seems obvious that the human dimension of His incarnate Person,
although truly human—and although subject, at some important
level, to the conditions of a fallen environment—must have
retained nonetheless at least some of the powers and privileges of
Eden. Or yet again one thinks of the incarnate Word’s ability to ren
der Itself invisible and weightless, disappearing in the midst of
crowds (Lk 4:30) and walking on water (Mt 14:25). In these and
numerous other such cases, it is obvious that Christ was free from
terrestrial and temporal constraints in some way—certainly to an
extent we are not—and hence that the properties and powers of His
manhood, genuine though it was, were ontologically affected by its
union with the Logos.
“The Divine man is ‘true God and true man.’” With this claim
no orthodox Christian will wish to quarrel. But Schuon is surely
right to add that “being ‘God’, and despite being ‘man’, He is not
‘man’ in the same way as other men are who are not ‘God’”.29 No
less a figure than St Athanasius concurs:
28. Eye of the Heart, pp. 104, 105.

29. Eye of the Heart, p. 106.
102
A man cannot transport things from one place to another merely

by thinking about them; nor can you and I move the sun and stars
by sitting at home and looking at them. With the Word of God in
His human nature, however, it was otherwise. His body was for
Him not a limitation, but an instrument, so that He was both in it
and in all things, and outside all things, resting in the Father alone.
At one and the same time—this is the wonder—as man He was liv
ing a human life, and as Word He was sustaining the life of the uni
verse.30
I have referred to Christ’s words and mentioned His miracles, but
the wonder of which the saint is here speaking can be apprehend
ed most clearly perhaps in the Transfiguration, when “His face did
shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light” (Mt 17:2).
What we see in this account, say the Orthodox Fathers, is resplen
dent and irrefutable evidence of what Christ always was in Himself.
For the transformation on Tabor involved no change in Him whose
eternal and celestial glory persisted throughout His earthly life; it
was a transformation instead in the eyes of His apostles, who were
now able to see His human nature as it had always been. Thus
Schuon’s observation:
To recognize that the humanity of Christ is the vehicle of the
Divine nature amounts to saying that if the human side is in one
respect truly human, it is so in a way that is nonetheless different
from the humanity of ordinary men. In a certain sense and a priori
the Divine Presence transfigures, or transubstantializes, the human
nature; the body of Christ is already, here below, what celestial bod
ies are, with the sole difference that it is nevertheless affected by
some of the accidents of earthly life.31
God became man. But since it was God who was this man, the man
cannot but have shimmered with the Divinity of His other nature,
and for this reason we are obliged to affirm that even His human
nature was not quite the same as our own. In becoming man, says St
Gregory of Nyssa, the Word of God “took our nature within
30. On the Incarnation, XVII. Some may object that despite its saintly provenance,
this passage comes too close to the Apollinarian heresy, which denied that
Christ had a real human soul. It is clear, however, that the “body” is for St
Athanasius what the “flesh” is for St Paul: the psychosomatic ensemble of the
individual man as a whole.
31. Christianity/Islam, pp. 56-57.
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Himself, so that the human should be deified by this mingling with

God. The stuff of our nature was entirely sanctified by Christ.”32
There remains, however, one final distinction. The Person of
Christ’s Divinity and the unique mode of His manhood having been
underscored, we are still faced with the question as to the union
between them. As we have just seen, the tradition insists that the
Son’s humanity was not of an ordinary or purely limited order. But
it must now be added that the Fathers also eschew the opposite
extreme: the Christian is not permitted to believe that Jesus was a
man like all others, a man merely chosen and empowered by God,
but neither may he deny that He was a man altogether. For even
though the human nature of Christ was transmuted, transfigured,
or “transubstantialized” through its union with God, that nature
remained truly and recognizably human. The Son of God really
lived as a man, and His willing submission to the accidents and con
tingencies of the terrestrial order was not an illusion—or in any case
no more an illusion than that order itself.33 This, too, Christianity
affirms and requires.
What is true for the tradition is also true for Schuon. It is evident
once again, from his many references to the Incarnation, that he
was thoroughly steeped in the classic sources and arguments, and
that he too was prepared to emphasize a real human nature in
Christ. As I mentioned earlier, some Christians appear to have con
cluded from the fact that Schuon was an esoterist and a teacher of
gnosis that he was a gnostic in the ancient sectarian sense, and per
haps for this reason they have been unwilling to study him closely
enough to see how consistent his teaching is on this point with the
Church. Jesus Christ, Schuon says unequivocally, “was incontestably
man”, and therefore “He was bound to have certain limits”,34 the
claims of heretical docetists notwithstanding. “There is no doubt,”
he continues, “that the Man-God is, in a certain respect and by def
inition, a human individual; otherwise He would not be a man in
32. Against Apollinarius, II.

33. The point of this qualification is to remind us that everything below the level
of the pure Absolute partakes to some extent in the illusory nature of Mâyâ. At
the same time, however, there is no denying “the objective homogeneity of the
cosmic environment” (Spiritual Perspectives, p. 114). “A mountain is a mountain
and not a dream, or it would be in the void that ants would be crossing rocks
and climbing slopes” (Gnosis, p. 57).
104
any sense, and it would be impossible to speak of Him in any way.”

Being ourselves of a formal and individual order, an individual form
is necessary to ensure us access to God. This in effect was the whole
point of the Incarnation: God became man precisely “for us men
and for our salvation” (Nicene Creed). Moreover, this “individuali
ty—the presence of which, in some mode or other, is an obvious
thing in every man, since the human state is an individual one—
cannot but be what it is by definition”, namely a condition of limi
tation. It is in the nature of things, says Schuon, that any human
being must possess “the limitative attributes which constitute his
essential definition, and failing which he would not be a human
individual but something else”.35 Man is not God, to say the least; he
is one kind of creature, and his distinction both from God and
other creatures will necessarily exhibit itself in his human form and
his manner of being. There should therefore be nothing unexpect
ed in the fact that Jesus was limited in various ways, whether we
think of His admitted ignorance in certain situations—the episode
of the fig tree has been mentioned already—or the physical hard
ships to which His body was subject, or His real human emotions.
Nor is it strange that He should have said of Himself, speaking
by virtue of His human nature, “Why callest thou Me good? There
is none good save one, that is God” (Mt 19:17). “We may compare
these Gospel words,” Schuon observes, “with the following saying
from an Upanishad: ‘the essence of man is made of desire.’”
Schuon’s point is by no means that Christ, a celestial and sinless
man, was subject to unruly passions; nevertheless He did assume a
real human soul, “which, as such, necessarily comprises all the con
stituent elements and all the essential attributes of individuality”.
Since to be a man means to have a mind which can reason, a will
which can choose, and emotions which are able to feel, it must be
said as a consequence that Christ possessed a genuine human “psy
chism”, which included something “analogous to what in ordinary
mortals we call ‘desire’”. While admittedly we “cannot know the
dimensions which individual facts, thanks to their transcendent
quality, have for the ‘human God’”,36 it is very clear from the Bible
35. Eye of the Heart, pp. 103, 105.

36. Eye of the Heart, pp. 104, 105. It is of interest to note that after more than fifteen
hundred years, many Orthodox authorities have concluded that the division
between them and the Copts on these very delicate points may have been strict
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James Cutsinger
that Jesus could truly think and feel as a man, being “tempted as we
are, and yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Whether therefore we
look at the matter as metaphysicians or simply as readers of Holy
Scripture, the inadequacies of monophysitism should be obvious:
Christ was truly human, or else the Incarnation is a meaningless
term. In all this, once again, Schuon agreed with the Fathers.
*
* *
Schuon was of one mind with the Fathers in much more than
the details, however. He was like them as well in his recognition that
the Incarnation presents the human mind with a puzzle or paradox,
which no discursive analysis will ever suffice to resolve. The
Christian tradition has always insisted that the Reality behind its
central beliefs infinitely transcends the categories and terms that
have been fixed in its dogmas; and in the case of Christology in par
ticular, the dogmatic formulas of the Councils have a largely
apophatic or koanic function, telling us primarily what should not
be taught regarding the incarnate Son. No unilateral affirmation
may be fully acknowledged, for whatever is said about Christ must
be at once taken back—and we are left to wonder in silence. In the
words of the Orthodox Vespers for Christmas, “A marvelous wonder
has this day come to pass. Nature is made new, and God becomes
man. That which He was, He has remained, and that which He was
not, He has taken upon Himself, while suffering neither confusion
nor division.”37
The mystery of the two natures is a wonder indeed, and it would
be foolish to think that one might give it a conclusive or definitive
explanation or discern the full range of its meaning. Indeed, for all
his dialectical efforts, Schuon was the first to admit the impossibili
ty of ever finding the appropriate words: “One may indeed try, in
human language, to specify in what manner the Divine man is indi
ly terminological. In recent conversation with an Orthodox monk—and read

er of Schuon—the Coptic Patriarch, His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, admitted
for his part that the Orthodox and Oriental Christologies are “merely points of
departure and are not contradictory”. The Copts, long thought to be mono
physite, had never meant to deny Christ’s continuing humanity in its incarnate
union with the Logos, but only to stress its Divine uniqueness.
37. The Festal Menaion, p. 291.
106
vidual and in what manner He is not”—or, we might add, in what

manner He is Divine and in what manner not—“but it will always be
impossible to express this adequately and completely, because the
infinitely complex and apparently paradoxical realities involved
transcend the bounds of simple human reason, of which language
is the instrument”.38 Metaphysically, the Incarnation means that the
Principle has entered manifestation in order to become what It is
not. But since this Principle is on the one hand the only thing that
exists, and since on the other hand whatever exists is the Principle,
the boundaries to be crossed in Its apparent descent are as it were
in constant movement, shifting and vanishing according to per
spective and spiritual strategy. There is certainly a pattern or rhythm
to this movement, and it can be discerned by the Intellect; but it can
never be adequately put into words.39
It therefore goes without saying that my aim in this chapter is
by no means to fathom the full depth of the doctrine, nor is it even
to present a complete picture of the Schuonian teachings on
Christ. Not the least of the matters that must remain unexamined
are the far-reaching implications of Christology for the spiritual
life. We get just a taste of these in Schuon’s observation that “the
function of the historical Christ is to awaken and actualize the
inward Christ, the Heart-Intellect”, which itself is “true man and
38. Eye of the Heart, p. 106. For those with the need to know and the ears to hear,
there is an important lesson here mutatis mutandis when it comes to assessing
the precise stature of any great saint or sage. Since “every spiritual master, by
his knowledge and his function and by the graces attaching to them, is myste
riously assimilated to his prototypes and, both through them and independ
ently of them, to the primordial Prototype, the founding Avatâra” (Logic and
Transcendence, p. 227), it is to be expected that the genuine master, whether
Christian or otherwise, should participate at some level in the antinomic or par
adoxical qualities resulting from that “union without confusion” which is the
mystery of the two natures. We should never be surprised at finding in such a
figure certain puzzling or even scandalous features, and we should realize that
it will never be an easy task to determine whether in any given instance these
are a part of the foolishness with which the Divine Wisdom must appear in the
world, or the result instead of the inevitable limitations which are marks of the
human condition. In a sense this entire article is meant to underscore this les
son.
39. “‘God became man in order that man might become God’: the Absolute
became Relativity in order that the relative might become absolute. This para
phrase of the Patristic formula suggests, with no more and no less felicity than
the formula itself, a metaphysical situation which it would be difficult to express
in a few words” (Logic and Transcendence, p. 104n).
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James Cutsinger
true God”,40 and that “the Son, Second Person of the Trinity, is
man universalized” while “Jesus Christ is God individualized”,41 or
again that “man’s problem is that he is at one and the same time
accident and Substance and that he needs to know exactly in what
respect he is the one or the other, and how he must turn this dou
ble nature to account”.42 The mystery of the two natures is a mys
tery inherent in our own deepest selves, and Christology is a matter
finally of esoteric anthropology. Here however, in the concluding
section of this chapter, I would like to direct our attention, not to
the spiritual path as such, but to the multiplicity of spiritual
forms—not to Christ and the Self, but to Christ and the non-
Christian religions.
As I explained at the outset, my fellow Orthodox and other tra
ditional Christians are often surprised when they learn that I share
the Schuonian perspective. How can a Christian accept the idea
that other religious traditions are true while at the same time
remaining faithful to Jesus? Many are convinced, without even read
ing his books, that Schuon—in typical modernist fashion—must
have somehow ignored or distorted their tradition, and that the
doctrine of the Incarnation in particular has been misrepresented
or misunderstood. Do the Fathers not tell us that Jesus is “the only-
begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all ages”
(Nicene Creed)? And did not He Himself say that “I am the way, the
truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me” (Jn
14:6)? Surely, many Christians would argue, this is decisive proof
that no other path to salvation is possible.
It is with such objections and protests in mind that I have devot
ed the largest part of this discussion to a detailed treatment of
Schuon’s teaching on Christ, and I hope it is clear by now that what
ever else one might say about his message in general, it is absurd to
think that his Christology came from neglect or misinformation. By
moving back and forth between his own words and those of the
Church, one can see very clearly that his understanding of the two
natures, based upon a close acquaintance with the traditional
sources, was perfectly orthodox in all the dogmatic essentials, even
40. Esoterism, pp. 38-39.

41. Transcendent Unity, p. 109.
42. Logic and Transcendence, p. 84.
108
judging the matter according to strictly exoteric criteria. This of

course is precisely what we would expect of the genuine esoterist,
who knows that the “truth does not deny forms from the outside,
but transcends them from within”.43 However he may assist us in
deepening or interiorizing our comprehension of a given spiritual
world, or a given traditional doctrine, his message will be distin
guished by its orthodoxy, and hence by its fidelity to the central and
presiding ideas of that world.
But if all this is true—if the Christological teachings of Schuon
are essentially orthodox—one begins to wonder, in view of his
explicit and distinctive universalism, why so many Christians have
nonetheless thought that a traditional faith in Christ obliges them
to repudiate the possibility of other saving religions; and it is diffi
cult to avoid the conclusion that they themselves must have failed to
understand the actual terms of the doctrine. In fact, although
Schuon never put it this way, one is inclined to go further yet: not
only have such Christians failed to comprehend the deepest signifi
cance of their most important dogma; the understanding they do
claim to have—however shocking it may sound for me to level this
charge—is itself heretical. It is the result in fact of three heresies all
wrapped into one.
Consider what the Christian exclusivist says. Salvation is impos
sible, he asserts, apart from a conscious, explicit, and active faith in
Jesus Christ, for Jesus is the only man in history who at the same
time was God, and it therefore follows that He alone can rescue
men from sin and death. This reasoning can be expressed in the
form of a syllogism: God alone can save; Jesus is God; therefore,
43. Spiritual Perspectives, p. 118. In emphasizing that Schuon’s Christology is in

accord with the letter of the Patristic formulas, I do not wish to imply that he
accepted all the opinions of the Church Fathers, nor all the more that most of
them would have approved of his universalism. Even allowing for the fact that
the Fathers knew very little de facto about other authentic traditions apart from
Judaism, we must admit in most cases that a de jure exclusivism marks their writ
ing. The words of St Justin the Philosopher are by no means unique, but like
those of St Nikolai Velimirovich in our own time (see note 61 below), they are
exceptional. According to Justin, “We have been taught that Christ is the First-
begotten of God, the Logos of which every race of man partakes. Those who
lived in accordance with the Logos are Christians, even though they were called
godless, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus. . . . Those who
lived by the Logos, and those who so live now, are Christians, fearless and unper
turbed” (First Apology, 46).
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James Cutsinger
only Jesus can save. Now certainly the Schuonian will not object to
the first proposition, for it is undeniably true that there is no possi
bility of salvation apart from Divine grace and the initiative of
Heaven. The problem arises with the exclusivist’s understanding of
the second claim, the minor premise of the syllogism. Jesus Christ is
certainly God, but the exclusivist takes the further step of supposing
that the verbal copula functions like the sign of identity in a math
ematical equation, and hence that the nouns in the minor premise
can be reversed: not only is Jesus God, but God is also Jesus. As a
result, the unique and eternal nature of the Son’s Divinity is trans
posed onto the plane of history; the one-and-only quality of Him
who was incarnate, “the only begotten Son of God”, is confused with
the temporal and spatial particularity of His incarnation in Jesus,
and His singularity in divinis is conflated with an event of a strictly
factual or historical order.44 Now of course, to affirm that God is
fully present in Christ is by no means false, and there is no question
as to the formula’s great rhetorical power. But the homiletic or
kerygmatic value of this expression should not blind us to its dialec
tical weakness, for as an ellipsis it risks identifying the Beyond-Being
of the pure Absolute with the individuality of a particular human
being.
Such an identification is the consequence of three very serious
errors, each the result of collapsing an important distinction, and all
strongly condemned—as we have seen—by the Christian tradition.
To use Schuon’s terms, those who thus reason have confused the rel
ative Absolute with Its principial Essence, they have failed to distin
guish between the Principle and manifestation, and they have
forgotten that the manifest Principle is not the same as manifesta
tion as such. They have not understood, in other words, that ortho
dox Christology is a “combination of three polarities—man and
God, terrestrial man and Divine man, hypostatic God and essential
God”.45 Or again, in the language of the early Church, they have
identified the First and Second Persons of the Holy Trinity, they have
44. The truth is that “only the Divine manifestation ‘is the Self’, to the exclusion of
every human counterfeit”. But this is reduced to meaning: “only such and such
a Divine manifestation—to the exclusion of all others—is the Self” (Gnosis, p.
68). This of course is not to deny a certain symbolic resonance between the his
torical singularity of Jesus’s life and the eternal uniqueness of the Logos.
110
failed to discriminate between Christ’s Divinity and His humanity,

and they have forgotten that Jesus was no ordinary man. Reverting
to the technical vocabulary used by historians of doctrine, we must
conclude that the exclusivist’s point of view is the product of three
major heresies: modalistic monarchianism, monophysitism, and
dynamic monarchianism. Ironically enough, it is only because he is
three times a heretic that he believes himself to be so orthodox!
Now I realize that this is quite a bold allegation, and I must con
fess at once that I have somewhat overstated my case. In truth I am
very far from supposing that, at the level of pious practice, there is
anything wrong with an exclusive fidelity to Jesus as the “only Son”,
and I am in no way proposing that the tenets of the sophia perennis
should be adopted as de fide dogmas. I recall in this regard a very
serious and pious priest who once told me that if he did not believe
that Jesus of Nazareth was the only way to be saved, he could not
believe in Jesus at all. Whether or not we are metaphysicians, there
is clearly no point in disparaging such a faith, or in deliberately dis
tracting such a person from the “one thing needful” (Luke 10:42)
by suggesting that he should concern himself with philosophical
and theological subtleties. Schuon always said that the whole point
of his books and other writings was the salvation of souls, and he
would never have countenanced that pseudo-intellectual one
upmanship which presumes to tell people what they have no need
of knowing; he would also have been adamant in reminding the
jñâni or intellectual that “intelligence and metaphysical certainty
alone do not save, and do not of themselves prevent titanic falls”.46
Furthermore, in asserting that the exclusivists have misunder
stood the Incarnation, I do not mean to suggest that the whole of
the Christian tradition can be reduced to this single doctrine, cen
tral and indispensable though it is. A religion is much more than
any one, or even all, of its dogmatic beliefs; as Schuon often
observed, religions are like planets or worlds, each bearing the
imprint of a Divine archetype and each serving to mold, not just the
arts and sciences of a given civilization, but the very souls of those
who inhabit it. Much of his work was devoted to explaining the vari
46. Spiritual Perspectives, p. 145. Elsewhere he writes, “Even if our writings had on
the average no other result than the restitution for some of the saving barque
that is prayer, we would owe it to God to consider ourselves profoundly satis
fied” (Play of Masks, p. vii).
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James Cutsinger
eties of religious partisanship which inevitably result from this fact,

especially in the climate of the Abrahamic traditions, and he was
always the first to allow for the existence of a “human margin”,47
where the believer has a certain right to his ego and hence to cer
tain sentimental predispositions and individual preferences.
Schuon taught, moreover, that what is true of the human beings in
a given traditional collectivity must be true in a sense of that tradi
tion itself. In the interest of saving as many men as possible, reli
gions take on something of the individuality of their adherents, and
therefore “every religion by definition wants to be the best, and
‘must want’ to be the best”.48 There is thus considerably more to the
exclusivist’s attitude toward other faiths than any given believer’s
comprehension (or not) of traditional Christology, and it is in no
way surprising that a majority of Christians, like their counterparts
in other religions, should wish to cling to the notion that they alone
have the keys of the Kingdom.
Indeed, this is all the more understandable, according to
Schuon, when one considers the esoteric and initiatic nature of the
central Christian mysteries, and when one measures them against
the capacity and expectations of the average believer, who needs to
see things in terms of clear-cut choices between God and the world.
The “simultaneity of antinomic aspects”49 in any adequate formula
tion of Christ’s two natures must unavoidably elude such a person,
and for this reason, in order to appeal to “a mentality more volitive
than contemplative”, the Christian theologian has in most cases set
tled for “a logic that is dogmatically coagulative and piously unilat
eral”50—one that accentuates “the most important truth to the
detriment of essential metaphysical shades of meaning”.51 Of course,
47. Face of the Absolute, pp. 65-105.

48. Christianity/Islam, p. 151.
51. Face of the Absolute, p. 75. That the two natures are indivisibly but unconfusedly
united in the one Person of Christ (see note 15 above) is a quintessentially
dialectical formula, in the very saying of which one must conflate complemen
tary opposites, neither of which is true on its own. In order to approach the
doctrine discursively, the theologian is therefore obliged, in any given rhetori
cal moment, to stress either the unity or the diversity, giving the appearance of
a competition between the two truths, and traditionally a kind of victory has
always been accorded to the relatively more important half-truth of unity. “‘The
Father is greater than I’, but ‘I and the Father are one’. Theology does not draw
112
if Christianity “were not a religion but a sapiential doctrine, it might

rest content with describing why and how the Absolute manifests
Itself. But being a religion,” Schuon observes, “it must enclose every
thing within its fundamental idea of manifestation”.52 And so it is
that the Absolute in Itself becomes reduced to the level of historical
fact: Jesus is God, and therefore God is Jesus—completely, uniquely,
and irrevocably. From this point, of course, it is but a very small step
to the claim that a conscious and sacramental connection with this
particular fact is the condition sine qua non for salvation.
Nevertheless, having conceded the rights of the Christian faith
ful to their simplifications, and thus their exoteric exclusivism, I
must at the same time continue to insist that the conciliar formulas
of the early Church by no means require the Christian to adopt an
exclusivist stance. Truth has its rights, greater indeed than those of
any man, and the truth in this case means calling the bluff on those
theologians and other Christian believers who would presume to
criticize Schuon for neglecting or misinterpreting their tradition.
Other justifications and explanations aside, it means facing up to
the fact that there is simply no good Christological reason for think
ing that Christianity is the only means of salvation.53 Charity cer
all of the consequences implied by the former, and it draws too many from the
latter” (Divine to the Human, p. 40n).
52. Logic and Transcendence, p. 98. According to Schuon, there has always been a
kind of tension between “the eminently esoteric character of primitive
Christianity” and the fact that it was providentially destined to be a world reli
gion, and therefore open to all men. “The essentially initiatory character of
Christianity is apparent from certain features of the first importance, such as
the Doctrine of the Trinity, the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and more particu
larly, the use of wine in this rite, or again from the use of purely esoteric expres
sions such as ‘Son of God’ and especially ‘Mother of God’. If exoterism is
‘something that is at the same time indispensable and accessible to all’ [René
Guénon], Christianity cannot be exoteric in the usual sense of the word, since
it is in reality by no means accessible to everyone, although in fact, by virtue of
its outward application, it is binding upon everyone” (Transcendent Unity, pp.
137, 132).
53. The exclusivist will perhaps respond that there are other scriptural and tradi
tional reasons for arguing that a rejection is called for, and this I concede,
though I cannot even begin addressing them here. I can only briefly mention
Schuon’s comments on two frequently cited Biblical texts. When it is written
(says Schuon) that there is “none other name under Heaven given among men
whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12), either the phrase “under Heaven” is
meant to indicate the “providential sphere of expansion and life of the
Christian civilization”, or else the name Jesus must be regarded as “a symbolic
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James Cutsinger
tainly demands that we be indulgent toward a simple piety, but

when the admitted virtues of simplicity become the pretext for a
pretentious fideism, the esoterist has every right to object. For
nowhere do the Ecumenical Councils require us to think that the
uniqueness of the Word in His eternal relation with the Father is to
be attributed to the temporal or spatial facticity of His incarnation
in Jesus, and nowhere therefore does the traditional understanding
of Christ’s Person and natures require the repudiation of other spir
itual worlds. If anything, the implications are just the reverse. As
preposterous as this may sound to many of my fellow Christians,
what a truly orthodox Christology “requires”—if such a word is per
missible in this context—is a full acknowledgment of the transcen
dent unity of all orthodox religions.
I have gone to considerable lengths to demonstrate that
Schuon’s teachings on Christ are compatible with those of the early
Church, and that his universalism is therefore—at the very least—a
legitimate Orthodox theologoumenon or theological opinion. But in
the final analysis it is not a question of compatibility alone; it is not
just the case, in other words, that the doctrine of the double nature
can be conveniently reconciled with the perennialist perspective
through some sort of artificial or Procrustean adaptation. On the
contrary, the mystery of Christ is at the very heart of that perspec
tive, serving in a sense as a key to Schuon’s entire approach to the
world’s religions. God has become man in order that man might
become God; the Absolute has become relative in order that the rel
ative might become Absolute; the Self has become ego in order that
the ego might become the Self; Nirvâna has become samsâra in
order that samsâra might become Nirvâna. As his readers know, we
designation of the Word Itself, which would imply that in the world there is one
name only, the Word, by which men can be saved, whatever the Divine mani
festation designated by this name in any particular case, be it ‘Jesus’, ‘Buddha’,
or any other”. One must of course remember that the scriptural term “name”
signifies primarily authority and is not to be confused in such contexts with the
proper name of a given individual. As for Christ’s words that “this Gospel of the
Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and
then shall the end come” (Mt 24:14), Schuon points out that this saying relates
to “cyclic conditions in which separating barriers between the different tradi
tional worlds will have disappeared”, and that from this point of view “‘Christ’,
who for the Hindus will be the Kalki Avatâra and for the Buddhists the
Bodhisattva Maitreya, will restore the Primordial Tradition” (Transcendent Unity,
pp. 80, 85).
114
have here a continuing theme that runs throughout this author’s

teaching. For wherever one looks, “Reality has entered into noth
ingness so that nothingness might become Real”,54 and “the Essence
has become form in order that the form may become Essence; all
Revelation is a humanization of the Divine for the sake of the deifi
cation of the human”.55
What we thus find are repeated reminders of the decisive and
universal significance of the Incarnation. My fellow Christians have
sometimes told me that the real meaning of this dogma is distorted
in the work of Schuon and other perennial philosophers, and that
in spite of all their protestations to the contrary, they end up ignor
ing the real importance of Christ. But I have never understood how
one could possibly take this criticism seriously. Far from being con
stricted or reduced in its scope, Christ’s significance is so far
expanded in the Schuonian vision that one might well have won
dered instead, apart from a careful reading of his books, what role
is left for the other religions. If anything, it is their adherents who
might ostensibly have had better cause to complain. For Schuon
leaves no doubts on this score: “All genuine religions are
Christian”;56 or again, “every truth is necessarily manifested in
terms of Christ and on His model”,57 for “there is no truth nor wis
dom that does not come from Christ”.58 Now of course what he
means is that “the other religions are ‘Christian’ inasmuch as they
have the universal Christ, who is the Word that inspires all
Revelation”.59 Schuon is not saying, in other words, that in order to
be a true Muslim or Hindu, one must identify the man Jesus with
God; but then, as we have seen, neither should the discerning
Christian acquiesce in so simple an equation. God and man have
been united in Jesus Christ, but unless we choose to be heretics, the
Christian tradition forbids us to think that the manhood in question
54. Stations of Wisdom, p. 133.

55. Face of the Absolute, pp. 71-72. Taking just the Abrahamic religions, for example,
and considering “the revelation on Sinai, the Messianic redemption, [and] the
descent of the Koran”, in every case what one sees are “so many examples of
the ‘Subjectivizing objectivation’” by virtue of which “Âtmâ is ‘incarnated’ in
Mâyâ, and Mâyâ expresses Âtmâ” (Spiritual Perspectives, p. 107). See also Light on
the Ancient Worlds, pp. 140-41.
56. Gnosis, p. 67.
57. Stations of Wisdom, p. 49.
58. Gnosis, p. 105.
59. Transcendent Unity, p. 81.
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James Cutsinger
was merely that of a historical individual, or that the Divinity was

that of the pure Absolute. Rather we ourselves are that man in our
essential humanity, and the God who assumed us into Himself was
the Divine Logos or Word, in and through whom the inaccessible
Essence makes Itself known to all.
As I have noted so often, Schuon was a master not only of gnosis
but of the Bible and other traditional sources, and he knew in this
case that Christ is “the true Light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world” (Jn 1:9)—that He who “in the beginning”
was “with God” and “was God” (John 1:1), and who therefore is
“before Abraham was” (John 8:58), must also be the One “from
whom arise all the ancient wisdoms”.60 Schuon knew, in other
words, that it is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity through
whom are revealed “the invisible things” of the Divine Principle,
“even His eternal power and Godhead” (Rom 1:20), and that it is
therefore He alone who accounts for the truth in any given tradi
tion. It follows, however—if we have understood the subtleties of
the doctrine—that every orthodox religion must be regarded as a
kind of Incarnation and as possessing “two natures”. For in each of
the world’s orthodox traditions, the Divinity of the Logos is indivisi
bly but unconfusedly manifest in an individual form, becoming fully
present on earth, but without compromise to either Its principial or
Its celestial integrity.
The terrestrial modalities will naturally differ, of course, and in
the case of religions with central human supports, the names will
vary: Jesus, Gautama, Muhammad, and so on. In each of these tra
ditions, writes Schuon, the proper name “indicates the limited and
relative aspect of the manifestation”, whereas the traditional titles of
these several figures refer to their corresponding celestial proto
types. Thus the term “‘Christ’—like ‘Buddha’ and ‘Rasûl Allâh’—
indicates the universal Reality of this same manifestation, that is to
say, the Word as such”.61 In an alternative formulation, Schuon
points out elsewhere that even the term Logos or “Word” is a kind of
60. Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 70.

61. Transcendent Unity, p. 92. It is in this light that St Nikolai Velimirovich (see note
43) could speak of the Divine Word as revealing “precious gifts in the East”. He
writes: “Glory be the memory of Lao-Tse, the teacher and prophet of his peo
ple! Glory be the memory of Krishna, the teacher and prophet of his people!
Blessed be the memory of Buddha, the royal son and inexorable teacher of his
116
name, colored by a specific religious world; it is a name—to use

again his technical metaphysical terminology—for the “relative” or
“lesser” Absolute, and thus it refers to a level of Reality which, while
subordinate to the Absolute as such, is nonetheless independent,
not only from the particularities of certain historical forms, but
even from Its own universal prolongations at the level of Heaven—
just as Christ’s degree of Divinity remains unconfused with His
celestial humanity. Thus “in Itself,” says Schuon, “the Logos is nei
ther ‘Word’ nor ‘Son’ nor ‘Book’ nor ‘Buddha’, but appears as one
of these according to Its mode of earthly manifestation”.62 In this
way It anticipates the distinctive role of Jesus for Christians or of
Muhammad for Muslims or of Gautama for Buddhists. The most
important point to notice, however, is that in each of these reli
gions, whether Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, the essential
metaphysical discriminations are precisely the same: there remain
in each case the same sets of distinctions and the same pattern of
“union without confusion”—whether between the Absolute and the
Relative, or between the Principle and manifestation, or between
the manifest Principle and manifestation as such. Wherever we look
we see the mystery of the two natures of Christ, expressed anew in
many dialects.
The Christian may feel the need to raise a final objection. Far
too great an emphasis has been placed, he may say, on “the prin
cipial, non-human, and non-historical Logos”,63 and there is thus a
risk of ignoring the actual, concrete facts of salvation. What about
the baby born in Bethlehem, the Baptism in the Jordan, the healing
of the man born blind, and all the many other specific events in
Jesus’s life? Most importantly, what about “Christ and Him cruci
fied” (1 Cor 2:2)? As I have already stressed, however, Schuon had
no intention of denying the reality of Christ’s individual manhood,
and unlike the demythologizers and other Biblical reductionists of
our day, he never supposed that the miraculous details of the
Gospels were anything but literally true. On the other hand, he
would have been quick to remind his exclusivist critics that, accord
ing to the teaching of the Christian tradition itself, the eternal Logos
people!” (Prayers by the Lake [Grayslake, Illinois: Free Serbian Orthodox Diocese
of the United States and Canada, n.d.], XLVIII, XLIX).
62. Spiritual Perspectives, p. 65.
63. Esoterism, p. 36.
117
James Cutsinger
is the one and only hypostasis of Christ’s Divine humanity; in placing

his own emphasis upon that Logos, Schuon is simply following the
lead of the ancient Church, modern historical and psychological
sensibilities notwithstanding. There is no doubt, certainly, that Jesus
was truly human, that He truly spoke to other men, and that He
truly acted in and upon this world; but we are not to forget that the
underlying subject of all His words and actions, however temporal
their mode of manifestation, remained the eternal Son of God. The
exclusivist wishes to cling to “Jesus the man” as the only means of
salvation. But Schuon is surely right that “in naming Himself the
way, the truth, and the life in an absolute or principial sense”, there
is no reason to think that Christ was “trying to limit the universal
manifestation of the Word” to a particular earthly form or to a spe
cific series of historical actions. On the contrary, He was “affirming
His own essential identity with the Logos, the cosmic manifestation
of which He Himself was living in subjective mode”.64 It remains
true, of course, that “no man cometh unto the Father” (Jn 14:6)
except by way of His Word; but what this means metaphysically is
that there is no entry into the Divine Essence except through the
Divine Person—however or wherever that Person may have chosen
to be present on Earth.
The Schuonian perspective thus provides us with a way of under
standing the Son’s earthly deeds which fully honors their saving
importance, but without restricting their operation or “efficient
causality” to any given temporal or spatial context. We are asked,
like every Christian, to admit the historical reality of the great
redemptive events of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection: Jesus really
died—in a particular way, in a particular place, and at a particular
moment—and He really rose from the dead in His body. But at the
same time, while remaining perfectly faithful to the conciliar dog
mas, Schuon assists us in seeing that these actions, if they are to have
the salvific power that Christians claim, could not have been those
of some isolated human individual, nor could their cosmic effect
have come from a purely temporal cause. On the contrary, the only
reason that Good Friday and Easter are of lasting significance is that
they are the reverberations in time of eternity. For He who died on
the cross was not some specially chosen man, but the Divine Son of
64. Transcendent Unity, pp. 27-28.
118
God, and if that Son, who is eternal, can be truly said to have died—
as the Christian tradition explicitly teaches—then His death must
have been eternal as well: the Lamb of God must have been “slain
from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8), and not only on
Golgotha. And if that same Son really rose from the dead, then His
rising, too, must be eternal: if He came forth from the Tomb at a
particular moment of time, it is only because His is a light that has
always shone “in the darkness”, though “the darkness comprehend
ed it not” (Jn 1:5). Thus Schuon writes
The Divine Redemption is always present; it pre-exists all terrestri
al alchemy and is its celestial model, so that it is always thanks to
this eternal Redemption—whatever may be its vehicle on earth—
that man is freed from the weight of his vagaries and even, Deo
volente, from that of his separative existence; if “my Words shall not
pass away”, it is because they have always been.
“A consciousness of this,” Schuon concludes—that is, a perception
of the true dimensions of the Son’s saving work—“far from dimin
ishing a participation in the treasures of the historical redemption,
confers on them a compass that touches the very roots of exis
tence.”65
Far from diminishing our full participation in Christ, prayerful
reflection on the mystery of His two natures cannot but do Him
great honor, for whatever a man’s traditional path toward salvation
might be, it is one and the same Logos that is the true Savior of all.
His scope is unlimited, extending far beyond the boundaries of the
Christian religion to “other sheep which are not of this fold” (Jn
10:16), and His treasures are bequeathed to us all.
65. Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 70. Schuon adds elsewhere, “The Redemption is
an eternal act which cannot be situated in either time or space, and the sacri
fice of Christ is a particular manifestation or realization of it on the human
plane” (Transcendent Unity, 21). Schuon was under no illusions, of course—no
matter the scriptural and other classic proofs—that his perspective would be
acceptable to all traditional Christians. “Within the framework of Christianity,
the idea that the Redemption is a priori the timeless work of the principial,
non-human, and non-historical Logos, that it can and must be manifested in dif
ferent ways, at diverse times and places, and that the historical Christ manifests
this Logos in a given providential world, without its being either necessary or
possible to define this world in an exact manner, is an idea that is esoteric in
relation to Christian dogmatics, and it would be absurd to demand it from the
ology” (Esoterism, p. 36).
119
The Mystery of the Two Natures by James S. Cutsinger
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The Mystery of the Two Natures

whose work was of a cyclic or Eleatic importance—a jivan-mukta,

The Mystery of the Two Natures

absence of an Orthodox starets, to seek direction “even from a

those who feel obliged to reduce their religions in the interest of

5. Gnosis, pp. 56-57.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

inasmuch as He was incontestably man, He was bound to have cer­

others will allow that the non-Christian may in certain cases be

9. Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, trans. Peter N. Townsend (London: Perennial

The Mystery of the Two Natures

12. Esoterism, pp. 25-26.

important distinctions. Let me restate them in the classic language

14. Theological Orations, XLII.15.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

Finally a third point, equally essential to a correct understand­

principial distinction he so often makes in his work between the

The Mystery of the Two Natures

Absolute as such, the Supreme Reality or “pure Ipseity”;18 but there

18. This is a formulation to be found in a number of Schuon’s unpublished texts.

from His historical incarnation in Jesus, the Logos or Word of God

The Mystery of the Two Natures

One who is greater than Christ, and we must therefore conclude

24. Face of the Absolute, p. 79.

Nor is this interpretation in any way contrary to Patristic tradition,

The Mystery of the Two Natures

universe. This is a distinction, in the Schuonian vocabulary,

26. Survey of Metaphysics, p. 19.

egos and agents—was “transmuted by the Real Presence” of

28. Eye of the Heart, pp. 104, 105.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

A man cannot transport things from one place to another merely

Himself, so that the human should be deified by this mingling with

32. Against Apollinarius, II.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

any sense, and it would be impossible to speak of Him in any way.”

35. Eye of the Heart, pp. 103, 105.

ly terminological. In recent conversation with an Orthodox monk—and read­

The Mystery of the Two Natures

vidual and in what manner He is not”—or, we might add, in what

40. Esoterism, pp. 38-39.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

judging the matter according to strictly exoteric criteria. This of

43. Spiritual Perspectives, p. 118. In emphasizing that Schuon’s Christology is in

The Mystery of the Two Natures

failed to discriminate between Christ’s Divinity and His humanity,

eties of religious partisanship which inevitably result from this fact,

47. Face of the Absolute, pp. 65-105.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

if Christianity “were not a religion but a sapiential doctrine, it might

tainly demands that we be indulgent toward a simple piety, but

The Mystery of the Two Natures

have here a continuing theme that runs throughout this author’s

54. Stations of Wisdom, p. 133.

was merely that of a historical individual, or that the Divinity was

60. Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 70.

The Mystery of the Two Natures

name, colored by a specific religious world; it is a name—to use

inasmuch as He was incontestably man, He was bound to have cer

Finally a third point, equally essential to a correct understand

ly terminological. In recent conversation with an Orthodox monk—and read