The Transcendent Unity of Religions

Religion, the source of heavenly truths without an awareness of which humanity would eventually bring about its own destruction, is presented as having two related aspects: exoteric and esoteric. The exoteric aspect reveals the diverse,the different, whereas the esoteric contains the same, the essential. It is the unifying core, the summit to which all paths lead and at which they all converge.
“In the spiritual world and, still more, the universal order,” Guénon writes, “it is unity that presides at the summit of the hierarchy.” The mountain metaphor is frequently used to illustrate the shared conviction that all religions are but so many roads that lead to one and the same summit. In “Paths That Lead to the Same Summit,” Coomaraswamy takes an ethical stance to argue that all great religions of the world have valid claims to truth, which must be respected and understood in a comparative mode and not just tolerated. Doctrinal differences, conspicuous at the mountain’s wide base, should not prevent us from recognizing the inner meanings or seeing the peak where all differences vanish. Such recognition does not necessarily demand a change in the path that one finds oneself on naturally, for “he who goes round about the mountain looking for another is not climbing.” Asserting the necessity of this approach for cross-religious understanding, Coomaraswamy writes: “The greatest of modern Indian saints actually practiced Christian and Islamic disciplines,that is, worshiped Christ and Allah, and found that all lead to the same goal: he could speak from experience of the equal validity of all these ‘ways,’ and feel the same respect for each, while still preferring for himself the one to which his whole being was naturally attuned by nativity, temperament and training.”
To illustrate the difference between metaphysical and theological knowledge, and indirectly to emphasize the unity of religions, Schuon uses the metaphor of light. He compares metaphysical knowledge to the awareness of the “colorless essence of light and its character of pure "luminosity” and theological knowledge to the assertion of light’s particular colors. Although both modes overlap in their distinction between light and darkness, they differ in the level of reality they disclose. Metaphysics discloses universal truths, whereas theology discloses divine revelations, which are but particular expressions of the universal truths. Philosophy is further removed from theology in that it deals with rational concepts. Religions, thus viewed, translate universal truths into dogmatic languages that are accessible by the wider public through faith. But the colorful variations of the dogmatic beliefs fade at the level of universal truths where all religious differences disappear. In brief, the reality of the transcendent unity of religions is shown to reside in the oneness of the Truth that governs all modes of manifestation and existence, and in the oneness of the human race that alone has the capacity of tracing the process of differentiation back to its transcendental source.