Language between The Sacred and The profane: The vision of René Guénon

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide an philosophical and perennialist understanding of the relationship between language and the sacred, as well as the sacred’s manifestation through language, drawing primarily on the perspective of perennial philosophy—particularly the thought of the French philosopher and perennialist René Guénon. It adopts a philosophical approach to examine the essential and intrinsic relationship between language and the sacred. In this context, the term sacred is used deliberately, not as a synonym for the “Holy,” but to indicate a metaphysical and transcendent dimension. From the outset, the study aims to reveal the transcendental and transhuman nature of language, viewing it as a reality deeply rooted in the inner world of human intuition. Christianity, Islam, and Sufism in particular are examined as traditions that have achieved a highly developed formulation of transcendental language and have offered profound metaphysical interpretations of the language of sacred scriptures. In contrast, the paper critically engages with scientific positivism, highlighting its reductionist treatment of sacred and religious language, and examines how modernist linguistic approaches tend to obscure or deny the metaphysical dimensions of language.

 The scope of the study is René Gino's worldview of the “relationship between language and the sacred” and the problems of modern scientific positivism and linguistics, just as our research material is an important part of Gino's works and books. with criticism and discussion of some of the works of modernists and post-modernists.

Our research consists of an introduction and two parts. The first part, the theoretical aspect of the research, presents “language and the sacred” to the internal, external and alienation dimensions of language in the modern world. In the second section, “Language Between the Unseen and the Visible World”, we worked on the ambiguity of language and the main concepts theorized by Gino.