Ananda Coomaraswamy

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A geologist found the mineral first. In 1903 the colonial administration of Ceylon appointed a twenty-five-year-old to direct its newly created Mineralogical Survey, and within the year he had identified two minerals previously unknown to science — serendibite and the radioactive thorianite — and described the island’s rocks with the patient exactness of a man trained to read crystal and strata. The University of London granted him its Doctor of Science in 1906, the first Ceylonese so honored. Three decades later the same man would argue that a Tamil bronze and a Gothic cathedral and a verse of the Bhagavad Gītā were exact in precisely the way a mineralogical report is exact — that traditional art is not feeling poured out but knowledge made visible, a proposition cast in stone or pigment. The continuity between the two careers is not accidental. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy spent his life insisting that the world is intelligible, and that the intelligible can be set down without loss.

He was born in Colombo on 22 August 1877, to Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy, a Tamil legislator and the first Hindu called to the English bar, and Elizabeth Clay Beeby, an Englishwoman from Kent. His father died when he was two, and he was raised and schooled in England — at Wycliffe College and then University College London, where he took first-class honors in geology and botany in 1900. The mineralogical survey returned him to the island of his birth, and that return reorganized his life. Confronted with the colonial dismissal of Ceylonese craft as decorative and inferior, he began documenting the island’s metalwork, weaving, and building, and founded the Ceylon Social Reform Society to defend a living culture he saw being administered out of existence. Medieval Sinhalese Art (1908), printed on his own hand-press in the manner of William Morris, whose Arts and Crafts convictions shaped him early, was the first fruit of that turn. The geologist had become a connoisseur, and the connoisseur was becoming something harder to name.

From connoisseur to keeper

The decisive widening came with Indian painting. Placed in charge of the art section of the United Provinces Exhibition at Allahabad in 1910–11, Coomaraswamy traveled across northern India buying works that hung unregarded in princely houses and bazaar shops, and in Rajput Painting (1916) he disclosed to the world an entire school of Hindu painting — the courtly art of Rajasthan and the Punjab Hills — that European scholarship had not known was there. The collection he assembled in the process became the seed of one of the first major holdings of Indian art in the United States. In 1917 it passed, by way of the Boston collector Denman Waldo Ross, to the Museum of Fine Arts, and Coomaraswamy went with it, appointed the museum’s Fellow for Research in Indian, Persian, and Muhammadan art — in effect the first keeper of Indian art in an American museum. He held the post for the rest of his life.

The Boston years produced the scholar’s monuments. His five-volume Catalogue of the Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts (1923–1930) set a standard for the cataloguing of South Asian objects, and his History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) became the field’s standard textbook for a generation, the first synthesis to treat the sculpture and architecture of the subcontinent and the islands as a single coherent development. None of this was the work of a metaphysician yet. It was the work of a museum man with extraordinary range — a cataloger, a dater of bronzes, a reader of inscriptions — who happened to command Sanskrit and Pali as readily as the European languages of scholarship.

Art history as a branch of metaphysics

The turn that made Coomaraswamy a founder of a school came around 1932, and it was a turn inward, toward first principles. He had encountered the writings of René Guénon, the French metaphysician who held that the world’s orthodox religions are partial expressions of a single primordial wisdom; the encounter did not convert him so much as confirm a direction he had been traveling on his own. From the early 1930s his prose changes register. The dating and connoisseurship recede; in their place comes a sustained argument that art history, rightly pursued, is a branch of metaphysics — that to understand a traditional image one must understand the doctrine it embodies, because the image is the doctrine, rendered in a sensible medium.

The argument is laid out most fully in The Transformation of Nature in Art (Harvard, 1934) and in the essays gathered as Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought (Luzac, 1946), with Why Exhibit Works of Art? (1943, later retitled Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art) as its sharpest polemic. Traditional art, on this account, is never self-expression. The maker of an icon, a temple, a woven figure does not externalize a private emotion; he gives visible form to an idea already complete in the mind, conforming his hand to a model that is not his own — the way a craftsman conforms a chair to the idea of a chair. For the medieval maker and the Indian alike, he wrote, “art is religion, religion art” — not related but identical. The icon is exact in the way a theological proposition is exact, and its rightness is not prettiness but adequacy — its fitness to convey the formal cause it exists to convey. What modernity calls aesthetic response, the pleasure taken in surfaces, Coomaraswamy regarded as a decadence: the figure of thought, the symbol adequate to an idea, degraded into a mere figure of speech, an ornament meant only to stir feeling. The shift from the medieval workshop to the post-Renaissance studio, from the anonymous craftsman to the signing genius, was for him not progress but the forgetting of what art had been for.

This was a theory of art built from theology, and Coomaraswamy drew it from everywhere at once. He read the Indian texts — the Bhagavad Gītā, the Upaniṣads, the metaphysics of Hinduism and the Buddhist canon — alongside Plato, whose doctrine of the form-as-model he treated as the Western statement of the same truth, and alongside the Christian schoolmen. Thomas Aquinas on beauty as the splendor of form, the wider scholastic doctrine of art as right reason in making, and above all Meister Eckhart — the fourteenth-century Rhineland Dominican whose negative theology Coomaraswamy read as the nearest European approach to Vedānta — furnished the second chapter of The Transformation of Nature in Art, in which medieval aesthetics is expounded through Eckhart’s German. The chain of Platonism and its Neoplatonic prolongation, running from Plato through the schoolmen, was for him not a separate tradition to be set beside the Indian one but the same metaphysics speaking a different language. He called this convergence the philosophia perennis — or, in Sanskrit, the sanātana dharma, the perennial order.

Method, and a peer

Coomaraswamy is grouped with Guénon and Frithjof Schuon as a founder of the Traditionalist or Perennialist current — the school built on the conviction that one metaphysics underlies the world’s authentic traditions and that modernity is the history of its loss. The three are not interchangeable. Guénon wrote as a metaphysician and a critic of the modern West, building his case by doctrinal exposition; Schuon would systematize the thesis into a doctrine of the transcendent unity of religions, esoterically one and exoterically many. Coomaraswamy occupied a third position, and the difference was one of method. He worked from inside the museum and the philological text, marshaling Vedic, Buddhist, Platonic, and Patristic sources to demonstrate what he held to be convergent symbolic and metaphysical structures — building outward from the object and the word rather than down from a system. He came to the position independently and kept his own emphases; he and the Buddhist scholar Marco Pallis helped move Guénon off his early dismissal of Buddhism. The two men met largely on the page and treated each other as peers in a common enterprise.

The convergence Coomaraswamy claimed to find he held to be a recovery rather than an invention. The agreement, he insisted, was already present in the sources, awaiting a reader with the languages to see it — and his languages were formidable. He read Sanskrit and Pali, Greek and Latin, and the major modern European tongues, and his footnotes range across all of them with a density few scholars before or since have matched, a single page often setting a Vedic verse beside a line of Plotinus and a passage of Aquinas as though they were variant manuscripts of one text. To his admirers this comparative reach was rigor of a high order. To his critics it was the school’s characteristic risk: a method apt to flatten real and stubborn differences into a wisdom that was always already one, hearing identity where another reader would hear only family resemblance. That the traditions converge as he claimed is the school’s conviction, reported as theirs; the academic study of religion has on the whole kept its distance from the strong form of the thesis, treating his comparative metaphysics with caution while continuing to mine his essays for their command of iconography and their sheer range. The historical record supports the milder claim — that traditions borrow, echo, and share apophatic and contemplative motifs — more readily than the identity of a single esoteric core.

The political afterlife of Traditionalism is worth marking precisely because it did not touch him. The current produced not only contemplatives and scholars but a hard-right wing — Julius Evola and his heirs — whose readings of Tradition fed reactionary politics; the historian Mark Sedgwick has documented that lineage carefully. Coomaraswamy belongs to none of it. His Traditionalism was scholarly and contemplative, and the entanglements that have drawn modern attention to the school run through other men.

Standing and reception

Coomaraswamy should not be confused with the perennialism of the seekers’ market. He was openly hostile to Aldous Huxley’s 1945 anthology The Perennial Philosophy, judging it deracinated and indiscriminate — wisdom filched from its contexts, the ritual and initiatic frames stripped away — and his quarrel marks the line between a learned Traditionalism and the popular variety. Among those who carried his thought forward, the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr drew on him most directly, extending the metaphysics of sacred art and the critique of modern science into the later twentieth century. His influence reached sideways as well: C. G. Jung and the Eranos circle moved in adjacent waters, and his iconographic readings have been borrowed by scholars who reject his metaphysics entirely.

He stood, too, among the great Indian polymaths of his generation. With the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, a contemporary of comparable reach, he shared the project of restoring Indian art and letters to dignity before a Western audience that had scarcely looked, though the two were different kinds of men — Tagore the lyric poet and educator, Coomaraswamy the scholar-metaphysician — and never a school. The standard account of the life remains Roger Lipsey’s three-volume Coomaraswamy in the Bollingen Series (1977), which traces the arc from geology through art history to metaphysics and gathers the mature scholarly essays; later scholarship treats the convergence thesis with reserve while acknowledging that no one in the twentieth century read the iconography of more traditions in more languages.

The text and the scholarship

Coomaraswamy’s pre-1929 work is in the public domain in the United States, and his early masterwork The Dance of Siva (1918) can be read directly; the influential later books — The Transformation of Nature in Art, Why Exhibit Works of Art?, Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought — remain in copyright and are best approached through their critical editions. The standard scholarly gathering of the mature essays, with the only full biography, is Roger Lipsey’s three-volume Coomaraswamy (Bollingen Series LXXXIX, Princeton, 1977), cataloged and reissued by Princeton University Press; volume three traces the life from the survey of Ceylon through Boston to the unfinished return. For the place of Coomaraswamy within the wider movement, Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World (Oxford, 2004) remains the standard external history, sorting the school into its scholarly, contemplative, and political wings and assigning him to the first; the Britannica biography gives the documentary skeleton of dates, posts, and titles. His own first vocation has not been forgotten by the science that retains it: the mineralogical reports of his Ceylon years, the descriptions of thorianite and serendibite among them, have themselves been gathered and reassessed as a chapter in the history of geology, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts having reviewed his writings on geology and mineralogy as the overture to everything that came after.

What he learned, he meant in the end to live. The learning was never, in his own account, the destination. He died in Needham, Massachusetts, on 9 September 1947, weeks after his seventieth birthday, having said he meant to return to India, settle at the foot of the Himalayas, and take up the life of a sannyāsin. The writing was the preparation for that life, he held, and not its substitute — the long apprenticeship of a man who had spent forty years reading about the doctrine he intended at last to enact.

→ In the library: Plato — Dialogues (Jowett) · The Bhagavad-Gîtâ — The Song Celestial (Arnold, 1885)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Theosophy · Rene Guenon · Traditionalism Perennialism · Plato · Platonism · Thomas Aquinas · Scholasticism · Meister Eckhart · Hinduism · Bhagavad Gita · Rabindranath Tagore · Seyyed Hossein Nasr · Julius Evola · Carl Jung