Charles le Gai Eaton contributed numerous articles to various issues of Studies. It is often believed that the mythology of "primitive" peoples represents nothing more than an early effort to explain the universe rationally and is meant to be taken literally.
Therefore, attention is shifted away from myth in favor of more highly developed forms of scientific investigation. This understanding, which assumes in modern man an evolutionary superiority, overlooks the symbolic message contained within the myths of such cultures.
A similar form of rationalistic attack is often conducted against religious doctrine, and has contributed to such the virtual dissapearance of the metaphysicial and intellectual heritage within Christianity. Gai Eaton discusses these and other instances in which failure to comprehend the depth of a spiritual reality leads to its dismissal as irrelevant or absurd.
Gai Eaton contrasts the increasingly prevalent view that man is in no way essentially different from other animals and therefore has no special rights with a doctrine characteristic of several spiritual traditions: that man is unique and granted certain privileges as well as obligated to uphold certain responsibilites. He explains how man has failed to meet these responsibilites by abusing animals and other natural resources, as well as behaving harmfully towards other men.
Eaton uses the destruction of American Indian civilization as the primary illustration of the latter tendency. Studies in Comparative Religion. Advanced Search. Book Review. Journal Information. Future Issues. Free Subscription. Purchase Copies. Contributing Author. Reviewed Author. About the Journal. Submit a Book Review. Shortly after the outbreak of the second world war he was commissioned into the British army.
His first marriage, to Katherine Clayton, was short-lived, but produced his eldest son, Leo. From the end of the war to his formal retirement in , he assumed the varied roles of actor, university lecturer, journalist, and finally diplomat in countries as far apart as Jamaica and Egypt, India and Ghana.
In Eaton married Corah Hamilton, a renowned Jamaican artist. This marriage produced three children, Judy, Maurice and Corah Ann. After retiring from the diplomatic service in , Eaton served for the next 22 years as a consultant to the Islamic Cultural Centre in London, where he also edited the Islamic Quarterly journal.
It was during these decades that Eaton made a major contribution to the expanding British Muslim community as writer and broadcaster; and as adviser and counsellor to those, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who were interested in Islam and, in particular, Sufism, its mystical tradition.
Like so many western intellectuals, Eaton found Sufism irresistibly compelling. It was not the externals of the religion that appealed; rather it was the spirit of the faith, exemplified in Sufism, which brought about his conversion.
For the Sufi interpretation and application of Islam allowed Eaton to continue to adhere to his belief — already finely articulated in his first book, The Richest Vein — in the universality of religious revelation. It also offered him the possibility of a direct, experiential "taste" of the deeper spiritual truths of the faith. His later books, King of the Castle and Islam and the Destiny of Man , firmly established Eaton's reputation as one of the most important Muslim intellectuals in the west.
In these works, and in the more contemplative work that followed, Remembering God , Eaton offered an analysis of the various maladies he thought were afflicting the world, such as atheism, secularism and materialism. In the process, he mounted a rigorous critique of all forms of Islamism, all ideological caricatures of the Islamic faith.
For Eaton, Islam was neither abstract ideology nor sociological category; eschewing political slogans and visible badges of identity, he insisted that it was above all else a means of leading a spiritual life, a life that is not dependent upon any of the transient institutional forms assumed by religion.
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