New research project on Romanian Traditionalism

Guest post by Alin Constantin (Stanford), blue_socking@yahoo.com

The new research project in which I am engaged has been a result of my own engagement with the legacy of interwar Romanian culture. I started reading into the history of Traditionalism and its representatives after finding out about Mircea Eliade’s association with this line of thought. This connection between Eliade and Traditionalism has played a significant role in the reception of post-communist religious thought in Romania. The publisher which has published Eliade’s work since the nineties, Humanitas, has also been responsible for introducing the Romanian public to the works of Guénon, Schuon and Evola, and—more recently—Aleksandr Dugin. Although Eliade was not a Traditionalist thinker, he was definitely influenced in certain respects by Coomaraswamy, Guénon and Evola.

Since the 1990s, a growing interest on the part of the Romanian reading public has been focused on the rediscovery of interwar intellectual culture. This interest was not, as it might be expected, a reaction to the limitations of official communist historiography, a desire to discover what had previously been hidden and condemned. In fact, interest in the period had already been underway in the last decades of communist rule, which were characterized by a strongly nationalistic political bent. As a result of this rightward turn, many writers and thinkers who been associated with the interwar far right were now being reintroduced in the cannon of officially endorsed representatives of Romanian culture. If anything, in the post-communist period this practice has been followed through rather than begun anew.

Previous researchers working on Eliade and Romanian Traditionalism have focused on published works. While valuable in many respects, such accounts cannot provide a comprehensive history of the movement. For this one needs to go into the archives. Yet how does one investigate a movement that kept itself purposefully hidden from view? The record here is mixed. Eliade kept a detailed collection of his drafts, manuscripts, diaries and correspondence. His archives are held in the University of Chicago Library. His collection of books was destroyed in a fire shortly before his death. One is thus unable to glean information on his reading habits during his American years. His Parisian library, however, has been preserved entirely. This contains books he had brought from Portugal, volumes he purchased or received as a gift in France, as well as books from Chicago which he brought along as reading material when he came back to Europe on holiday. This valuable collection was housed in a branch of the Metropolitan Library of Bucharest, the Nicolaus Olahus Warehouse. Unfortunately, the whole of Eliade’s books have been transported from this library in February of this year, supposing to be relocated to another branch by March. As of yet, this has not happened and the move seems to be in limbo.

The Nicolaus Olahus Warehouse also possesses a collection of manuscripts which belonged to Vasile Lovinescu and Michel Valsan, two of the leading representatives of Romanian Traditionalism. A diplomat by profession, Valsan did not return to Romania following the end of WWII and settled permanently in France, becoming the editor of Études Traditionnelles. Lovinescu on the other hand remained in Romania, alternating his time between the provincial town of Fălticeni and Bucharest. Lovinescu depended on friends from abroad such as Valsan for receiving books he could not get hold of. Lovinescu was closely monitored by the communist secret police, the Securitate, and his correspondence with Valsan is available in its archives. Other libraries in Bucharest also hold important material pertaining to the subject. The Library of the Romanian Academy holds copies of Memra: Studii de tradiţie ezoterică, the first (and only) Romanian Traditionalist journal, published in the 1930s.

The resources for the study of Romanian Traditionalism are rich, and their investigation can considerably advance our understanding of the movement, from both a national and transnational perspective.

Maude Murray on Frithjof Schuon

A number of comments on this blog’s main posting on Frithjof Schuon and Islam have just been made by (a person self-identifying as) Maud Murray, Schuon’s third wife. They do not fundamentally change the picture we have, but add some detail. They also announce a forthcoming blog.

Soft Traditionalism at the University of Kansas

A new biography reveals John Senior (1923-99) of the University of Kansas as a ”soft” Traditionalist. The biography is by Francis Bethel, O.S.B., John Senior and the Restoration of Realism (Merrimack NH: Thomas More College Press, 2016).

During the 1950s, Senior was a “hard” Traditionalist, following René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. He then moved away from this position towards Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, and converted to Catholicism. He subsequently wrote two important books, The Death of Christian Culture (1978) and The Restoration of Christian Culture (1983).

Senior worked practically for the restoration of traditional Christian culture at the University of Kansas from 1967 to 1984. He and two others ran the “Pearson Integrated Humanities Program,” which ran very much against the spirit of the times by focusing on the reading and discussion of classic texts (taking notes during these discussions was not allowed) and stressing the traditional, the Christian, and the European. As well as reading and discussing, students took part in formal dinners and ballroom dancing, went star gazing and traveled to Europe. Many became Catholics. The program became ever more controversial, and was finally closed.

My attention was drawn to the book by a fine review by Christopher H. Owen in the International Philosophical Quarterly.

Missing Dugin's attempt to understand

Alexander Dugin is one of seven interesting Russians followed by the Russian–American journalist Masha Gessen in The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017). The book is well written, as one would expect from the pen of a talented journalist who is a New York Times bestseller. It interweaves the familiar tale of the recent history of Russia with the lives of Gessen’s seven characters, chosen not because they are powerful and important or because they are representative “regular people,” but because “they are the people who try to understand” (p. 4). An excellent idea: there is much in Russia’s recent history that needs to be understood.

In the event, however, the book focuses mostly on the other characters, who are generally liberal and sometimes gay, and on the familiar tale of the rise and fall of Russian liberalism. Disappointingly little space is given to Dugin or to his attempt to understand. In fact, almost the only new information about him is what his first wife later remembered as his opening line: “Do you know when violets bloom on the lips?” (p. 20). The opportunity to understand how Dugin’s understandings fit in with recent Russian history is, sadly, missed.

Evola and the Anti-Christian Alt-Right

An interesting new article on “The Anti-Christian Alt-Right: The Perverse Thought of Right-Wing Identity Politics” by Matthew Rose has been published in First Things (03, 2018). Rose looks at the stances on Christianity of Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, and Alain de Benoist. The article is largely descriptive, and (predictably) takes a Christian view. Rose’s characterization of Evola as “avant-garde painter, occultist, sexologist, alpinist, and unreliable scholar of Eastern religions” is memorable, if not entirely fair.