Monday, May 05, 2025

On Philip Sherrard

Christopher W. Howell has just published an article on Philip Sherrard (1922-1995, photo here), the English, Traditionalist, Greek Orthodox writer and translator who helped the English poet and Neoplatonist Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) to found the Temenos Academy. It is Christopher W. Howell, “The Holiness of Creation: Philip Sherrard and the Climate Apocalypse,” in Orthodox Christianity and the Study of Nature: Histories of Interaction, ed. Kostas Tampakis and Ronald L. Numbers (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2025), pp. 213-240.

Howell knows Sherrard well, and had access to his unpublished as well as published writings when researching this article. It starts with a biography and an account of Sherrard’s postwar “search for tradition” and his 1956 conversion to Greek Orthodoxy, and then moves on to his Traditionalism, asking whether Sherrard was actually a Traditionalist. Sherrard mentioned René Guénon in a letter in 1953, before his conversion, and the answer would be yes, argues Howell, were it not for Sherrard’s rejection of Frithjof Schuon’s syncretism and his disagreement with René Guénon’s view of Christianity. He also disagreed with Guénon’s conviction that in the modern world the tradition was lost save, perhaps, for an elite: Sherrard had previously found the tradition in the peasants of Greece. Finally, he preferred the Orthodox understanding of creation to that of Guénon.

Rejection of Schuon’s syncretism means one is not a Schuonian, but one can still be a Traditionalist. The disagreements with Guénon that Howell identifies are important, but may be seen as a development of aspects of Guénon’s thought; they are certainly not a rejection of the whole of it.

Howell goes on to discuss Sherrard’s view on modernity, evolution, and finally “climate change,” perhaps not the best phrase. The title of Sherrard’s 1987 book, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science, gives a better view of how he saw the problem, even though wildfires later became a special problem for Greece. Sherrard, then, sits with Seyyed Hossein Nasr as a Traditionalist environmentalist.

This is a well-informed and well-written article that fills one gap in our knowledge of later twentieth-century Traditionalism beyond the Maryamiyya.

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Online lecture series by Schuonians

A new lecture series entitled the “Schuon Lectures” is available online.

In 2025 they will be delivered by Harry Oldmeadow, formerly of La Trobe University Bendigo, Australia, author of Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy (2000) and Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions (2004). Other Schuonian speakers are planned for later years: M. Ali Lakhani (2026), Michael Oren Fitzgerald (2027), and Patrick D. Laude (2028).

Oldmeadow’s lectures will be on:

  • The Rhythms of Time and Traces of Primordiality (Primordial Worlds) 
  • Revealed Tradition as Mediator between Time and Eternity (Traditional Worlds) 
  • Signs of the Times: The Reign of Scientism, Evolutionism and ‘Progress’ (The Modern World) 
  • Metaphysics and the Spiritual Life (The Eternal Present) 
As well as the lectures, the website offers networking: “Expand your professional network and connect with leading scholars and thinkers in philosophy and theology. Schuon Lecture series provides a platform for networking and collaboration, allowing you to engage with experts from different backgrounds and disciplines.”

For more details, see schuonlectures.respectgs.us/

Sunday, March 16, 2025

Conference in Paris: René Guénon et l’Orient

René Guénon et l’Orient:

Perspectives critiques 100 ans après La métaphysique orientale (1925-2025) 

11 avril 2025 (9h-18h30) 

École Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Salle 1 54, Bd Raspail, 75006, Paris 

Événement partenaire du FRÉSO (Association Francophone pour l’Étude Universitaire des Courants Ésotériques) et de l’ESSWE (European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism) 

Conférence organisée par : Roberto Corso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”/École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) Comité scientifique : Jean-Pierre Brach (EPHE-LEM) ; Vincent Eltschinger (EPHE-GREI) ; Margherita Serena Saccone (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) ; Thierry Zarcone (CNRS-GSRL) 

Nombre de places limité. Réservation requise en envoyant un e-mail à l’adresse suivante : roberto.corso@unina.it 

Programme 

Accueil (9h-9h15)

  • Mot de bienvenue de Jean-Pierre Brach (École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) et de l'organisateur (9h15-9h30) 
Session 1 (9h30-11h) 
  • Modératrice : Mayssa Coutard-Evangelista 
  • Davide Marino (CAS-E, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg/University of Vienna) : Chinese Whispers. René Guénon and La métaphysique (extrême-)orientale 
  • Alessandra Marchi (Università degli Studi di Cagliari) : Parcours soufis du traditionalisme guénonien en Italie 
Pause 11-11h30
 
Session 2 (11h30-13h) Modérateur : Roberto Corso 
  • Hugo David (École Française d’Extrême-Orient) : René Guénon et le Vedānta : retour à la tradition ou nouveau syncrétisme ? 
  • Dominique Wohlschlag (Chercheur indépendant) : Guénon et les cycles cosmiques 
Déjeuner libre 13h-15h
 
Session 3 (15h-16h30)
  • Modérateur : Nathan Fraikin 
  • Marco Giardini (Chercheur indépendant) : L’« Orient merveilleux » médiéval et ses relectures ésotériques au XXe siècle : la légende du Prêtre Jean entre les « études traditionnelles » et la théorie du « monde imaginal » 
  • Youna Eskandari (École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) : René Guénon : orientaliste ou oriental? 

Pause 16h30-17h 

Session 4 (17h-18h30)

  • Modérateur : Tom Fisher 
  • Roberto Corso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”/École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) : « La part de l’inexprimable ». Perspectives critiques sur les idées de métaphysique et d’Orient dans l’œuvre de René Guénon 
  • Jean-Pierre Laurant (École Pratique des Hautes Études) : Apprendre à vivre au hasard d’une rencontre : René Guénon

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Traditionalism available in paperback

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in paperback, at £10.99 in the UK, also available in Europe, but not in the US, where it's still $29.99 for the hardback from OUP.

Tuesday, March 04, 2025

Henry Corbin's critique of Traditionalism

A new article looks at a dispute in 1963 between Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–1978), the most important Traditionalist in Pakistan, discussed in an earlier post here, and Henry Corbin (1903–1978), a leading French scholar of Islamic mysticism and in his youth an enthusiast of the work of René Guénon. It is Hadi Fakhoury, “Ibn ʿArabi between East and West: Henry Corbin and Guénonian Traditionalism.” Religiographies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2024): 25–45 available here (open source).

The dispute took place in the pages of a major French philosophical journal, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Journal of metaphysics and ethics), and started with an article by Askari (available here) which compared Ibn ‘Arabi and Kierkegaard, the former understood in Traditionalist terms as an exponent of orthodox esotericism, and the later understood as representative of modernity. This article contained a passing criticism of Corbin which ensured that Corbin read it and, unusually, responded (here). Fakhoury suggests that one reason that Corbin responded may have been that he wanted to make clear his mature position on Traditionalism. Probably referring to his own early encounter with Traditionalism, he wrote that “reading the works of René Guenon can, at some point in one’s life, provoke a salutary shock.” An interesting perspective: perhaps that is, indeed, one of the main functions of Guénon’s work.

Corbin’s basic argument was that Askari seemed better acquainted with the writings of Guénon than with those of Ibn ‘Arabi, and that Ibn ‘Arabi was more complex than the Traditionalists suspected. “Anyone,” wrote Corbin, “who has devoted his life to seeing the texts for himself will find it impossible to accept that the last word has been said in René Guénon’s work.” That is, I think, true.

Beyond this, Corbin also accuses Traditionalism of a “bias towards systematic rationalism” without really explaining why, and also of “denouncing and devaluing everything that has to do with personal individuality. Fleeing into the impersonal and the spirit of ‘orthodoxy.’” This, said Corbin, was “strangely in tune with the intellectual fashion of the day,” by which he probably meant the varieties of totalitarianism that he saw smothering the personal. As Fakhoury writes, “for both Guénonian Traditionalism and Corbin, the interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi has implications far beyond mere historical accuracy. Indeed, their respective retrieval of Ibn ‘Arabi is intrinsically connected to, and motivated by, a series of wider, interrelated questions.”

Fakhoury contrasts the approaches of Corbin and the Traditionalists nicely:

Rather than a “return to tradition,” Corbin seeks to go one step before tradition, as it were, that is, to recover the spiritual source that gave rise to it in the first place. This implies a continuous “re-activation” and “re-creation” of tradition in the present, literally, its “modernization” – a word that derives from the Latin modo, meaning “now existing” or “just now.”

 An important and interesting article.