New article on the work of Andrei Scrima

Marco Toti, author of the paper that first drew attention to the Romanian Traditionalist Andrei Scrima (1925-2000, see earlier post here), has now published an article on Scrima's thought and writing, "Religious Morphology, Hermeneutics and Initiation in Andrei Scrima’s Il padre spirituale (The Spiritual Father)," Aries 11.1 (2011), pp. 77-97.

After a complex and nuanced discussion, Toti concludes that Scrima was not so much a hard Traditionalist (in the sense in which I use the adjective) as someone who "recovers, develops, deepens and recontextualizes some typical ‘traditionalist’ themes—softening, for example, the ‘mathematical’ orientation given by Guénon to them, and placing in his treatment poetic and philosophical motives which are completely irrelevant to the French metaphysician" (p. 94). This is much what Patrick Ringgenberg concluded in the case of Schuon (see earlier post here).


Scrima's life is not Toti's main subject, but he notes, interestingly, that Scrima was "one of the ‘inspirers’ for the establishment in Bucharest of the ‘New Europe College’, an institute for advanced studies in humanities founded in 1994 by Andrei Pleşu, former Foreign Minister and Minister of Culture of the Republic of Romania" (p. 78). The name of Pleşu has featured before in the history of Traditionalism in Romania.