More on the history of the esoteric-exoteric distinction

The Swiss scholar Urs App, in his The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), gives an early instance of the esoteric-exoteric distinction that I missed in my book Western Sufism. The esoteric-exoteric distinction is, of course, central to René Guénon's Traditionalism.

In Western Sufism, I identified the analysis of Chinese religion of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) as an early example of universalism (WS, pp. 92-93), but failed to note that some of Ricci’s colleagues were adding an esoteric-exoteric framework to their understanding of Japanese religion. At abut the same time, another Jesuit, Alessandro Valignano (1539-1606), interpreted the Buddhist doctrine of the “two truths” into something approaching the esoteric and the exoteric, starting a tradition of interpretation of Japanese religion that leads us to Leibniz and then perhaps to John Toland (1670-1722), whose definition of esoteric and exoteric in Clidophorus (1720) I emphasize in Western Sufism.

According to App, Valignano first made a distinction between the gonkyō (権教, Sanskrit saṁvṛti-satya, provisional or mundane, approximately exoteric) and the jikkyō (実況, Sanskrit paramārtha-satya, ultimate, approximately esoteric) in his Sumario de los errores del Japon (Summary of the Errors of Japan) of 1556.  He made the same distinction again in his Catechismus christianae fidei, in quo veritas nostrae religionis ostenditur, et sectae Iaponenses confutantur (Catechism of the Christian Faith, in which the truth of our religion is shown, and the Japanese sects are refuted) of 1586, which then became standard reading in a 1593 re-edition. 

Ricci did not make Valignano’s distinction, but João Rodrigues (1561-1633) did, and in this was followed by Niccolò Longobardi (1559-1654) in his Trattato su alcuni punti della religione dei cinesi (Treatise on Some Points of the Religion of the Chinese). Longobardi was cited by Leibniz in his Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois (Discourse on the natural theology of the Chinese, 1716) as writing that the Chinese 

have two kinds of doctrine: a secret one that they regard as true and that only the learned understand and teach encoded in figures [symbols]; and the vulgar one which is a figure of the first and is regarded by the learned as false in the natural meaning of the words (cited in App, p. 144). 

Longobardi, then, may have been a source for Leibniz’s one-time friend Toland.

One further update. In Western Sufism, I identify the French Protestant scholar Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) as the first person to identify Sufism, along with Buddhism, as a form of Spinozism in 1702 (WS, p. 103). App notes that an opponent of Bayle’s, the Swiss protestant theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736 ), in fact made the same connection in the case of Buddhism, though not of Sufism, rather earlier, in 1688 (App 150-151).

Bloomington

Just published: an article by Mark Sedgwick (me) on "The Traditionalist micro-utopia of Bloomington, Indiana," in the Journal of Political Ideologies, available here, open access. It starts with general considerations regarding Traditionalism and politics and utopias in general, as the article was written for a special issue focusing on the political. It then looks at Frithjof Schuon's community in Bloomington during the 1980s. Conclusion: "In many ways the Bloomington community was indeed a spiritual micro-utopia free of modern vulgarity and bathed in beauty. To an extent, practice corresponded to principle... In the end, however, the objectives that proved easiest were the less central ones, the aesthetic and the aristocratic. Spiritual objectives were marred by distractions, passions, and ambitions."

More on Traditionalism in Hungary

There is a good discussion of Traditionalism in Hungary in a new book on Modern Hungarian Political Thought: Ideologies and Traditions by Zoltán Balázs and Csaba Molnár (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). It comes in a chapter on “National Radicalism, Radical Conservatism, National Socialism and Traditionalism,” available here. Traditionalism is discussed along with these other trends because they are all to the right of moderate or classical conservatism. 

Traditionalism is introduced first in general terms, and then in the Hungarian context. “Much as elsewhere in Europe,” write Balázs and Molnár, “traditionalism in Hungary was never a serious political movement. However, it can boast some fascinating intellectuals.” They then discuss these: the Dialogical School of Béla Tábor (1907–1992) and Lajos Szabó (1902–1967), who attacked modernity in their Vádirat a szellem ellen (Indictment Against the Spirit, 1936), and whose group Béla Hamvas (1897–1968), discussed in earlier posts here and here, joined. 

Then we have András László (born 1984) and Tibor Imre Baranyi (born 1967), also discussed in posts already linked, and their influence on recent politics. Balázs and Molnár conclude: “In its early phase, some important politicians of… Jobbik, including its previous chairman, Gábor Vona, were heavily influenced by these traditionalist tenets. However… it has been radical conservatism… that has been the most successful in absorbing certain traditionalist arguments, mostly the modernity-criticizing ones.” It would be interesting to see this second argument more fully developed.

Between Hamvas in the first generation and László and Baranyi today, Balázs and Molnár insert Thomas Molnar (1921-2010), an American philosopher of Hungarian origin who became popular in Hungary after 1989 and who they also class as a Traditionalist. Molnar is certainly close to Guénon’s Traditionalism as an anti-modernist who regrets desacralization, values esotericism, and condemns occultism as a modern confusion, and he cites Guénon as well as Mircea Eliade and Titus Burckhardt, but his focus is mostly that of the mainstream American Right, certainty in his earlier years, before he moved in the direction of Alain de Benoist. He seems not close enough to Guénon to be classed as a Traditionalist, but I may be wrong.

A new journal and a new generation

A new Traditionalist journal was published in 2023: Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions (cover to left). It represents a new generation of Traditionalists: Americans, Russians, and Europeans.

Passages describes itself as “a textual forum for studies on and in Traditionalism” in succession to earlier Traditionalist journals such as Études traditionelles, Studies in Comparative Religion, Sophia, and Sacred Web, and is published by PRAV Publishing, on whom more below. It is more of an annual than a journal, as the first volume is 393 pages long, and the next volume is due in 2024 or perhaps early 2025.

The lead editor of Passages and the Editor-in-chief of PRAV Publishing is Jafe Arnold, an American with an MA in Religious Studies and Western Esotericism from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Philosophy and Education at the University of Warsaw, where he submitted a dissertation on “Heidegger’s Ins and Outs of Plato’s Cave: The Mythical Liberation of Education in Heidegger’s On The Essence of Truth” in 2024. Arnold is one of the most active Traditionalists of the new generation, and has worked on and with Alexander Dugin. One article of his was previously discussed on this blog (see here). 

The opening article in Passages 1 is a translation of Dugin’s “René Guénon: Traditionalism as Language,” originally a 1998 lecture, and certainly one of Dugin’s most important pieces on this topic. Of the following seventeen articles, two are by Russians, three by Hungarians, and six by Italians, including two authors from the Julius Evola Foundation (definitely not the new generation). There are also two Americans, one Belarusian, one Englishman, and one Frenchman—this last being Jean-Pierre Laurant, the venerable doyen of French scholars of Guénon, neither new generation nor usually associated with Dugin.

PRAV Publishing (website at pravpublishing.com) describes itself as “devoted to the publication of scholarly and popular works which build bridges of ideas between Continents and Civilizations.” The ideas in question are those of Traditionalists, especially Russian ones. So far it has published sixteen books. These include three volumes on the Foundations of Eurasianism, translated and edited by Arnold together with John Stachelski, an American who recently completed a PhD on “The geopoetics of an undiscovered continent: Eurasianism as a writing practice” at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale. The first volume of the Foundations is introduced by the contemporary Russian Traditionalist and Eurasianist Leonid Savin, and contains texts by the classic first-generation Eurasianists, especially Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), Petr Savitsky (1895-1968), and Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). These are the thinkers on whom Dugin’s Eurasianism, sometimes called neo-Eurasianism, builds, combined with Guénon and Evola.

Two of the other books are by Daria Dugina (1992-2022), the daughter of Alexander Dugin who was killed by a Ukrainian car bomb that was probably intended for her father. There are no books by Dugin himself, as the English translations of these are mostly published by Arktos, an older publisher focusing on Traditionalist works, established in 2009. Five of PRAV’s other books are by Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov), a Russian Pagan Traditionalist who was once a prominent member of Dugin's Eurasian Youth Union and in 2011 founded Svarte Aske (Norwegian: Dark Ash[tree]), an Odinist community in Siberia. Then there are two books by Boris Nad, a Serbian writer whose Vreme imperija (Time of Empires, 2002) was published with an introduction by Dragoš Kalajić, the leading Serbian Traditionalist of the first generation, discussed in a recent blog post here. In addition there four more books written by two Americans, a Russian, and an Italian. 

I am told that PRAV is working on an English translation of Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola (The Adventurous life of Julius Evola), a monumental biography of Evola, a blog post on which is overdue. 

PRAV, Passages, and Arnold and his collaborators are definitely worth watching. 

This post has been edited to correct a number of small errors.

More Guénon in Arabic

A good part of the work of René Guénon is finally available in Arabic. Nine books have been published by a Jordanian publisher, عالم الكتب الحديث (Modern Books’ World). This is major news, as previously the work of Guénon seemed to have been received with interest in the Muslim world in Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, and Bosnia—but not in the Arab world. 

The translations are all by Shaykh Abdul Baqi Miftah (born 1952), an Algerian scholar and shaykh. He was born in the small town of Guemar in the province of El Oued, an agricultural area. His father was an imam and a Tijani, and he started reading Ibn Arabi as a teenager.

He studied physics at the University of Algiers, where, at the age of about 20, he discovered the work of Guénon. He later told an interviewer: "I was quite amazed by the breadth of Guénon’s outward and inward knowledge... Just as I believe that the greatest unveiler of spiritual realities after the Prophets is Ibn ʿArabi, so too do I think that the greatest spiritual figure to have come from the west is René Guénon. Indeed, his explication of metaphysical doctrines perfectly accords with Ibn ʿArabi’s perspective, which is not surprising, since there is only one Reality."

At the age of about 21 he joined the Habriyya, a branch of the Darqawiyya. He taught science and mathematics in local high schools, and on the advice of his shaykh, Sayyid Muhammad Belkaid al-Tilimisani (1911-1998), opened a zawiya of his own in Guemar in 1988. He began to write about Ibn Arabi, on whom he published his first book in 1997, followed by several more. 

He started to translate Guénon at the suggestion of Guénon's son Abd al-Wahid, who was a follower of the son of his own shaykh, and the first translation was published in 2013 (see cover image above). On at least one occasion he edited his translation to remove some of Guénon’s universalist positions, which are of course problematic from most Islamic perspectives. 

PDFs of the translations are all available on the Internet Archive, at https://archive.org/details/RG-Arabic/RG%20-%20Tarbiyya-Tahaqquq/mode/2up.

It would be interesting to know more about the reception of these translations in Algeria, in Jordan, and beyond. 

My thanks to Bnar Jabar for bringing Shaykh Abdul Baqi’s translations to my attention, and my thanks to an the reader of this blog who left the first comment below, directing me to the interview from which I quoted above. This is Hany Ibrahim and Mohammed Rustom, "An Interview with Abdel Baki Meftah, Algerian Master of Akbarian Teachings," Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society 72, 2022, available at https://traditionalhikma.com/an-interview-with-abdel-baki-meftahalgerian-master-of-akbarian-teachings/. After reading this article, I made major revisions to this blog post.

A Traditionalist Initiatic Novel

In his new book on Serbian literature and esotericism 1957–2000 (Српска књижевност и езотеризам 1957–2000, vol. 2 in the series Подземни Ток, Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik, 2020), Professor Nemanja Radulovic of the University of Belgrade devotes a chapter entitled “Portrait of a Traditionalist” to the Serbian painter, essayist, novelist and political commentator Dragoš Kalajić (1943-2005), already discussed in a previous post here, based on a 2020 article by Branislav Jakovljević. 

Radulovic adds a lot of detail to Jakovljević’s article, covers the whole of Kalajić's career, and helps answer the question I asked at the end of my last post: what Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalist thought was. 

Radulovic argues convincing that whenever René Guénon and Julius Evola differed, Kalajić followed Evola, and also that where de differed from both Guénon and Evola was in his emphasis on the Slavs as the bearers of tradition. Here and in his views on international relations he comes close to Alexander Dugin who, according to Radulovic, he knew, and whose politics he echoed during the 1990s and 2000s, though it is unclear to what extent he was influenced by Dugin and to what extent he came to similar conclusions independently. 

What appears as Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalism, however, was his “initiatic” novel Kosmotvorac (Cosmocreator; Belgrade: Beletra, 1989), cover pictured above. This, as Radulovic shows, is very much built on an Evolian view of things. It is set in the future and deals with the trial of members of the defeated Ordo explorarum (Order of Explorers), which is based on the actual Order of Templars, and led by an Elder Yalomed, a reverse anagram of the name of the actual Templar Grand Master (Jacques) de Molay. One of the monks of the Order is even called Alovej, J. Evola in reverse. 

The Ordo explorarum teaches that there is a divine spark in man, and seeks to replace the diversity of manifestation with original unity. Its members “preserve the doctrine of the restoration of the primordial state, the seeds of which they are to carry into the next cycle.” They also represent the male principle of order against the gynecocratic government, which defeats them, and is then itself defeated in a terrorist attack aided by alchemy. Kosmotvorac is, in Radulovic’s view, an initiatic novel not just because it tells of an initiatic journey, but also because it seeks to alter the reader.