A note on Guénon’s sources for Dante

A new article on the esotericism of Dante focuses on the way in which the Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854) of Eugène Aroux, a major source for Guénon’s L’Ésotérisme de Dante, is plagiarized from La Beatrice di Dante (1842) by Gabriele Rossetti. It is Piero Latino, “The Forgotten History of an Indirect Influence: From Gabriele Rossetti to Eugène Aroux, «L'eminente Plagiario», and the Spread of a Silent Idea in European Literature,” Studi Medievali e Moderni 29 (2025), pp. 135-156. 

Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854) was an Italian poet, nationalist revolutionary activist (and consequently later exile in London), and an enthusiast of Dante. One of his sons, Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828-1882), was among the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London. Eugène Aroux (1793-1859) was a less distinguished French politician and writer, and in his Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste, révélations d'un catholique sur le Moyen Âge (Dante: heretic, revolutionary, and socialist: Revelations of a Catholic about the Middle Ages) reversed the central message of Rossetti, still basing that new version largely on Rossetti’s work. 

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Howell knows Sherrard well, and had access to his unpublished as well as published writings when researching this article.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.