More on André Scrima

The Romanian historian of religions Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban has recently contributed to the discussion of the status of Traditionalism for the Romanian monk and theologian André Scrima (1925-2000), discussed in previous posts here and here, with an excellent article, “The Inner Dimension of the Orthodox Tradition and Traditionalism According to André Scrima’s Hermeneutics,” Review of Ecumenical Studies 12:3 (2020): 485-496, available here. 

Tătaru-Cazaban takes us further into the original sources (1958, 1994, and 1996) and maintains the position taken by others that Scrima was not really a Traditionalist, given the various points on which he criticized Traditionalist positions. “His detachment from Traditionalism appears evident,” writes Tătaru-Cazaban.

The article is well argued, but I am not entirely convinced that the detachment is realty that evident. Scrima wrote a preface to a Romanian translation of Schuon’s De l’unité transcendante des religions in 1994, when he was 69 and approaching the end of his life, which suggests that he still valued Schuon’s work, even if he disagreed with it in certain ways. It all depends, perhaps, on what one means by “Traditionalist.” If one means “absolutely faithful to the positions taken by Guénon and Schuon,” there are very few real Traditionalists, especially since Guénon and Schuon themselves disagreed on various points. If one means “someone whose starting point was in Traditionalist thought and who then developed and modified that thought,” Scrima was perhaps a Traditionalist.

Tătaru-Cazaban finds “two invariable aspects” in Scrima’s hermeneutics. One is that “tradition is a transmission of living knowledge and of the access to an experience of the Living God through his Holy Spirit; it is not only a ‘repository’ of the experience of faith.” The other is that “Hesychasm is not an ‘universalizable’ spiritual tradition without Christ.” Hesychasm, the ritual pursuit of stillness (Greek hēsychia), is a collection of spiritual practices that developed in the Orthodox church in the fourteenth century, and was revived in Romania in the 1940s by a group of monks including Scrima who were inspired by Traditionalist understandings of the esoteric

To see tradition as a transmission of living knowledge rather than as a historical repository is not necessarily a detachment from the Traditionalist position. Although the way that some Traditionalists find the tradition in ancient texts might seem to turn it into a sort of repository, any Traditionalist who follows a Sufi shaykh also sees the tradition as a transmission of living knowledge. The one position does not exclude the other. One can read ancient texts and following a living master. Similarly, although some perennialists might universalize a practice such as Hesychasm stripped of its context, most would not: Guénon ended by stressing the importance of the exoteric context for any esoteric practice, following the Sufi approach that emphasizes the sharia as the contained of the haqiqa.

When it comes to the relationship between the esoteric and exoteric, Scrima did perhaps detach himself from the Traditionalist position, to judge from passages quoted by Tătaru-Cazaban, here translated by me from French to English:

Spiritual life has always been conceived in the Eastern Church as a living transmission, a parádosis, conveying the Spirit incarnate… There is no room here for any conflict of importance with the Tradition of the Church as such, nor for any distinction of nature from it… The distinction, itself external, between esoteric and exoteric, is meaningless here, for it is no longer a hidden continuation that denies time, a sacred passage, but a continuation of Presence.

Scrima, then, rejected the absolute distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric that is central to Traditionalism, especially in Guénon’s early work, though he later softened this position, and Schuon further eroded the distinction. Scrima, however, emphasized throughout his life the Hesychast practice that he and others saw as corresponding to Guénon’s understanding of the esoteric.His position here, then, is best seen as a modification, not a rejection.