At first sight, Corbin and Guénon were very different types of people. Corbin was a scholar who spent his life within French academia, occupying several prestigious posts. Guénon was rejected by French academia, and spent his life outside it, often criticizing it. On the other hand, their paths did somehow cross, given the close relationship between Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Italian scholar Francesco Piraino has recently drawn our attention to their very similar contemporary impact: reading Corbin, like reading Guénon, is often important for the trajectories of French converts to Sufi Islam. The Traditionalist author Patrick Laude has written about Corbin together with Guénon and Schuon (see here).
Fakhoury’s volume helps make clear where Corbin and Guénon agreed and where they differed. Firstly, Corbin was not a self-distancing academic scholar. He was never just a historian of ideas, or even a philosopher in the normal sense. He engaged actively in the exploration of the human relationship with the transcendent, and was as interested in actual spiritual experience as in written attempts to explain it. Secondly, he was in many ways a perennialist, believing in an “Oriental” or “Iranian” “Hellenism” that included Zoroastrianism, Plato, Proclus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi—not as a succession of historical figures, but as ways of accessing truth. Thirdly, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was central to his thought, as was—to a lesser extent—initiation. Fourthly, he had a low opinion of the modern West, preferring Oriental Hellenism to “Latinism,” and seeing modernity as lamentably desacralized. Finally, at least towards the end of his life, he sought for surviving transmissions of what Guénon would have called the primordial tradition in ancient orders (the Order of St Jean of Jerusalem) and Freemasonry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s chapter on “Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple” in Fakhoury’s volume sheds much light on this quest.
And yet Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s. Even if Corbin was never just a scholar, he worked on original texts in their original languages with considerable scholarly rigor. When it came to perennialism, Corbin was interested in Christianity and Iranian Hellenism, while Guénon was interested in Hinduism and Arab Islam. Corbin was a Protestant, and Guénon abhorred Protestantism. Corbin valued Plato, and Guénon did not. Guénon’s perennialism derived from Theosophy, while Corbin’s (perennial) Hellenism derived from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). The esoteric/exoteric pair is hard to avoid if one looks in certain areas of Islam, and while Corbin’s esoteric was located primarily in what he famously termed the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginary” between the realm of the forms and the experiential world, Guénon’s esoteric was mostly in the teachings of the primordial tradition. For Guénon, anti-modernism was primary, but for Corbin it was secondary.
In the end, the two men were also of different generations. Most of Corbin’s (1903-1978) work was published after Guénon’s death in 1951. Corbin's crucial Sohravardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative was published in 1939, but—presumably because of the disruption caused by the Second World War—was not reviewed in Études traditionnelles until 1947. And even then it received only one (rather dismissive) paragraph, which can be read here.
I know that you are labeling all and sundry under the *Traditionalist* label (which to me is beginning to lose its meaning), but having spent a lifetime reading Corbin in French, English, Persian and Arabic, your post and rubricization is missing a big forest for trees. Henry Corbin was no Traditionalist and makes his views about the Guenonians abundantly clear in several publications, including in a famous caustic comment of his *Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi*.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, having spent a few quality days with the late Stella Corbin in 2000 and asking her pointed questions related to this and other matters directly, I know Corbin did not look too kindly on the Guenonians and his acolytes, and definitely did not consider himself in their camp. Nor did they consider him one of them---and the reasons are obvious. Despite SH Nasr's later involvement, Corbin's approach to esotericism and Islam in particular comes from the angles of Gnosticism and Shi'ism. These are tendencies that the first generation of Neo-Trads consider to be heterodox, even anti-tradition. Just as your contextualization of Aleksandr Dugin as a Traditionalist makes no credible sense (he is a Heideggerian camouflaging his neo-Black Hundred Russian fascism under Neo-Traditionalism), placing Corbin under this label makes even less sense.
Steven Wasserstrom attempted during the 1990s to slur Corbin as a fascist, and failed. His *Religion after Religion* subsequently became the butt of jokes throughout the comparative religion study scene, and he himself never returned to the subject because of all the negative reviews his book got. But there appears to be a tendency in the Anglophone Ivory Tower to either cast Corbin as a crypto-fascist (as Wasserstrom did and failed) or a Neo-Traditionalist (as you are now attempting). Underlying this is politics -- full-stop.
Thanks for what you say about Corbin's view of the Guénonians, which could fit nicely into the "Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s" section of my post. For clarification, I was not arguing that Corbin was a Traditionalist, but that there were particular points of agreement despite the differences. Dugin is another matter; for this, see my recent article at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11212-025-09708-y .
DeleteI must fundamentally disagree with your continued classification of Aleksandr Dugin within the Neo-Traditionalist camp. This conflation reveals a significant conceptual slippage that, in my view, undermines the philosophical rigor of your analysis. Let me explain.
ReplyDeleteI read and engage with Heidegger, but that does not make me a Heideggerian. My metaphysical commitments lie squarely within the tradition of the Akbarians, the school of Mullā Ṣadrā, as further shaped by the Shaykhī tradition and Bayānī metaphysics. I am not a Traditionalist. My politics are Marxist-Left, though I diverge from classical Marxism in its treatment of religion. Dugin, similarly, may engage certain metaphysical texts, but his orientation is not coherently Traditionalist—neither in the Guénonian sense nor even in its contemporary permutations.
The most conspicuous break between Dugin and the Neo-Traditionalists lies in his Heideggerian ontology and his lack of a symbolic metaphysics. Neo-Traditionalism, by definition, entails a commitment to a symbolic cosmology, an anagogical worldview, and a theology rooted in perennial metaphysical principles—what Guénon called principes. But Dugin’s notion of Being (Sein) is filtered almost entirely through Heidegger’s Dasein—a category of finitude, not divinity. Heidegger emphasized repeatedly that Dasein is not God. Yet within the Neo-Traditionalist lexicon, “Being” always implicitly refers to the Absolute, the Divine, or the Principial. This is a decisive difference that you seem to overlook.
Moreover, Dugin’s primary intellectual engagement has been with politics, geopolitics, and political ontology, not with metaphysics in the properly Traditionalist sense. His Fourth Political Theory lacks any rigorous metaphysical scaffolding, and when he gestures toward cosmological concepts—such as “Chaos” in his appendix—it is not rooted in traditional symbolic language. His “Chaos” is not the Śakti of Kashmir Shaivism, nor the materia prima of Hermetic thought, nor the Nūr Muḥammadī of Islamic metaphysics. It is an ontological posture derived from Heideggerian mood (Stimmung) and the Abgrund (abyss), devoid of transcendence.
In fact, if one applies the very criteria that the Neo-Trads use to define their own tradition—hierarchical metaphysics, symbolic cosmology, perennial theology, esoteric orthodoxy—Dugin fails every test. He does not uphold metaphysical unity (tawḥīd), nor does he ground politics in cosmological symbolism. His entire framework is predicated on geopolitical will, existential finitude, and mythic nationalism, which stands in stark contrast to the apolitical, anti-modern, and metaphysically grounded worldview of figures like Guénon, Schuon, or even Nasr.
To persist in labeling Dugin as a Traditionalist, then, is not only inaccurate—it amounts to a distortion of both Dugin’s project and Traditionalism itself. If anything, Dugin represents a post-Heideggerian political existentialism dressed in Eurasian civilizational rhetoric. Calling this Traditionalism is taking serious liberties with the term.
If your goal is analytical precision, I would encourage a close re-reading of Heidegger—particularly the Introduction to Metaphysics and the Beiträge zur Philosophie—alongside a reappraisal of Dugin’s actual corpus. Then compare this with the metaphysical and symbolic framework of the Traditionalist School. I believe the disjunction will become evident.
All good points and thank you. If you read the article I referenced, you will see that I am making a somewhat different argument, not really incompatible with what you say.
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