New PhD thesis on Guénon, Metapolitics, and the modern ethical domain

A PhD thesis on Guénon has just been defended at the City University of New York. It is by Frederic Colier, entitled “Beyond the Veil of Modernity: René Guénon, Prophet of the Metapolitical Imaginary,” and is available here.

As Colier tells us, Guénon did not use the word “metapolitical” himself, but many of his late followers use it, and Colier argues that Guénon’s work was indeed metapolitical, not purely spiritual, as some claim. Guénon's metapolitical aim was “to neutralize the modern ethical domain and reorient it towards a… theocratic doctrine in which social and political structures are rooted in a permanent, rigid spiritual universality.” 

That Guénon’s work has such political significance today is partly a result of this, and partly a result of the recent “globalization of capitalism and liberalism.” “Guénon reemerged at the beginning of the 21st century because his metapolitical work enables new extreme discourses to implement other ‘salvific’ alternatives. Liberated from Judeo-Christian [ethical] ‘shackles,’ neo-traditionalists profess radical measures to confront the perceived mounting threats, no matter the cost.” At the end of the thesis, Colier argues that “Together, Guénon, Evola, Eliade, Dumézil, and Schmitt have played their part as ‘horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ They toiled hard, often in obscurity, to cut loose the moral reins restraining the horse.”

Colier makes his argument primarily by placing Guénon in the context of the intellectual currents of his time, both French (Joseph de Maistre, Martinists, and others), as has been done before, but also beyond that: Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck and, especially, Neo-Thomism. As Colier points out, Guénon spent many years working with Western philosophy. He argues that Guénon’s esoteric/exoteric/initiatic mirrors Aquinas’s division between dogmatics, morality, and ritual. Perhaps, though I myself would trace the esoteric/exoteric pair to Sufism and earlier Western esotericism. He further argues that “through his exposure to the structured Masonic organization, Guénon learned about the crucial role of transmission, hierarchy, and alternative history, elements that became integral to Primordial Tradition and to Crisis.” Yes, but also through his contact with Sufism, in my view.

Finally, Colier also makes his case with a close reading of La Crise du monde moderne, and by pointing out how practically oriented were Guénon’s repeated hopes for the Catholic church would rediscover tradition and lead the salvation of the West.

A subsidiary argument is that Guénon was antisemitic, and that French scholars, especially, have knowingly or unknowingly obscured this. I think Colier is probably right—as he says, almost everyone else Guénon was in contact with was even more antisemitic. I am not sure exactly where this point gets us, beyond (perhaps) the neutralization of the Judeo element in the modern Judeo-Christian ethical domain.

Colier’s critique of Guénon includes the observation that conspiracy theories always follow the same pattern, “an effect looking for a cause,” and that Guénon’s approach to history rather fits this pattern. Indeed.

Interestingly, Colier pairs Julius Evola and Mircea Eliade among Guénon’s successors. Evola’s positions are well known, but there is a greater variety of views on Eliade. For Colier, Eliade’s “entire oeuvre reads like a manifesto for transforming the substitution of the ethical domain into its outright suppression.” The goal of Eliade’s archaic pagan religiosity was “to sever all Judeo-Christian roots of Western culture, especially its ethical domain, and substitute them with a mystical exaltation of the Sacred: cyclical, natural, and regional.” In this sense, perhaps, yes.

A good thesis, with many interesting observations along the way, though I am not entirely sure that Guénon's aim was really “to neutralize the modern ethical domain,” even if that may have been one of the consequences of his work.