What sort of a perennialist was Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch?

Two recent articles discuss the conversion to Islam of the French scholar Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch (1909–99). They are Doha Tazi Hemida, “Another Orientalism? The Case of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch and Rumi,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 25:4 (2023), 521-539, available here, and Samir Abdelli, “’Je ne reniais ni la Thorah ni l’Évangile.’ Eva Meyerovitch (1909-1999), devenir musulmane et rester chrétienne ?” L’Année du Maghreb 34 (2025), available here (open access).

De Vitray-Meyerovitch was brought up in France as a Catholic, abandoned Catholic practice as various doubts crystalized, and married a Jew in a civil marriage. She turned to Islam through Louis Massignon (1883-1962), reading Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), and translating Rumi, who she came to see as her true shaykh. In addition to this she joined the Boutchichiyya, which discovered through the Traditionalist Boutchichi Faouzi Skali (born 1953). 

Tazi Hemida and Abdelli both note the similarities between de Vitray-Meyerovitch and the Traditionalists. She read René Guénon, and occasionally cites him, for example on the nature of the Vedanta and for his argument that resemblances between different "traditional forms" were to be expected "because Truth is one" ("L’âme et le visage du soufisme," Planète 18, septembre 1964). She also cites Titus Burckhardt, and on one occasion recommended someone to read a book by Frithof Schuon. But her own mature understanding of that universal truth is soundly Islamic:

For Islam, divine revelations, which are all repetitions of a single, universal message, descend at various moments in history upon those whom God has chosen as His messengers. And since there can only be one Truth, in all times and in all places, Revelation can only be essentially the same for all of humanity. If there are differences between religious traditions, they are attributable to erroneous transmission or to purely human interpretations of the divine Word, which can lead to an alteration or even a distortion of this Revelation. ("Une doctrine de l’unicité," Le Magazine littéraire 181, février 1982).

De Vitray-Meyerovitch differs from the Traditionalists in that she was not a critic of modernity (she even welcomed Iqbal’s modernity), and did not refer to esotericism, despite her Sufism. Her universalism was in some ways in the tradition of what might be termed Massignon’s spiritual sensibility, and also followed Iqbal. In her own words (following a citation by Abdelli)

You have to be prepared for a meeting or a book to turn your life upside down. I was already on a path of free inquiry, personal interpretation, and individual research, and I found all of that concretized in a great thinker [Iqbal]. And then I was happy to realize that I was not alone, lost on a side road, but that I was, without knowing it, part of a great tradition. And that without having to renounce anything. I did not renounce the Torah or the Gospel. I simply left aside what had always annoyed me: the conciliar, dogmatic decisions of gentlemen gathered in Rome to decide that God is this or that. (Islam, l’autre visage, 1991).

De Vitray-Meyerovitch was more of a universalist than a perennialist, then, arriving at a similar destination by a different route. The title Universalité de l'Islam (The Universality of Islam) in the picture above ws not her own; it was chosen by others for a posthumous collection of her writings.

This post has been updated to correct the initial mis-statement that "She does not, so far as I know, ever cite the Traditionalists," and also to note that De Vitray-Meyerovitch recommended a book by Schuon (thanks to Samir Abdelli for that information).

Kathleen Raine, almost a Traditionalist

A new study of the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) has just been published: Jenny Messenger, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness (Bloomsbury 2025). This supplements the “authorized biography” by Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine (Shepheard Walwyn 2012). 

Raine was almost a Traditionalist, and it is interesting to explore how she differed from the Traditionalists on whom this blog focuses. She was a perennialist and worked (in her own words) to “reaffirm the Perennial Philosophy which, like an underground river, has flowed through all civilizations and all ages, and wherever it sends up springs and fountains, Beauty and Wisdom have flowered.” She was well versed in the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, and in Messenger’s view built on their work, though it is not explained quite how. She also worked with individual Traditionalists in England. Her Temenos journal (now the Temenos Academy Review) was established with the help of Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, all of whom were probably Maryamis. Speakers at her Temenos Academy have included many Traditionalists. Raine also disliked the modern world, and—like many but not all Traditionalists—was a scholar who was somewhat on the margins of the mainstream, since she insisted that the important thing about ancient texts was their meaning for people today, more than their place in the historical context.

Several things make Raine different, however. One is that although she disliked the modern world, she did not systematically attack it or develop a theoretical basis for condemning it. Another is that she admired and studied two (relatively) modern figures, William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Then come her ancient sources: Plato and the Neoplatonists, who the Traditionalists have generally ignored—wrongly, in my view, since the Sufi philosophy that Traditionalists have studied with such attention contains much that is derived from Neoplatonism. As Messenger puts it,

She did not view eastern religions and philosophies as entirely hers, however. Hinduism and Buddhism were not her culture or tradition, she felt. Plato and Plotinus, enfolded within the grand arc of Western civilization, were – despite the fact that the Neoplatonists were not at all ‘western’ and instead were from places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Finally, Raine was a woman, which—for some reason I have never understand—none of the major figures in the Traditionalist movement have been.

René Guénon and Henry Corbin

A recent publication, New Perspectives on Henry Corbin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), edited by Hadi Fakhoury, available here, has prompted me to reflect on the relationship between Corbin (pictured left) and Guénon.

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.

Was Gandhi a Traditionalist?

Michael Allen, a philosopher at East Tennessee State University, has worked on protest movements for many years, and has just published a book about Gandhi in which he asks the unexpected question of whether Gandhi has a Traditionalist. The answer, he argues, is no, but the question still gives rise to an interesting discussion, in chapter 7 of Allen's Gandhi’s Popular Sovereignty of Truth: Devotional Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), available here.

Gandhi was, like Guénon, a fierce critic of modernity, and also a perennialist. So far, so similar. The difference, according to Allen, is that while the Traditionalist route to personal or political realization is esoteric, Gandhi’s route was exoteric: his “devotional democracy” depended on “the whole sovereign people together speaking God’s voice,” not just on an elite.

Allen also compares Gandhi to the contemporary Identitarians, who draw on Traditionalism. Here the difference is about “pluralism of ethno-cultural traditions.” While the Identitarians suppose that “each discrete culture may flourish only in its own territory of origin,” which Allen sees as “an impossible global ethno-cultural apartheid,” Gandhi rejects this idea and looks towards "a wide pluralism" instead.

I am not sure that Allen has got the Identitarians quite right, but I am certainly convinced that Gandhi was not a Guénonian. He was closer to Guénon than I had thought, though, perhaps because I have not previously thought about him enough.

Henry Corbin's critique of Traditionalism

A new article looks at a dispute in 1963 between Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–1978), the most important Traditionalist in Pakistan, discussed in an earlier post here, and Henry Corbin (1903–1978), a leading French scholar of Islamic mysticism and in his youth an enthusiast of the work of René Guénon. It is Hadi Fakhoury, “Ibn ʿArabi between East and West: Henry Corbin and Guénonian Traditionalism.” Religiographies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2024): 25–45 available here (open source).

The dispute took place in the pages of a major French philosophical journal, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Journal of metaphysics and ethics), and started with an article by Askari (available here) which compared Ibn ‘Arabi and Kierkegaard, the former understood in Traditionalist terms as an exponent of orthodox esotericism, and the later understood as representative of modernity. This article contained a passing criticism of Corbin which ensured that Corbin read it and, unusually, responded (here). Fakhoury suggests that one reason that Corbin responded may have been that he wanted to make clear his mature position on Traditionalism. Probably referring to his own early encounter with Traditionalism, he wrote that “reading the works of René Guenon can, at some point in one’s life, provoke a salutary shock.” An interesting perspective: perhaps that is, indeed, one of the main functions of Guénon’s work.

Corbin’s basic argument was that Askari seemed better acquainted with the writings of Guénon than with those of Ibn ‘Arabi, and that Ibn ‘Arabi was more complex than the Traditionalists suspected. “Anyone,” wrote Corbin, “who has devoted his life to seeing the texts for himself will find it impossible to accept that the last word has been said in René Guénon’s work.” That is, I think, true.

Beyond this, Corbin also accuses Traditionalism of a “bias towards systematic rationalism” without really explaining why, and also of “denouncing and devaluing everything that has to do with personal individuality. Fleeing into the impersonal and the spirit of ‘orthodoxy.’” This, said Corbin, was “strangely in tune with the intellectual fashion of the day,” by which he probably meant the varieties of totalitarianism that he saw smothering the personal. As Fakhoury writes, “for both Guénonian Traditionalism and Corbin, the interpretation of Ibn ‘Arabi has implications far beyond mere historical accuracy. Indeed, their respective retrieval of Ibn ‘Arabi is intrinsically connected to, and motivated by, a series of wider, interrelated questions.”

Fakhoury contrasts the approaches of Corbin and the Traditionalists nicely:

Rather than a “return to tradition,” Corbin seeks to go one step before tradition, as it were, that is, to recover the spiritual source that gave rise to it in the first place. This implies a continuous “re-activation” and “re-creation” of tradition in the present, literally, its “modernization” – a word that derives from the Latin modo, meaning “now existing” or “just now.”

 An important and interesting article.

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).

Catholic and Guénonian Traditionalism, and the Angelico Press

As well as the Guénonian Traditionalism that this blog follows, there is also “Catholic Traditionalism,” the broad stream of Roman Catholic thought that is hostile to the ascendent liberalism that it identifies with the Second Vatican Council. In general, Guénonian and Catholic Traditionalism are quite separate phenomena, but Alistair McFadden (a pseudonym) has drawn my attention to an overlap between the two at US-based Angelico Press, one of the leading “traditional” Catholic publishers.

Angelico Press is important for Catholic Traditionalism. In McFadden’s words, “Traditional Catholics will likely have at least one Angelico title on their bookshelves.” Others agree about the press’s importance. 

McFadden, himself a traditional Catholic, finds the presence of Traditionalist and other esoteric voices at Angelico problematic, as he argues in a long blog post, “Observations on the Influence of the Occult in Traditional Catholic Discourse.” It is not the scope of this blog to address such judgments. But publishing Traditionalist works was one reason why Angelico was established in the first place, as explained in an interview (here) by its founder and current president, John Riess:

I wanted to run a Catholic press, yet reach beyond what most Catholic presses were publishing: to explore the catholicity past and present of the tradition; to give a mouthpiece to contemporary Catholic voices such as Stratford Caldecott, Jean Borella, and Jean Hani.

Caldecott (1953-2014) was and English convert to Catholicism who seems to have been what I term a “soft” (Guénonian) Traditionalist, while Borella (b. 1930) and Hani (1917-2012) were leading French Catholic (Guénonian) Traditionalists. Riess’s partner in starting Angelico was James Wetmore, the director of the leading US (Guénonian) Traditionalist publisher Sophia Perennis. Angelico, then, was as much a (Guénonian) Traditionalist publisher that became popular among traditional Catholics as it was a traditional Catholic publisher that published (Guénonian) Traditionalists.

Angelico’s success among traditional Catholics owes something to the fact that it republishes traditional Catholic classics. The model of republishing classics was pioneered by the US publisher Dover, starting in the 1940s, and Riess worked for 15 years at Dover before starting Angelico. Its current list includes not only Catholic and Traditionalist authors, but also Rainer Maria Rilke and Max Weber.

In 2020, Angelico’s imprints included a joint Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis imprint with sixteen books, and a purely Sophia Perennis imprint with three books. These imprints have now vanished from Angelico's website, perhaps partly as a reaction to McFadden’s criticisms, but the books involved remain. At time of writing, Angelico has, as intended, published Caldecott, Borella, and Hani (four books each). It has also published contemporary Catholic (Guénonian) Traditionalists—notably Wolfgang Smith (born 1930) and Bernard Kelly (see earlier post here—and non-Catholic (Guénonian) Traditionalists—notably Charles Upton and Brian Keeble (born 1941). And it has also republished classic (Guénonian) Traditionalists, including Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) and Lord Northbourne (1896-1982), and the “soft” Traditionalist (and typeface designer) Eric Gill (1882-1940).

Angelico, then, is known as a major “traditional” Catholic publisher, and is also a significant (Guénonian) Traditionalist publisher. As such, it represents an overlap or even a mixing of two formerly distinct streams within contemporary religious thought, an interesting development. My thanks to McFadden for bringing it to my attention.

Note

• Jean Borella (b. 1930) and Jean Hani (1917-2012) were leading French Catholic Traditionalists. Borella was a professor of philosophy, and for many years the leading Catholic Traditionalist in France. For some years in the 1990s he was the joint editor of the journal Connaissance des religions (1985-2005), which was in effect the Schuonian successor to the original Études traditionnelles of René Guénon. Jean Hani was also a French scholar (of classical antiquity), a Traditionalist, a Catholic, and a regular contributor to Connaissance des religions.
• Stratford Caldecott (1953-2014) was an English scholar and convert to Catholicism who accepted the Traditionalist understanding of the transcendent unity of religions but does not seem to have been a paid-up Traditionalist, though he is said to have often cited Borella. He acknowledged the influence of Guénon’s one-time sponsor, the great French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973).

Traditionalists and Neo-Tradtionalists

A new edited book has two chapters on Neo-Traditionalists, one of which also deals with a Traditionalist, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad in Jordan, and with the reading of Julius Evola by a Neo-Traditionlaist, Abdal Hakim Murad in England. The book as a whole deals with modernity in the Muslim world.

The book is Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity: Islamic Traditions and the Construction of Modern Muslim Identities, ed. Dietrich Jung and Kirstine Sinclair (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

The first chapter is Mark Sedgwick, "The Modernity of Neo-Traditionalist Islam," pp. 121–146, available https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425576_008.

Abstract: The chapter discusses certain exponents of “traditional Islam” who are organized in an informal network spanning both the Arab world and the West and who are referred to as “Neo-traditionalists,” since the chapter argues that their traditionalism is, in fact, modern. The key figures are Muhammad Saʿid Ramadan al-Buti in Syria, ʿAli Gomaa in Egypt, ʿUmar bin Hafiz in Yemen, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and Nuh Keller in Jordan, Abdal Hakim Murad in England, and Hamza Yusuf Hanson in the USA. It is argued that Neo-Traditionalism is a product of what Peter Wagner would call a “crisis of modernity,” the reaction against one stage of modernity that gives rise to a new stage of modernity. 

And the second chapter is Kirstine Sinclair, "An Islamic University in the West and the Question of Modern Authenticity," pp. 147–165, available https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004425576_009.

Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to discuss how Islamic universities in the West facilitate and condition the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities in minority contexts with emphasis on the institutions as providers of guidelines for good, Muslim minority life. This is done through a case study of Cambridge Muslim College in the UK, its values and aims, as well as through interviews with the founder and dean [Abdal Hakim Murad], faculty members and students and participatory observation. Cambridge Muslim College sees itself as mediator between Islamic traditions and modern Muslims in the West, and as having a responsibility in engaging in the development of both Muslim minorities and the wider society within which it operates. 

For those who are interested in modernity, the blurb of the book as a whole is:

With critical reference to Eisenstadt's theory of "multiple modernities," Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity discusses the role of religion in the modern world. The case studies all provide examples illustrating the ambition to understand how Islamic traditions have contributed to the construction of practices and expressions of modern Muslim selfhoods. In doing so, they underpin Eisenstadt's argument that religious traditions can play a pivotal role in the construction of historically different interpretations of modernity. At the same time, however, they point to a void in Eisenstadt's approach that does not problematize the multiplicity of forms in which this role of religious traditions plays out historically. Consequently, the authors of the present volume focus on the multiple modernities within Islam, which Eisenstadt's theory hardly takes into account.

Evola and Tolkein

A new article on how the thought of Julius Evola and J. R. R. Tolkien came together in Italian "Hobbit Camps" in the late 1970s and early 1980s has just been published by John Last. It is "How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism."

As Last shows, there was something of the (lowercase t) traditionalist about Tolkien, both in his dislike of modernity and his interest in ancient myth. This fitted well with the mood of the Italian Right, as did the work of Evola.

It would be interesting to know whether this is just coincidence, or whether there is a deeper connection. What inspired Tolkien, other than the myths he worked wth as a scholar?

Anti-modernism in America

Steve Bannon is not America’s only Catholic anti-modernist. In a new article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Riding the Tiger, Riding the Wave: Christian Conservatives and Radical Anti-Modernism,” Benjamin R. Teitelbaum discusses the recent work of two other prominent American Christians, Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia and Rod Dreher, an Orthodox Christian and senior editor at The American Conservative. Their anti-modernism does indeed have something in common with the Traditionalism that this blog covers. Teitelbaum himself makes the comparison between their views and Julius Evola’s.

Teitelbaum argues that both Catholics are quite as anti-modernist as Evola, and that both have also adopted Evola's pessimistic “ride the tiger” approach (which he explains nicely in the first part of his article). Both Catholics take the same event—the 2015 court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the US—as representing the irreversible victory of “totalizing liberalism.” Chaput sees this as the triumph of the ideal of the sovereignty of the individual, the idea that our identity should not be constrained by even the most basic fact of birth, our sex. Dreher proposes a radical remedy: that America’s remaining Christians should take inspiration from the separatism of Orthodox Jews.

Teitelbaum does not argue that Chaput or Dreher are actually inspired by Evola (though Dreher’s phrasing at one point does echo Evola's). He argues rather that what he calls “a broad anti-modernism” “poses the most serious threat to global liberalism.” It may indeed be becoming more widespread.

Correction: Rod Dreher was inaccurately described as a Catholic in the original version of this post.

Political Hesychasm

In a comment to my post on "Alexander Dugin, Bishop Tikhon, and President Putin," Wurmbrand asks for an explanation of the term “Political Hesychasm.”

Hesychasm (ἡσυχασμός) is, of course, the tradition associated with the late Byzantine monk Gregorios Palamas (died 1359) that focuses on the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, a sort of Orthodox dhikr. This was accepted by the Orthodox Church and condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.

The phrase “political Hesychasm” seems to have been coined by Vladimir Petrunin in Политический исихазм и его традиции в социальной концепции Московского Патриархата (Political Hesychasm and its Traditions in the Social Thought of the Moscow Patriarchate, 2009). It describes an understanding of relations between East and West ascribed to Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), a priest and scientist who did not survive the Great Terror, and the philosopher (and monk) Aleksei Losev (1893-1998), who did survive the Terror.

In Эстетика Возрождения (Esthetics of the Renaissance, 1978) Losev developed a highly original analysis of the Renaissance in terms of the ascendency of “anthropocentric Neoplatonism” and the consequent birth of individualism. He contrasts this in his introduction to Palamas and the Hesychasts, who he sees as central to a parallel Eastern Renaissance that drew on the Orthodox Neoplatonism of Dionysius the Areopagite.

Hesychasm and the Eastern Renaissance were not Losev’s main topic, but his book provides the basis for a view of Eastern Christianity in opposition to Western Christianity and the Renaissance that fits very neatly with Alexander Dugin’s Traditionalism.

Alexander Dugin, Bishop Tikhon, and President Putin

There has been much discussion about how much influence Alexander Dugin really has in the Kremlin. A partial answer is provided by a new article by Michael Hagemeister, “Der ‘Nördliche Katechon’ – ‘Neobyzantismus’ und ’politischer Hesychasmus’ im postsowjetischen Russland” (The Northern Katechon: Neo-Byzantinism and political Hesychasm in Post-Sovet Russia), Erfurter Vorträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Orthodoxen Christentums 15 (2016), pp. 5-36.

Dugin is not Hagemeister’s main topic. This is Bishop Tikhon, Georgy Shevkunov, who is visibly very close to President Putin, and may well be the president’s confessor. The article describes Tikhon’s influence and examines the ideologies that he represents, notably Neo-Byzantinism and political Hesychasm, which Hagemeister traces back to Gelian Prochorov in the mid 1960s.

Political Hesychasm, especially, is easily compatible with Traditionalism, as it sees modernity and the Renaissance in very much the same way as Tradiitonalism does. Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism thus fits very comfortably with two wider and possibly more powerful currents, and the views of the influential Bishop Tikhon. Whatever Dugin’s own influence in the Kremlin, then, others with very similar views clearly have significant influence there.

My thanks to Birgit Menzel for bringing this article to my attention.

JAAR review of The Study Quran

A review of The Study Quran, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and others and previously mentioned on this blog for its Maryami connections, has just been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, possibly the world’s leading journal in the field. It is by Aisha Geissinger, a Quran specialist and assistant professor at Carleton University in Canada, and is careful and fair.

Geissinger welcomes The Study Quran as “a fascinating example of what could be termed the ‘next stage’ in the publication of confessional literature that reflects the reception of the Qur’an by believing Muslims writing in English” because, unlike other English translations, it really engages with the techniques and history of tafsir (exegesis) and “vividly conveys something of the Qur’an’s long and intellectually vibrant history of interpretation.”

She notes, however, that—like all other translations—The Study Quran presents one particular perspective. She characterizes this perspective as “broadly... neo-traditionalist” and sometimes perennialist. The selection of “traditional” material, she concludes, produces “a twenty-first century CE construction of an ostensibly timeless ‘tradition.’” And how, I wonder, could it not?

My thanks to OA for drawing this review to my attention.

Deep background, especially US

A new book, Patrick Bowen's A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States: White American Converts before 1975 (Brill, 2015), does not deal directly with Traditionalism (though Guénon is mentioned) but does deal with various topics that are part of the background to Traditionalism, and part of the background to Sufism and Traditionalism in the United States. There's lots on the Theosophical Society, on Martinism, on early neo-Sufis, universalism (if not exactly perennialism) and on changes in attitudes to religion in the nineteenth century. A good book, recommended.

"Traditional Islam" explained

An important new article on Traditional Islam has just been published, and is easily available online. It is Kasper Mathiesen, "Anglo-American ‘Traditional Islam’ and Its Discourse of Orthodoxy," Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 13 (2013), pp. 191-219.

In this article, Mathiesen explores and explains the discourses of "Traditional Islam," which he distinguished from Traditionalism, despite its origins in Traditionalism and the ways in which it continues to parallel Traditionalism.

He suggests that Traditional Islam, with capital letters, "may be construed as a denomination within Sunni Islam."  It is, he considers, "one of the main paradigms and most influential currents within contemporary Islam," but is predominantly Western: as a Google search confirms, al-islām al-taqlīdī ("Traditional Islam" in Arabic) barely exists.

Mathiesen traces the origins of Traditional Islam to Seyyed Hussein Nasr’s Traditional Islam in the Modern World (1987) which, he considers, "sets forth a holistic, inspiring and learned grand vision of the Islamic past, of traditional Islam as it was, is, should and could be." Since 1987, he argues, Traditional Islam has developed into something more specific, more Sunni, and less perennialist--replacing, for example, the classic Traditionalist account of decline with one based soundly on Islamic hadith.

Above all, however, there has developed a distinctive discourse, mostly at the hands of Nuh Ha Mim Keller and Abdul Hakim Murad, which the bulk of Mathieson's article explains. The essentials of this mirror the classic trio of  islam, iman and ihsan, and are the importance of the madhhabs in fiqh, an ʿaqīda that stresses complete Divine transcendence against the anthropomorphism of Ibn Taymiyya and his contemporary Wahhabi/Salafi followers, and "the revivification of Islamic Sufism," which for Mathiesen is the "real core issue" in Traditional Islam.

The article is valuable for giving a more thorough and precise picture of Traditional Islam than is available anywhere else, and for explaining its relationship to Traditionalism clearly and convincingly. Mathiesen is right that Traditional Islam today is something separate from Traditionalism, and yet its debt to Traditionalism is clear: it is after all quite possible to object to reformists and Salafis, to value the madhhabs and stress Divine transcendence, without ending up in Sufism. Traditional Islam in a sense simply reaches the same destination as Traditionalism proper by a different route.

Mathiesen notes in passing that he accepts Ron Geaves' classification of British Barelwis as "Traditional Islam." It would be interesting to see a fuller examination of the relationship between this and the Traditional Islam of Keller and Murad.

In closing, I must declare an interest: Mathiesen is a PhD student in the Islamic Cultures and Societies Research Unit at Aarhus University, where I teach.

A Jesuit critique of Traditionalism

An interesting discussion of Traditionalism has been published by Damian Howard, a Christian theologian and Jesuit priest.

Howard's 2011 book, Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview (Abingdon: Routledge), deals with three Islamic approaches to the challenges raised by the theory of evolution. First come approaches inspired by Henri Bergson, second comes the Traditionalist approach, and third and last come approaches Howard places under the rubric of Islamization of knowledge--Syed Muhammad al-Attas and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). None exactly mainstream in Islam, then, but all interesting. Howard explains his selection of Traditionalism on grounds of its inherent interest, and of the influence Traditionalist views have among non-Traditionalist Muslims, especially in the West.

For Howard, Traditionalism's rejection of evolution follows inevitably from its rejection of modernity--a rejection which he sees as itself problematic. Firstly, the Traditionalist conception of tradition is simply too all-inclusive: "it elides radically different models of revelation" (p. 110). Secondly, to see modernity as "pure negation of the transcendent" (p, 118) is to grant too much to modernity, in effect to accept modernity's own claim to be unique.

Howard himself would prefer to distinguish the major elements that he sees Traditionmalism lumping together as "tradition"--"emanationist metaphysics, initiatory esotericism, a theology of revelation" (p. 117)--and to see modernity as "a complex, multi-layered phenomenon" (p. 118).

An interesting critique, and an interesting book.

Schuon in an Indonesian doctoral dissertation

Dinar Dewi Kania of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought and Civilizations (INSISTS) in Indonesia has just successfully defended a doctoral dissertation entitled Studi Komparatif Pemikiran Epistimologi Frithjof Schuon dan Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (A Comparative Study of Epistemological Thought of Frithjof Schuon and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas) at the UIKA Bogor.

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas is a venerable and celebrated neo-traditionalist philosopher in neighboring Malaysia, and thus in some ways close to Traditionalism, but not a Traditionalist. In her differtation, Dinar Dewi Kania compares the epistemology of Schuon with that of al-Attas, and finds some common ground: both affirm the position of metaphysical knowledge (gnosis) or ma’rifa as the highest knowledge to achieve the absolute reality that is God, and both also criticize the notion that separates the ratio from the intellect, stating that the intellect is a factor that will illuminate the ratio through intuition. The difference between them, she argues, is that they include their own conceptions in understanding reality, truth and intellect, resulting in a significant difference in the object of knowledge, sources of knowledge and the process of knowing.

According to Dinar Dewi Kania, Schuon defined things that may be known to humans as objects of knowledge, including the substance or essence of God, while al-Attas rejected this view and stated that the object of knowledge is limited to a permanent natural archetype in the form of the names and attributes of God. Schuon sees religious dogma as representing a relative truth, while the total truth obtained through esoteric gnosis that comes from the heart (intellect) is named subjective revelation. Perennialist epistemology is thus fundamentally different from Islamic epistemology, because it  affirms the spiritual union between the substances of man and God and thus is a form of monism or pantheism. Schuon’s epistemology also places religious sciences that are derived from revelation in a lower position than metaphysical knowledge obtained by way of meditation, whereas in the view of al-Attas, an authentic revelation (the Quran and the sunna of the Prophet) is the highest source of knowledge which has absolute value to be used for guiding empirical and rational science. Al-Attas's epistemological thought is thus in accordance with Islamic epistemology, constructed by the worldview of Islam.

"Modern Anti-Modern Discourse"

An unusual course is being offered this Fall, by Thomas F. Bertonneau, who teaches at SUNY Oswego (Oswego, NY). It is entitled "Modern Anti-Modern Discourse: The Critique of Pure Modernity from 1920 to 2001."

Unusually, Bertonneau has published an article about his forthcoming course: "'I Told You So': The Critique of Pure Modernity from 1920 to 2001," Academic Questions online first, July 13, 2012. The authors chosen for the course are Nicolas Berdyaev (author of The Fate of Man in the Modern World, 1935), T. S. Eliot, René Girard (for I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001), René Guénon, José Ortega y Gasset, and Eric Voegelin. It seems from the article that Voegelin was Bertonneau's own point of introduction to anti-modernism.

As well as teaching at  SUNY Oswego, Bertonneau has a blog at the conservative Brussels Journal and an amusing list of extracts from student essays at Taki's Magazine.

On Prince Charles

Rod Dreher has just published an interesting article on Prince Charles in the American Conservative, "Philosopher Prince: The revolutionary anti-modernism of Britain’s heir apparent." The article is interesting both because it is a thoughtful profile that places the prince's Traditionalism within its wider context and because it provides food for thought about the political and ideological right. Dreher maintains that "Postwar American conservatism is a fusion of traditionalist and libertarian schools" (he is using 'traditionalist' in the general, little t sense, of course). I don't know to what extent this is true of American conservatism in particular (though the on-line comments on Dreher's article suggest that it is), but--more importantly--I suspect that it is true of the broad right as a whole.

The main topic, though, is Prince Charles, and my feeling is that Dreher has got that more or less right.

Memoirs of a Dervish

Just published: Robert Irwin, Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties ($17.59 from Amazon US and £8.49 from Amazon UK). This is an autobiographical account by a talented writer and novelist of his own journey from 1960s Oxford through the Maryamiyya to Mostaghanem and onwards. Irwin, who is Middle East editor of The Times Literary Supplement, is perhaps best known for his criticisms of Edward Said's Orientalism. Well worth reading, and endorsed by Esther Freud (of Hideous Kinky).