“In any case, what Westeners call civilization, the others would call barbarity, because it is precisely lacking in the essential, that is to say a principle of a higher order.”
René Guénon, East And West, 1924
fn1: This is not a school - such as when supposing that “Guénonian Traditionalism is a school
inspired by Guénon, and taking various different forms,” but a metaphysical point of view, or of inspiration. Different authors may share their critical view of modernity, but would have to propose a spiritual medicine against it, which they mostly failed to do.
fn2: Sedgwick writes: ”as the truths that should have been handed down.” But they have been handed down.
fn3: This recovery is ”in full swing” in the West and in several countries in the East. Many flowers are flourishing and trees finding their roots.
fn9: Not just ’religious movements’, but more and more political, exclusivist movements.
fn8: Concepts such as ”Traditionalism” or ”Traditionalists”, are useful for academics or orientalists, but easily misunderstood, see above fn1.
“Still less would (many Muslims in the Islamic world) think much of his idea of the fundamental unity of all religions.fn4 Sure, there have been and are dissenting voices, but the overwhelming consensus among Muslims is that other religions are just plain wrong.fn5 That's very different from the standard Traditionalist view.”
fn4: The ’idea of the fundamental unity of all religions,’ in this expressively stated form was not R. Guénon’s , but F. Schuon’s idea.
Guénon’s concern was to rediscover the traces (and principles) of tradition in the many religious forms of the world. His purpose was not to propose some ’super-religion’, as his detractors contend.
fn5: Answer to this proposition: To say that older religions before Islam are no longer ”up to the mark” and therefore not valid for the salvation of man, is different from saying they are ”just plain wrong.” We cannot and must not try to restrict the mercy of the All-Merciful.
For the individual person the final decision is upon God as expressed in the Holy Quran:
{ So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it… }
“Traditionalism at the start was more or less an intellectual movement — find the true religion of mankind, that sort of thing. And then after Guénon had been in Cairo for a while, had been living with Islam — which is a religion that really emphasizes daily practice — suddenly it was all about practice. Well, perhaps not all about — the intellectual element stayed. But practice was really emphasized, became really very important. And that was because of Islam, I'm almost certain.”fn6
fn6:
Of course it was Islam, which still was - and is today - a living religion, because it offers the intellectual insights, and practical methods to tread the path for inner enlightenment to reach the Divine Presence.
There is simply no authentic tradition, such as Islam, if there is no spiritual practice. Many verses in the Holy Quran together with the prophetic practice ﷺ focus on this principle.
“Yes, I think that's exactly it. Although Traditionalism defines itself in terms of what it is for — tradition, the religio perennis and so on — in some ways it's a lot easier for an observer like myself to define Traditionalists partly in terms of what they are against. And what they are against is modernity. And you can't be against modernity until you have experienced it.”
“Now, Iran and Turkey are the two countries in the Middle East that have most experienced modernity. Morocco has a bit, too, and that's where in the Arab world you find Traditionalism most important. There are no Traditionalists at all, so far as I know, in mountain villages in the Yemen. None of it would make any sense at all there. This is actually part of the point you made earlier about Traditionalism being, in many ways, essentially modern.”
“I call those who look for a firm anchoring in their own or some other religion those for whom Traditionalism is a "stepping stone" — it gets them somewhere, whether to Sufi Islam or Russian Orthodoxy or whatever, and then they just get on with where they are. Traditionalism may remain interesting to them, but it isn't the main point. But then there are those for whom Traditionalism remains the main point, and for some of these it is indeed a sort of supra-religion.”fn7
fn7: This
question has been answered in:
On The Common Eternal Principles, And That Islam Reigns
...
*Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 368 pages.
The interview with Mark Sedgwick was conducted by Jean-François Mayer. Mark Sedgwick is associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at Aarhus University in Denmark.
The complete interview is here
( religion.info )
Religioscope, 5 Jun 2004
notes:"When man is imprisoned like this in life and in the conceptions directly connected with it, he can know nothing about what escapes from change, about the transcendant and immutable order, which is that of the universal principles"
René Guénon, East And West, p.90