Looking Forward to TraditionAncient Truths and Modern

Delusions*

Harry Oldmeadow

December 1st, 2014

*A talk given at the Lincoln Centre, London, for the TemenosAcademy and under the auspices of the Matheson Trust.

…the very idea of tradition has beendestroyed to such an extent that thosewho aspire to recover it no longerknow which way to turn

René Guénon¹

In all epochs and all countries therehave been revelations, religions, wis-doms; tradition is a part of mankind,just as man is part of tradition

Frithjof Schuon²

“When a man is tired of London, he is tiredof life…”, said Samuel Johnson. Well, ladies andgentlemen, I am tired of neither. I am very gladto be here. And it is through the good graces andgenerosity of the Matheson Trust and the TemenosAcademy that I am so, though I hope you will

¹ René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of theTimes (first published 1945) (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perenniset Universalis, 1995), pp. 251–252.² Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds (Blooming-ton: World Wisdom, 2006), p. 25.

not hold them to account for anything I might saytonight. But let us not tarry over introductions…

Penicillin, computers, man on the moon, BertrandRussell, democracy, compulsory education, theUnited Nations, longer life expectancy, mobilephones, indoor toilets, anesthetics, Albert Einstein,the internet, the Genome Project… a random sampleof the sorts of things which are often marshaled bythe apostles of “progress”. Looking at such a cata-logue of apparent marvels one might be tempted torecall Terry Pratchett’s wise dictum that, “Progressjust means bad things happen faster”. More seriously,thinking about the last century some of us mightcompile a more sobering and blood-soaked list. Forinstance: the Somme, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, se-rial killers, the Gulag, Chernobyl, 50 million-plusrefugees worldwide today, environmental devas-tation, terrorism, Pol Pot, Bhopal, pornographyas global mega-business, chemical and biologicalweapons. Nonetheless, the idea of Progress is one ofthe most potent shibboleths of modernity. It comesdressed in many alluring guises, often hand-in-hand

with its shady accomplice, evolutionism, and findsapplications in many fields. So pervasive is this ideain the modern climate, so much taken for granted,that it has become almost invisible—rather like thesmog to which urban dwellers become inured. Nodoubt the unprecedented barbarisms of the 20thcentury have caused some disenchantment but thetenacity of the idea is remarkable. “Progress” has along and sordid pedigree in Western thought, andmany brutalities and infamies have been justified inits name. To mention just one we might adduce theextirpation of the nomadic cultures, one of the mostappalling vandalisms of the last few centuries: Cain’smurder of Abel repeats itself on a vast scale. Theidea of Progress is modernity’s siren song, luring theways of the past to their destruction. But it is notmy purpose tonight to unravel this dark history, norto analyze the ways in which the pseudo-myth ofProgress contaminates almost all aspects of modernthought. In the first instance, I want to focus on anidea which stands at radical odds with it: “Tradition”.

“Tradition” has accumulated many unhappy po-litical and sentimental accretions over the last twocenturies. Here is Henry Ford, one of the pioneersof industrial mass production:

I don’t know much about history, and Iwouldn’t give a nickel for all the historyin the world. History is more or lessbunk. It is tradition. We want to live inthe present, and the only history that isworth a tinker’s damn is the history wemake today.³

More often than not nowadays the word “tra-dition” is used pejoratively, signifying the “deadweight” of the past, useless baggage which shouldnow be jettisoned. Hence Brian Eno, the avant-garde musician, tells us that when he returned toEngland after a year’s absence, “the country seemedstuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight³ http://www.searchquotes.com/quotes/about/Traditions/

of tradition”. The English actress, Minnie Driver,declares that, “You do a James Bond film, you’re be-ing part of an anachronism, a tradition”—well goshMinnie, we wouldn’t want that!⁴ For others adher-ence to “tradition” betrays a mental condition—lazy,conformist, stagnant—as when Jiddu Krishnamurtideclares that, “Tradition becomes our security, andwhen the mind is secure it is in decay” whilst an-other commentator warns us that, “tradition” is “oneof those words conservative people use as a short-cut to thinking.”⁵ Sometimes the term signals nomore than blind custom, or some institution whichhas persisted over generations but which is now ob-solete. Defenders of tradition are associated with a“nostalgia for the past”, and perhaps with “roman-ticism” and “folklore”—sentimental fuddy-duddieswith their heads in cloudy idealizations of a Golden⁴ Eno and Driver quotes at: http://www.brainyquote.com⁵ Krishnamurti and Ellis quotes at: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/tradition

Age that never was.⁶ Lewis Mumford put the case alittle more charitably when he remarked that, “Tra-ditionalists are pessimists about the future and op-timists about the past”.⁷ I prefer to say that it is amatter of neither pessimism nor optimism but ofseeing things clearly. I also want to repudiate theconventional notion that we look back on Tradi-tion, belonging to the past, and we look forward toProgress, taking us into the future. Perhaps some ofyou had the privilege of knowing the late Lord North-bourne. He entitled one of his books Looking Back onProgress; in similar vein, and following the suggestionof our Chairman, I entitle this talk “Looking For-ward to Tradition”. My sub-title is “Ancient Truthsand Modern Delusions” which some of you will rec-ognize as an oblique tribute to Martin Lings and hisbook Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions.

⁶ For some comments about these associations see FrithjofSchuon, Logic and Transcendence (London: PerennialBooks, 1975), p. 6.⁷ http://thinkexist.com/quotations/traditions/2.html

Of course, in some quarters, even today, theword “tradition” retains some weight and dignity.Perhaps its most positive usages have been withinthe discourses of religion and cultural history (andperhaps cricket!): think, for instance, of Dr. Leavis’use of the term when he writes that a literarytradition is “essentially more than an accumulation ofseparate works: it has an organic form, or constitutesan organic order, in relation to which the individualwriter has his [or her] significance”.⁸ Or recallT.S. Eliot’s use of “tradition” to refer to “all thosehabitual actions, habits, and customs, from themost significant religious rite to our conventionalway of greeting a stranger, which represent theblood kinship of ‘the same people living in thesame place’.”⁹ Here Eliot renders the term more orless synonymous with “culture” which he defined

⁸ F.R. Leavis in Two Cultures (1962), quoted in AndrewMilner, Contemporary Cultural Theory (Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1991), p. 27.⁹ T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1953), p. 20.

as “a whole way of life” and “all the characteristicactivities and interests of a people”.¹⁰ However, nodenying that in recent years the word “culture”,like “tradition”, has been corroded and tarnishedby postmodernist theorizing, and by the general“slaughter of the ancestors” conducted by over-heated ideologues and by those Parisian “monks ofnegation”—Foucault, Derrida et. al.

I want to argue that “tradition”, in its fullamplitude, is a religious and metaphysical conceptionand that even its more positive latter-day meaningsand associations—as in writers such as Leavis andEliot—are somewhat restrictive while its morenegative usage, as in the postmodernist lexicon,betrays a complete ignorance of what the termmight properly comprise. Some seventy years ago,the French metaphysician, René Guénon, observed,“the very idea of tradition has been destroyed to suchan extent that those who aspire to recover it no longer

¹⁰ T.S. Eliot,Notes towards a Definition of Culture (London:Faber, 1965), p. 31.

know which way to turn”¹¹—words certainly no lesstrue today than then!

Guénon’s name brings us to one of the centralconcerns of this talk: the understanding of traditionto be found in a small group of thinkers andwriters who have hitherto exerted only a marginalinfluence on the Anglophone world but whoseworks unravel some of the darkest enigmas ofmodernity. Because of the key place occupied intheir thought by “tradition”, the figures in questionhave sometimes been referred to as “traditionalists”;another designation is “perennialist”.¹²¹¹ Guénon, The Reign of Quantity, pp. 251–252.¹² While Ananda Coomaraswamy, the great art historianand savant, occasionally used the term “traditionalist” in astraightforward way to describe an outlook in conformitywith traditional principles, Guénon himself applied itnegatively to certain individuals who in reaction to therelentless march of modernity were calling for some kindof traditional restoration in the West although they werethemselves unaware of the true nature of tradition: “peoplewho,” as Guénon wrote, “have only a sort of tendency

or aspiration towards tradition without really knowinganything at all about it…”. (Reign of Quantity, pp. 251–252.) He called these people “traditionalists” and theirvague objectives “traditionalism” which he contrasted with“the true traditional spirit”. It is important to note in thiscontext that, at that time, a Guénonian school guided bya proper understanding of tradition had not yet emerged,and by the time such a movement began to take shape mid-century, not only were both Guénon and Coomaraswamyno longer alive, but the war years had effectively put anend to such revivalist agitation as Guénon had in mindwhen he first used those terms. Therefore, some threedecades later when the new traditionalist movement hadestablished itself and attracted sufficient attention, it wasinevitable that the term “traditionalism” should be usedto describe its message and that its members be called“traditionalists”. If the traditionalists themselves have usedthe term cautiously this is doubtless because they do notsee themselves as a “school”, nor the principles they affirmas constituting any kind of “-ism”. See Schuon, Logic andTranscendence, p. 6, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledgeand the Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 1981) p. 104.

The traditionalist perspective was first publiclyarticulated by René Guénon (1886–1951), the remark-able French intellectual (sometimes misleadingly de-scribed as an “occultist” and “orientalist”) whosemetaphysical writings really inaugurate the move-ment. Since the time of Guénon’s first writings,a century ago, a significant traditionalist “school”has emerged with Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy(1877–1947) and Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) recog-nized as its most authoritative exponents. Otherleading figures include Titus Burckhardt, Marco Pal-lis, Martin Lings and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.¹³ These¹³ Coomaraswamy, of English and Sri Lankan parentage,was an art historian, philosopher and Curator of theAsian collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.Schuon was born in Alsace of German parents, trainedas a textile designer, spent time in North Africa andeventually became a Sufi Shaykh. He is the author of somethirty books on religious and metaphysical subjects. TitusBurckhardt (1908–1984), a schooldays friend of Schuon,worked in publishing, and was the author of many bookson sacred arts and sciences. Marco Pallis (1895–1989) was a

writers are committed to the explication of the Peren-nial Philosophy which lies at the heart of the diversereligions and behind the manifold forms of theworld’s different traditions. At the same time, unlikemany other so-called perennialists—Aldous Huxleymight serve as an example—they are dedicated tothe preservation and illumination of the traditionalforms which give each religious heritage its distinc-tive character and guarantee its formal integrity and,by the same token, ensure its spiritual efficacy. Inother words they have insisted on the incalculablevalue of religious orthodoxy.musician, mountaineer and the author of several works onBuddhism. Martin Lings (1909–2005) was for many yearsKeeper of Oriental Manuscripts at the British Museum, apoet, author and spiritual teacher. Seyyed Hossein Nasr(b. 1931) is recognized as one of the leading Islamicistsin the contemporary world and holds a chair at GeorgeWashington University.

St Augustine speaks of “Wisdom uncreate, thesame now as it ever was and ever will be”.¹⁴  Thistimeless wisdom has carried many names: PhilosophiaPerennis, Lex Aeterna, Hagia Sophia, Din al-Haqq,Akalika Dhamma and Sanatana Dharma are amongthe better known. In itself and as such this truthis formless and beyond all conceptualizations. Anyattempt to define it is to chase the wind with a net.This universal wisdom, in existence since the dawn oftime and the spiritual patrimony of all humankind,can also be designated as the Primordial Tradition.Guénon refers, in one of his earliest articles, to“the Tradition contained in the Sacred Books of allpeoples, a Tradition which in reality is everywherethe same, in spite of all the diverse forms it assumesto adapt itself to each race and period…”.¹⁵ In this¹⁴ Quoted in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, “Fragments of aConfession”, in The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,ed. P. A. Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1952), p. 80.¹⁵ René Guénon in La Gnose, 1909, quoted in WhitallPerry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (London: Allen& Unwin, 1971), p. 20.

sense tradition is synonymous with the perennialphilosophy itself which is universal and immutable.¹⁶“Tradition” in its purest metaphysical sense—thesense in which Guénon often means it—signifiesthe unity of First Principles, an eternal wisdomwhich, in Schuon’s words, signifies “the totalityof the primordial and universal truths”;¹⁷ it isone and the same timeless Wisdom which can be¹⁶ See Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Vedanta and WesternTradition” in Selected Papers 2: Metaphysics, ed. RogerLipsey, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 7.See also Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, p. 74.¹⁷ Frithjof Schuon, “The Perennial Philosophy”, in TheUnanimous Tradition, ed. Ranjit Fernando (Colombo: SriLanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1991), p. 21. Whencomparing the terms sophia perennis and philosophia perennisSchuon explains that he prefers “the term sophia to that ofphilosophia, because the latter is less direct and in addition itevokes associations of ideas with a completely profane andall too often aberrant system of thought”. See also FrithjofSchuon, The Feathered Sun (Bloomington:WorldWisdom,1990), p. 114, where he refers to this underlying unity ortotality as the Primordial Sanatana Dharma.

found, sometimes heavily veiled, in all the sacredScriptures, and which nourishes all integral religioustraditions. This is a first principle, the sine qua non oftraditionalist thought. It has met with a good deal ofskepticism, even derision, in modern times, whichonly goes to show how far we have “progressed” inour foolishness. On the other hand, the credibilityof the principle, if one might so put it, has alsobeen compromised by a rag-tag of so-called “gurus”and pseudo-spiritual movements claiming adherenceto some vague universalist “essence” without reallyunderstanding its nature. More often than not suchpeople are shameless iconoclasts who repudiatethe very forms in which the perennial wisdomis necessarily clothed; they are also, thereby, anti-traditional.

Schuon and other perennialists point out that allthe great religious teachings, albeit in the differingvocabularies appropriate to the spiritual economy inquestion, affirm a primordial truth or wisdom. Weremember Krishna’s declaration, in the BhagavadGita, of the pre-existence of his message, proclaimed

at the dawn of time.¹⁸ Likewise Christ, speakingin his cosmic function as Incarnation of the Truth,states, “Verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, Iam”.¹⁹ Affirmations of the principle are to be foundover and over in the religious traditions.²⁰ “Tradition”in its most pristine sense is this primordial truthand as such takes on the status of a first cause, acosmic datum, a principial reality woven into the veryfabric of the universe. As such it is not amenable to¹⁸ Bhagavad Gita 4.6.¹⁹ St John 8.58. For a brief commentary see Marco Pallis, ABuddhist Spectrum (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 157.²⁰ Chou Li: “The true doctrine has always existed in theworld” (in Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, p. 794);St Augustine: “That which is called the Christian Religionexisted among the Ancients, and never did not exist, fromthe beginning of the human race” (cited in Radhakrishnan,“Fragments of a Confession”, p. 80); Plotinus: “There mustfirst be one from which the many arise. This one iscompetent to lend itself to all yet remain one…this isidentity in variety” (in Perry, A Treasury of TraditionalWisdom, p. 776).

“proof ”; it is a self-evident, self-validating principlein the face of which it is possible only to understandor not understand. As Coomaraswamy points out,“a first cause, being itself uncaused, is not probablebut axiomatic”.²¹  Thus the Primordial Traditionor sophia perennis is of supra-human origin andis in no sense a product or evolute of humanthought: it is “the birth-right of humanity”.²² It is,in Marco Pallis’s words, “formless and supra-personalin its essence” and thus “escapes exact definition interms of human speech and thought”. Deploying aBuddhist idiom, Pallis also writes this:

Only the divine Suchness is unborn andtherefore undying, limitless and there-

²¹ Ananda Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity (New Delhi:Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993), p. 42n.²² Coomaraswamy in Letter to Vasudeva Saharan Agrawala,March 1939, Selected Letters of Ananda Coomaraswamy, ed.Rama Coomaraswamy & Alvin Moore Jr (New Delhi:Oxford University Press/Indira Gandhi National Center,1988), p. 168.

fore not limiting, free and thereforethe seat of Deliverance. The voice oftradition is the invitation to that free-dom whispered in the ear of existentialbondage; whatever echoes that messagein any degree or at any remove mayproperly be called traditional; anythingthat fails to do so, on the other hand, isuntraditional and humanistic.²³

However, the word sometimes carries a differentsignification which can be confusing. Etymologically“tradition” simply means “that which is transmit-ted” and this is the key to the second meaning ofthe word. Here tradition cannot simply be equatedwith a formless and immutable Truth but is ratherthat Truth as it finds formal expression, through themedium of a divine Revelation, in the myths, rituals,doctrines, iconographies and other manifestationsof different primal and religious civilizations. The²³ Pallis cited in the Introduction to Fernando, TheUnanimous Tradition, p. 1.

Truth as such is formless and so cannot be con-veyed, as such, within forms: thus it is aspects ofTruth or, we might say, partial truths or intima-tions which are transmitted by traditional forms.²⁴ Thirdly, “tradition” may sometimes refer to the liv-ing process of the transmission itself. Lastly it mayalso refer to the channels of transmission. This is notas confusing as it might look: once the distinctionbetween the first sense and the other three has beengrasped then the meaning is signalled by the contextin which it is used.

When Guénon uses the word “tradition” he ismore often than not referring to the primordial²⁴ A caution must here be issued against seeing anyparticular tradition as no more than a temporal continuityof the Primordial Tradition. Guénon’s work sometimesleaves the way open for this kind of misunderstanding. Fora definitive treatment of the relationship between Traditionand the traditions see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge andthe Sacred, ch. 2, esp. pp. 66–69, 74; see also Whitall Perry,“The Revival of Interest in Tradition” in The UnanimousTradition.

wisdom as such; he was not much interested inhistory in general, nor in the annals of the particularreligions. However, later perennialists frequently usethe word “traditions” to refer to different religiousand spiritual heritages as they are manifested intime, conduits for the transmission of truths ofsupra-human origin, couched in the forms whichhave been providentially adapted to suit the needsand receptivities of the peoples and civilizationsin question. Tradition, then, entails “an effectivecommunication of principles of more-than-humanorigin… through use of forms that will have arisenby applying those principles to contingent needs.”²⁵

Plainly tradition here means vastly more than theobservance of custom; it cannot be understood asa mere temporal continuity nor assimilated to anyhistorical process. As Brian Keeble has observed:

…tradition is far beyond being merelyan accumulation of human endeavour

²⁵ Marco Pallis, The Way and the Mountain (London: PeterOwen, 1960), p. 203.

and invention even if it does have ahistory. Granting that the external char-acteristics and expression of a traditionare coloured by and reflect the passageof time, nonetheless, to equate tradi-tion with a form of historical continuityis to ignore its supra-formal essence inthe name of which it remains free andobjective in relation to spatio-temporaldeterminations.²⁶

As Guénon insisted, “there is nothing and canbe nothing truly traditional that does not containsome elements of a superhuman order.”²⁷  In ourcontext, then, the term cannot be applied to anythingof purely human provenance—which is to say mostof modern culture, even if traces of fossilized²⁶ Brian Keeble, “Tradition, Intelligence and the Artist”,Studies in Comparative Religion, 11:4, 1977, p. 236. Thesame point is made in Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred,p. 69.²⁷ Guénon, The Reign of Quantity, p. 253.

traditional forms inevitably persist. It must always beremembered, to cite Brian Keeble again, that

Tradition cannot be improvised fromhuman means for by the terms of atradition the human state as such isby definition a mode of ignorance—ablindness that cannot, by merely havingrecourse to itself, overcome its ownunknowingness.²⁸

On the other hand, tradition cannot simply beequated with religion which is one form of tradition,neither exclusive nor exhaustive.  Thus “tradition” ismore inclusive than “religion” though the relation-ship of the latter to the former is always intimate. Atradition may appear in a guise which cannot strictlybe termed “religious”, this word implying the pres-ence of certain formal elements which may be miss-ing. A tradition may, for instance, be embedded ina complex of stories and rituals which might more²⁸ Keeble, “Tradition, Intelligence and the Artist”, p. 239.

properly be described as mythological rather thanreligious. Or again, one might refer to an esoteric wis-dom which may be associated with religious formsbut which is distinct from them—one can speak, forexample, of the Pythagorean or the alchemical tradi-tion. However, these qualifications notwithstanding,in most cases where the word “tradition” is used in aperennialist context the writer has in mind a religioustradition including, of course, whatever esoteric cur-rents might be associated with it. This is to say thattradition here encompasses more than the visible ex-oteric forms.

Marco Pallis provides us with a kind of workingdefinition of a religious tradition:

…wherever a complete tradition exists[he writes] this will entail the pres-ence of four things, namely: a sourceof… Revelation; a current of influ-ence or Grace issuing from that sourceand transmitted without interruptionthrough a variety of channels; a way

of “verification” which, when faithfullyfollowed, will lead the human subjectto successive positions where he is ableto “actualise” the truths that Revela-tion communicates; finally there is theformal embodiment of tradition in thedoctrines, arts, sciences and other ele-ments that together go to determinethe character of a normal civilization.²⁹

—Revelation, grace, method, forms: these are thefour indispensable constituents of any religioustradition properly so-called.

What then is a traditional civilization? In Notestowards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot posedthe question

whether what we call the culture, andwhat we call the religion of a peopleare not different aspects of the samething: the culture being essentially the

²⁹ Pallis, The Way and the Mountain, p. 9.

incarnation (so to speak) of the religionof a people.³⁰

The great scholar of Jewish mysticism, GershonScholem, has written that tradition “embodies therealisation of the effectiveness of the Word inevery concrete state and relationship entered intoby a society.”³¹ For perennialists, tradition is the“application and full extension in every domain” ofRevelation.³²  Thus the Revelation informs the artsand crafts, the sciences and the social life of atraditional civilization, as well as its theology andspiritual means. In this sense, then, tradition is “thechain that joins civilization to Revelation”³³ and “the³⁰ T.S. Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture, p. 28.³¹ Gershon Scholem, “Tradition and Commentary as Re-ligious Categories in Judaism”, Studies in ComparativeReligion, 3:3, 1969, p. 148.³² Perry, “The Revival of Interest in Tradition”, p. 3(emphasis mine).³³ Lord Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World(London: Perennial Books/J.M. Dent, 1963), p. 34.

mediator between time and eternity”.³⁴ As SeyyedHossein Nasr insists,

Tradition is inextricably related to rev-elation and religion, to the sacred, tothe notion of orthodoxy, to authority,to the continuity and regularity of trans-mission of the truth, to the exoteric andthe esoteric as well as to the spiritual life,science and the arts.³⁵

Of the many formal elements which necessarilyappear in any tradition the perennialists have paidespecially close attention to sacred art.  We mightnote in passing the implications of Schuon’s affirma-tion that, “Traditions appear out of the Infinite likeflowers; they can no more be invented than can thesacred art which is their witness and their proof.”³⁶³⁴ A.K. Saran, “The Crisis of Hinduism”, Studies inComparative Religion, 5:2, 1971, p. 93.³⁵ Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred, p. 68.³⁶ Frithjof Schuon, Treasures of Buddhism (Bloomington:World Wisdom, 1993), p. 8.

This view of tradition has all manner of implica-tions and applications. Let us consider a few. Thetraditionalists, unlike most modern social theorists,find no absolute or self-evident value in “society” assuch, nor, indeed, in what is called “civilization”. Norare they susceptible to the “demagogic obsessionwith purely ‘social’ values” which is nowadays sowidespread, even amongst believers”.³⁷ As Schuonpoints out,

When people talk about “civilization”they generally attribute a qualitativemeaning to the term, but really civiliza-tion only represents a value provided itis supra-human in origin and impliesfor the civilised man a sense of thesacred… A sense of the sacred is fun-damental for every civilization becausefundamental for man; the sacred—thatwhich is immutable, inviolable, and

³⁷ Frithjof Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man (Blooming-ton: World Wisdom, 1995), p. 18.

so infinitely majestic—is in the verysubstance of our spirit and of our exis-tence.³⁸

Traditional societies are grounded in an awarenessof this reality. Society itself represents nothing ofabsolute value except insofar as it provides a contextfor the sense of the sacred and the spiritual life whichit implies.³⁹ 

Such a vision of a religious culture is radicallyopposed to the Marxist/Durkheimian thesis aboutthe relationship between religion and society. It isnot society which fashions religion in its own image

³⁸ Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (Bloomington:World Wisdom, 1998), p. 26.³⁹ One of the most eloquent statements of this principlecan be found in the Foreword to A. Govinda, The Way ofthe White Clouds (Boulder: Shambhala, 1970), pp. xi-xii. Atraditional society will not necessarily be self-consciouslyaware of being “traditional”: the conditions pertaining to atraditional order will appear to be natural and normal, noother possibility having intruded itself. 

but religion which shapes the society whose wholerationale is embedded in the sense of which Schuonspeaks. In traditional societies, “It is the spiritual,not the temporal, which culturally, socially andpolitically is the criterion of all other values.”⁴⁰ It isfrom this platform that the traditionalists reaffirmthe values of civilizations other than our own andfromwhich the most trenchant critique of modernitycan be mounted. Western civilization is now, inGuénon’s words, “devoid of any traditional characterwith the exception of the religious element”,⁴¹ whichitself is increasingly devastated on all sides. Suchan understanding also disallows those condescending,sometimes frankly contemptuous, attitudes to the⁴⁰ Schuon, The Transfiguration of Man, p. 28. See alsoTreasures of Buddhism, pp. 13ff; Light on the AncientWorld, p. 18; and Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, “The SpiritualFunction of Civilization” in The Sword of Gnosis, ed, JacobNeedleman (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), pp. 104ff.⁴¹ Guénon, quoted in Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: Lifeand Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977),p. 266.

past widespread today amongst so many of the so-called “intelligentsia”.

A tradition is not static, an unchanging da-tum that persists in a frozen state throughtime. Traditions are dynamic: if needs be, they cangrow, branch out and blossom. However, the princi-ple of continuity which preserves the link with theRevelation must always be respected if the traditionis to remain an integral one. As G.K. Chestertonpithily remarked, tradition “does not mean that theliving are dead but that the dead are alive”.⁴² “Thegrowth of a tradition,” writes Titus Burckhardt, “re-sembles that of a crystal, which attracts homologousparticles to itself, incorporating them according toits own laws of unity.”⁴³ In the final phrase—”itsown laws of unity”—we find the key to the princi-ple of orthodoxy. The great doctrinal formulationswhich follow a Revelation, usually at some historicaldistance, do not, essentially, constitute an “addition”⁴² G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America, p. 40.⁴³ Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Scienceof the Soul (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), p. 17.

to the tradition but an unfolding of principles andperspectives which until then have remained im-plicit. One thinks of a Shankara, a Nagarjuna, anAquinas, an Ibn ’Arabi or the Sixth Patriarch. Suchfigures disavow any personal “originality”, claimingonly to be elaborating the spiritual teaching to whichthey are heirs. Burckhardt again: “Doctrine grows,not so much by addition of new knowledge, as by theneed to refute errors and to reanimate a diminishingpower of intuition…”⁴⁴ For the traditionalists there isalways something providential about the appearanceof the great doctors of theology and metaphysics.⁴⁵ ⁴⁴ Titus Burckhardt, An Introduction to Sufi Doctrine(Wellingborough: Thorsons, 1976), p. 17.⁴⁵ Schuon has addressed this issue in unequivocal terms:It is therefore our increasing weakness, and with it therisk of forgetfulness and betrayal, which more than any-thing obliges us to externalize or make explicit what at thebeginning was included in an inward and implicit perfec-tion. Saint Paul needed neither Thomism nor cathedrals,for all profundities and splendors were in himself and allaround him in the sanctity of the early community. And

Modernity

Let me now turn briefly to a few remarks aboutmodernity which in the European context meansthe post-medieval era inaugurated by the Renais-sance and subsequently shaped by the ScientificRevolution, the so-called Enlightenment, and theeconomic and political upheavals and transforma-tions of the 19th century. Our interest here isprimarily in what, for want of a better word, wethis, far from supporting iconoclasts of all kinds, refutesthem completely; more or less late epochs—the MiddleAges, for example—have an imperious need for external-izations and developments, just as water from a spring, ifit is not to be lost on its way, needs a channel made bynature or by the hand of man; and just as the channel doesnot transform the water and is not meant to do so—for nowater is better than spring water—so the externalizationsand developments of a spiritual patrimony are there, notto change that patrimony, but to transmit it as fully andeffectively as possible. Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 5.

might call “modernism”⁴⁶—the dominant worldviewof the post-medieval West. One might classify theingredients of modernism under any number ofschema. Lord Northbourne typifies modernism as‘anti-traditional, progressive, humanist, rationalist,materialist, experimental, individualist, egalitar-ian, free-thinking and intensely sentimental’.⁴⁷Seyyed Hossein Nasr gathers these tendenciestogether under four general features of modernthought: anthropomorphism (and by extension, sec-ularism); evolutionist progressivism; the absence ofany sense of the sacred; an unrelieved ignorance ofmetaphysical principles.⁴⁸ Frithjof Schuon observesthat⁴⁶ The term should not here be confused with its morerestricted meaning, referring to certain artistic and literarydevelopments originating in late 19th century Europe.⁴⁷ Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World, 13.⁴⁸ See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘Reflections on Islam andModern Thought’, The Islamic Quarterly 23:3, 1979, 119–131.

…humanistic culture, insofar as it func-tions as an ideology and therefore as areligion, consists essentially in being un-aware of three things: firstly, of whatGod is, because it does not grant pri-macy to Him; secondly, of what manis, because it puts him in place of God;thirdly, of what the meaning of lifeis, because this culture limits itself toplaying with evanescent things and toplunging into them with criminal un-consciousness.⁴⁹

Modernism is a disease which continues tospread like a plague across the globe, destroy-ing traditional cultures wherever they are stillto be found. Although its historical origins areEuropean, modernism is now tied to no spe-cific area or civilisation. Its symptoms can bedetected in a wide assortment of inter-related⁴⁹ Frithjof Schuon, To Have a Center (Bloomington:WorldWisdom, 1990), p. 37.

‘mind sets’ and ‘-isms’, sometimes involved incooperative co-existence, sometimes engaged inapparent antagonism, but always united by thesame underlying assumptions. Scientism, rational-ism, relativism, materialism, positivism, empiricism,evolutionism, psychologism, individualism, human-ism, existentialism—these are some of the primefollies of modernist thought, and they are all vari-ations on a theme. Their genealogy can be tracedback through a series of intellectual and cultural up-heavals in European history to certain vulnerabilitiesin Christendom which left it exposed to the sub-versions of a profane science. The Renaissance, theScientific Revolution and the Enlightenment wereall incubators of ideas and values which first ravagedEurope and then spread throughout the world likea lethal virus. Behind the bizarre array of ideologieswhich have proliferated in the last few centurieswe can discern a growing and persistent ignoranceconcerning ultimate realities and an indifference,if not always an overt hostility, to the eternal veri-ties of Tradition. Not without reason did William

Blake characterize the modern worldview as ‘SingleVision’, a horizontal understanding of reality whichstrips the ‘outer’ world of its mystery, its grandeurand its revelatory function, and which denies ourhuman vocation. As he so acutely remarked, ‘Manis either the ark of God or a phantom of the earthand the water.’⁵⁰ In similar vein, W.B. Yeats pennedthat now well-known passage, ”The mischief beganat the end of the seventeenth century when manbecame passive before a mechanized nature…. Soulmust become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, theone activity, the mirror turn lamp.”⁵¹

Since the Scientific Revolution of the 17th centurythe prevailing worldview amongst the Western intel-ligentsia (and alas, increasingly elsewhere) has beenconstructed on the foundations of scientism—whichis to say on an ideology, albeit one heavily camouflaged⁵⁰ Blake quoted in Kathleen Raine, ‘The Underlying Order:Nature and the Imagination’ in Fragments of Infinity: Essaysin Religion and Philosophy, ed. Arvind Sharma, (Bridport:Prism Press, 1991), 208.⁵¹ Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936).

in the sterilized vestments of “scientific objectivity”.Science (a field and method of inquiry) becomes sci-entism (an ideology) when it refuses to acknowledgethe limits of its own competence, denies the author-ity of any sources which lie outside its ambit, and laysclaim to a comprehensive validity as if it could explainno matter what, and as if it were not contradictoryto lay claim to totality on an empirical basis (wit-ness Stephen Hawking’s preposterous pretensions toa “Theory of Everything” or the grandiose claimsmade on behalf of the Genome Project!). Althoughthis ideology has come under the most cogent criti-cism from many directions it retains its grip on themodern mentality and its spokesmen are increasinglystrident and arrogant in their triumphalism. So itis, for example, that Richard Dawkins can assert,“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet any-body who claims not to believe in evolution thatperson is ignorant, stupid or insane”.⁵² Thanks for⁵² David Berlinsky, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and ItsScientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 7.

that Richard! So pervasive is the scientistic regimethat the American National Science Foundation canasseverate, with hardly a murmur of dissent from any-where, that, “Science extends and enriches our lives,expands our imagination and liberates us from thebonds of ignorance and superstition.” Such bromidesare to be found all around us. Yet, as David Berlinskyobserves, “there is hardly any reason to believe themto be true”.⁵³Wemight well recall Gai Eaton’s remarkthat the so-called advance of science is a matter of“knowing more and more about less and less”. Mod-ern science, to be sharply distinguished from whatthe ancients called natural philosophy, is today effec-tively inseparable from scientism. That this kind ofscience—and we can find hardly any other, in theWestern world at least—might constrict and impov-erish our lives, stifle our imaginations and imprisonus in both ignorance and superstition, is a proposi-tion which will strike most people as self-evidentlyabsurd.⁵³ Berlinsky, The Devil’s Delusion, p. 16.

Some years ago E.F. Schumacher observed that,

Nothing is more conducive to the bru-talization of the modern world thanthe launching of, in the name of sci-ence, of wrongful and degraded defini-tions of man, such as “the naked ape”.What could one expect from such a crea-ture…?⁵⁴

Thanks to the likes of Richard Dawkins suchdefinitions are now more widely countenanced thanever, at least amongst the so-called intellectual elites.Berlinsky observes that it is an article of faithamongst the belligerent atheists that humankind isno more than another biological species, enmeshedin the Darwinian struggle for survival:

The thesis that we are all nothing morethan vehicles for a number of “selfish

⁵⁴ E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (London:Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 31.

genes” has accordingly entered deeplyinto the simian gabble of academic life,where together with materialism andmoral relativism it now seems… self-evident….⁵⁵

The same might be said of many of the otherbleak reductionistic accounts of the human beingwhich litter modern thought. Reductionism, to recallKathleen Raine’s vivid image, is that habit of mind“which sees in the pearl nothing but the disease ofthe oyster”.⁵⁶

No one will deny that modernity has its compen-sations, though these are often of a quite differentorder from the loudly trumpeted ‘benefits’ of scienceand technology—some of which are indubitable butmany of which issue in consequences far worse thanthe ills which they are apparently repairing. Further-⁵⁵ David Berlinsky, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and ItsScientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 8.⁵⁶ Kathleen Raine’s image cited in Theodore Roszak,Wherethe Wasteland Ends (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 264.

more, many so-called ‘advances’ must be seen as thepoisoned fruits of a Faustian bargain which must oneday come to its bitter conclusion. What indeed is aman profited if he gain the whole world but lose hisown soul? In this context we might remind ourselvesof Schuon’s caution that

When the modern world is contrastedwith traditional civilizations, it is notsimply a question of seeking the goodthings and the bad things on one side orthe other; good and evil are everywhere,so that it is essentially a question ofknowing on which side the more impor-tant good and on which side the lesserevil is to be found. If someone says thatsuch and such a good exists outsidetradition, the answer is: no doubt, butone must choose the most importantgood, and it is necessarily representedby tradition; and if someone says thatin tradition there exists such and such

an evil, the answer is: no doubt, but onemust choose the lesser evil, and again itis tradition that embodies it. It is illogi-cal to prefer an evil which involves somebenefits to a good which involves someevils.⁵⁷

On the other hand, one real advantage of livingin these latter days is the ready access we have tothe spiritual treasuries of the world’s religious andmythological traditions, including esoteric teachingswhich have hitherto been veiled in secrecy.

If we are to believe the textbooks the storyof the modern world is one of man’s climb outof a dark world of ignorance, superstition andbarbarism into a more spacious and sunlit worldwherein we understand how things really stand andin which, with the aid of science and reason, wecan determine our own destiny. But as Blake andYeats so well understood, the modern understandings⁵⁷ Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, p. 33. See alsoSchuon, To Have a Center, pp. 11–12.

of the human condition have actually reduced andimprisoned us. Is it not one of the most gallingironies of modernity that these much vauntedideologies and scientific theorizations which, we aretold ad nauseam, have emancipated us from ‘theshackles of ignorance and superstition’, have, inreality robbed us of all that is most precious in thehuman estate ‘hard to obtain’, by denying the DivineSpark which we all carry within? This, truly speaking,is a monstrous crime against God and thereby againsthumanity.

Many of the luminaries of modern though—fromDarwin and Marx, through Nietzsche and Freud,down to the Parisian postmodernists—deprive manof his fundamental freedom by portraying him asthe subject of blind, impersonal forces: in Darwin’scase the biological imperatives of the survival ofthe fittest; for Marx, the dialectic of the materialforces of history; for Freud the sexual drive with allits accompanying repressions, projections, complexesand neuroses; for Nietzsche, the ‘will to power’. Ineach case we are offered a meagre and charmless

portrait of the human condition: man as biologicalorganism, as a highly evolved ape whose essentialfunction is to ensure the survival of the species, andwhose behaviour is governed by the iron dictatesof biological necessity; man as economic animal,fashioned by his material environment and by theimpersonal forces of history; man as a herd-creature,mediocre, cowardly, foolish and deluded, redeemedonly by the Ubermensch who dares to exercise thewill to power; the human being as a marionette ofthe dark forces of the Id. As Guénon so acutelyobserved nearly a century ago, “While nineteenthcentury materialism closed the mind of man to whatis above him, twentieth century psychology openedit to what is below him”.⁵⁸ But it hardly matterswhether these purportedly scientific accounts be ofa pseudo-biological, psychological or sociologicalnature, not to mention the surreal postmodernist

⁵⁸ René Guénon, L’Erreur Spirite (1923), quoted in AnandaCoomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (Delhi: Munshi-ram Manoharlal, 1996), p. 61.

“erasure” of the human individual altogether! Theseare all variations on a single theme—man cutoff from the transcendent, a creature living inan entirely horizontal world, a puppet of “drives”,“complexes”, “reflexes”, “conditionings”, “historicalforces” or whatever.

It comes as no surprise that each of these thinkersleaves God out of the frame. In the case of Marx,Freud and Nietzsche, the disavowal is quite explicitwhilst in Darwin it is a matter of ignoring thequestion, which amounts to more or less the samething. The transcendent dimension of both thecosmos and themicrocosmic human being is strippedaway to leave us in an entirely horizontal world inwhich there is no longer any sense of our dignity,responsibility and freedom as the children of God.In such a world there is no longer any sense ofthe sacred from which we might take our spiritualbearings. Our souls cry out for bread but we are givenstones. It might also be said that these god-denyingthinkers paved the road to the slaughter-houses ofthe 20th century. We now better understand the

truth of Dostoevsky’s frightful premonition that‘without God, everything is permitted’.

The modern mentality is rationalistic, materialis-tic, empiricist, historicist and humanistic. The adula-tion of Reason and of an empirical and materialisticscience could only arise in a world in which the sa-cred sciences of the traditional worlds had been lost.To cleave to these much-vaunted modes of modernthought is simply to announce that one is entirelybereft of any metaphysical discernment, entrappedin the world of maya, that tissue of fugitive rela-tivities which makes up the time-space world. AsFrithjof Schuon has tersely remarked, ‘The rational-ism of a frog living at the bottom of a well is todeny the existence of mountains; this is logic of akind, perhaps, but it has nothing to do with real-ity.’⁵⁹ To succumb to the idolatry of Reason is also,necessarily, to turn one’s back on the ever-presentsources of traditional intellectuality and spirituality,

⁵⁹ Schuon, Logic and Transcendence (New York: Harper &Row, 1975), 42.

which is to say doctrine and spiritual method—theepochal Revelations providentially directed towardsvarious human collectivities, the traditions issuingfrom these Revelations, the Scriptures and commen-taries of the doctors and sages of each tradition, thewitness of the saints and mystics. All this is thrownout in favour of the prejudices of the day, largely fash-ioned by those pseudo-mythologies current at anyparticular moment.⁶⁰ Forget Lao Tzu, forget Meister⁶⁰ In a passage of singular importance, René Guénon wrote,“…when profane science leaves the domain of a mereobservation of facts, and tries to get something out ofthe indefinite accumulation of separate details which isits sole immediate result, it retains as one of its chiefcharacteristics the more or less laborious construction ofpurely hypothetical theories. These theories can necessarilynever be more than hypothetical, since their startingpoint is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves arealways susceptible of diverse explanations… and besides,such hypotheses are really not inspired by the resultsof experience to nearly the same extent as by certainpreconceived ideas and by some of the predominant

Eckhart, forget Ramana Maharshi—listen instead toBertrand Russell or Christopher Hitchens or SamHarris: can a more bizarre and ludicrous propositionbe imagined?

Our Contemporary Predicament

I started this talk with reference to the pseudo-mythology of “Progress”: the absurdity of progres-sivism, if one may so call it, is exposed by the mostcursory consideration of our contemporary situation.Who can deny that there is indeed a fundamentalcrisis in the modern world and that its root causesare spiritual. The crisis itself can hardly be disputed.Some of the symptoms: ecological catastrophe, a ma-terial sign of the rupture between Heaven and Earth;a rampant materialism and consumerism, signifyinga surrender to the illusion that man can live bybread alone; the genocidal extirpation of traditionaltendencies of the modern mentality”; from Reign ofQuantity, p. 149.

cultures by the careering juggernauts of ‘moderniza-tion’; political barbarities on an almost unimaginablescale; social discord, endemic violence and dislo-cations of unprecedented proportions; widespreadalienation, ennui and a sense of spiritual sterilityamidst the frenetic confusion and din of modern life;a religious landscape dominated by internecine andinter-religious strife and by the emergence of aggres-sive fundamentalisms in both East and West; theloss of any sense of the sacred, even among thosewho remain committed to religious forms, many ofwhom have retreated into a credulous religious liter-alism or into a vacuous liberalism where ‘anythinggoes’. These ‘signs of the times’—and the inventoryis by no means exhaustive—are plain enough to thosewith eyes to see. No amount of gilded rhetoric about‘progress’, the ‘miracles of modern science and tech-nology’, or the ‘triumphs of democracy’ (to mentionjust three of modernity’s “sacred cows”) can hide thefact that our age is tyrannized by an outlook inimicalto our most fundamental needs, our deepest yearn-

ings, our most noble aspirations. As Frithjof Schuonhas acutely observed,

That which is lacking in the presentworld is a profound knowledge of thenature of things; the fundamentaltruths are always there, but they do notimpose themselves because they cannotimpose themselves on those unwillingto listen.⁶¹

Those truths, so often derided in the modernworld, can be found in Tradition—and as I hope Ihave made clear, by this term we mean somethingvery different from the jaundiced senses it has accu-mulated in the modern mentality. We must dispelthe false charges sometimes leveled at traditionalists⁶¹ Frithjof Schuon, ‘No Activity Without Truth’ in TheSword of Gnosis, 28 (a different translation of this article canbe found in The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritualcrisis of Modernity, ed. Harry Oldmeadow [Bloomington:World Wisdom, 2004], 3–14).

that they are dusty obscurantists ‘out of touch’ withthe contemporary world, that they want to ‘windback the clock’, that they are romantic reactionariesescaping into an idealized past. Let us never forgetthat the essential message of tradition is timeless andthus ever new, ever fresh, and always germane to bothour immediate condition and to our ultimate destiny.As Schuon remarks, a ‘nostalgia for the past’ is, in it-self, nothing; all that is meaningful is ‘a nostalgia forthe sacred’ which ‘cannot be situated elsewhere thanin the liberating ‘now’ of God’.⁶² In this sense we donot look back to Tradition as a kind of relic of thepast: we look forward to re-discovering those ever-present intellectual and spiritual treasures vouchsafedby Tradition. From another point of view we mightsay that we must look neither backwards nor for-wards but upwards. And here, by way of an aside,we might note that one of the roots and symptomsof a horizontal worldview is historicism—that men-⁶² Frithjof Schuon, ‘On the Margin of Liturgical Improvi-sations’ in The Sword of Gnosis, 353.

tality which holds that everything is to be explainedby the exigencies and vicissitudes of Time. For sucha mentality there can be no looking up.⁶³

No doubt our crepuscular era is riddled with allmanner of confusions but there are many directionsin which we can still turn to find a way out ofthe darkness. It might be through humble listeningand dialogue with those representatives of authentictraditional forms such as still survive in the modernworld, or through the lessons of the primordialcultures of the nomadic and indigenous peoples.We can turn to the saints and sages who arealways in our midst, though often hidden fromview, and without whom the world would instantlyvanish: in recent times one might mention suchfigures as the Algerian Sufi master, Shaykh AhmedAl Alawi, or Hindu sages such as ParamahamsaRamakrishna, Ramana Maharshi and Ananda-mayi,⁶³ On this subject see Mircea Eliade, “Religious Symbolismand Modern Man’s Anxiety” in Myths, Dreams andMysteries (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 231–245.

or Native American visionaries such as Black Elkand Chief Thomas Yellowtail, not to mention themany wise lamas and masters of the Far Easternworld. We can turn to the example and writingsof those Christian writers who can help us discoveranew the spiritual treasures which are close at handbut often forgotten or obscured—I am thinkingof figures such as Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths,and the French monk, Henri Le Saux who becameSwami Abhishiktananda. Then, too, there is theabiding work and example of the great perennialistsof whom I have made mention in this talk. At a timewhen the forces of anti-Tradition sometimes seemoverwhelming and when we feel unable to keep ourhands to the plough, let us recall Frithjof Schuon’sreminder that no effort on behalf of the Truth is everin vain.⁶⁴ Before inviting you to ask me questionswhich I cannot answer I will conclude this talk, asI have done others, with some salutary words fromRené Guénon:⁶⁴ Schuon, “No Activity Without Truth”, 39.

Those who might be tempted to giveway to despair should realize that noth-ing accomplished in this order can everbe lost, that confusion, error and dark-ness can win the day only apparentlyand in a purely ephemeral way, thatall partial and transitory disequilibriummust perforce contribute towards thegreat equilibrium of the whole, and thatnothing can ultimately prevail againstthe power of truth. Their watchwordshould be that used formerly by certaininitiatory organizations of the West:Vincit Omnia Veritas.⁶⁵

Thank you. Peace be with you!

⁶⁵ These are the concluding words of René Guénon’s LaCrise du Monde Moderne (1927). This translation is takenfrom the Vincit Omnia Veritas website: http://www.religioperennis.org

The Temenos Academy.. .. . .. . . .

The Matheson TrustFor the Study of Comparative Religion

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