Traditionalist School - Traditionalism and Religion

Traditionalism and Religion

Although René Guenon envisaged in his first books and essays a restoration of traditional “intellectualité” in the West on the basis of Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry, he gave up early on this idea of a spiritual resurrection of the West on a purely Christian basis. Having denounced the lure of Theosophy and neo-occultism in the form of Spiritism, two influential movements that were flourishing in his lifetime, Guénon was initiated in 1912 in the Shadhili order and moved to Cairo in 1930 where he spent the rest of his life as a Sufi Muslim. To his many correspondents he clearly designated Sufism as a more accessible form of traditional initiation for Westerners eager to find what does not exist any more in the West: an initiatory path of knowledge (Jnana or Gnosis), comparable to Advaita.

One of the distinguishing features of traditionalist authors is their insistence on the necessity for affiliation to one of the "normal traditions" or great ancient religions of the world. Most traditionalists, like Guénon himself, found a way in Sufism, and accordingly they embraced Islam, but others, like Marco Pallis, found a way in Buddhism, and still others, like James Cutsinger belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. The most influential representatives of this school in Northern Europe, viz. Kurt Almqvist, and Tage Lindbom, also embraced Sunni Islam. What is primarily crucial for the seeker is, as pointed out early by Guénon, the regular affiliation to an exoterism, i.e. the ordinary life of a believer: this would eventually open, for those qualified, the doors of initiation, i.e. access to the esoterism of that given religious form. Naturally, through the work and influence of important traditionalist authors like, again, Guénon himself, who married and had children in Egypt, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Lings, Gai Eaton and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, all closely related to native Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim believers, this perspective has been gaining ground in Asia and the Islamic world at large.

It could be argued that Traditionalism has a strong, although discreet, impact in the field of comparative religion and particularly on the young Mircea Eliade, although he was not himself a member of this school. Contemporary scholars such as Huston Smith, William Chittick, Harry Oldmeadow, James Cutsinger and Seyyed Hossein Nasr have advocated Perennialism as an alternative to secularist approach to religious phenomena.