The Long View

A Halloween Counterfactual

Despite everything that did go wrong in the 1920s and '30s, maybe there was one bullet we did dodge. It was not a particularly well-aimed bullet, perhaps, but it is still food for thought

This theme occurs to me now that, finally, I got around to reading René Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). There is quite a lot on my website about the doctrine of esoteric Tradition , so I will not trouble readers with another full exposition here. The principal argument of this book is that the supposed progress of the Western world in the modern era is actually a process of irreversible disintegration that can have no end but collapse. However, the collapse can be postponed, and even moderated, if an elite can grasp the allegedly perennial doctrine that Guénon elsewhere described and infuse it into some still-surviving institution that had developed before the eclipse of Tradition in the West. Such a policy would preserve seeds of Tradition that could sprout after modernity is over. Guénon's candidate for the institutional receptacle of revived Western Tradition was the Catholic Church.

Guénon's proposal chimes with contemporary arguments for Eurasianism, which was the notion that the have-nots of the West should make common cause with the rising powers of Eurasia. For members of the German Right with thoughts along these lines, the prospective Eurasian ally was the Red Army; on the European Left, there were visions of an alliance between the Western working class and the colonial peoples (there was even some speculation about how the two projects could be put together). Guénon hoped to add a third alliance, a collaboration of the “genuine” religious leaders of India and China, and especially Islam's Sufis, with an inner ring in the Vatican.

Nothing about the Catholic Church should change outwardly in this scenario. Quite the opposite: the Church would cling even more emphatically to its ancient ceremonial and institutions. The words would stay the same, but they would mean something different to the initiates of Tradition, who understood that all the major revealed religions were equally doorways to the transcendent. The sole novelty, presumably, would be that the Church would harden its post-18th-century suspicion of modernity into a principled opposition. One imagines that this would have implied the rejection of democracy in favor of divine kingship, the end of the alliance with organized labor coupled with a categorical denunciation of capitalism; even, perhaps, the end of proselytism outside the Western culture area.

We might contrast this proposal with the situation in Brian Stableford's Empire of Fear (1993). In that novel, by the 17th century all of the incumbents of Europe's elite institutions had long been infected with a vampirizing virus, the Church not least. This meant a certain differentiation between the higher clergy and the people in the pews. On the other hand, as far as we can tell, the holy undead were perfectly orthodox; they believed what the people in the pews believed, however afraid the latter may have been of the former. In Guénon's esoteric Catholicism, the relationship between inner and outer would have been the reverse of Stableford's world: a façade of historical continuity masking a radical ressourcement within (if we accept the Traditionalists' understanding of their mystery as a return to the primordial revelation). Ordinary believers would encounter this core only if they rose through the clergy. Then they might experience the sort of surprise that, reportedly, the young initiates of a medieval Ismaili school might experience on encounter its more exotic doctrines.

Guénon was not quite a crank, but he was a marginal figure in Europe even after establishing his reputation in esoteric circles. There was little chance his project would be taken up by the higher clergy. On the other hand, he was a man of the Right with respectable academic connections, so it's not at all unlikely the higher clergy would have encountered it. Again, as is so often the case with Tradition, echoes of his ideas turn up in the oddest places. C.S. Lewis seems to have encountered it, as Charles Upton noted, though we might also note that Lewis regarded the temptation to join any elite “Inner Ring” as a grave peril to his soul.

Certainly Guénon despaired in later years of a Traditional restoration. Nonetheless, though he failed to convert the core of the Church, he did succeed at the margins. There is a fair number of Catholics who think of themselves as Traditionalists in some sense who are still in communion with Rome, even if they do regret the Church's post-Vatican II determination to make the best of modernity. There is also a scattering of schismatics who are Traditional in Guénon's sense but whose chief quarrel with the Church is liturgical (Fr. Coomaraswamy comes to mind). There are also persons claiming to be Catholic who are esoteric fascists in the manner of Julius Evola. The interesting question is the region where traditional meets Traditional, where ordinary conservatism meets esoteric perennialism. The major schismatic groups, and notably the Society of Pius X are not exoterically Traditional, but you have to wonder.

Oddly enough, the greatest victory for Guénon's ideas in the 21st century has come in religious circles who has almost certainly has not influenced directly. His great ideological enemy was historical progress. He asserted that the perennial opinion of mankind is that history is a story of decay; that is largely true. We see this opinion reflected in today's premillennialism. The world will only worsen until the Second Coming, premillennialists have been saying since the early 19th century, with all that that implies with regard to suspicion of any claim of historical progress.

One might be tempted to say that this attitude is a feature of the cutting-edge Right in the United States. Not only is progress impossible in the future, but it has never occurred in the past, at least if you listen to Glenn Beck. The Whiggish interpretation of history that saw the development of the United States as, more or less, a tale of the betterment of the human condition through most of the 20th century is now rejected. The three generations from Theodore Roosevelt through the Carter Administration are now characterized as a nightmare of growing government tyranny, its institutions slated for destruction.

René Guénon has arrived at the Tea Party. As we have noted, he shows up in the oddest places.