Findings

In Metaphysic, Path, and Lore
With a Response to the Traditionalist/Perennialist School

By Charles Upton
Sophia Perennis 2009
298 Pages, US$19.95
ISBN 978-1-59731-096-3

Eternity may have no history, but its interaction with the temporal world certainly does. If you are a follower of esoteric Tradition, for whom all of recorded history falls into the terminal darkness of the Kali Yuga, this interaction cannot be a happy tale. That is certainly the picture painted by this nonetheless very useful collection of essays, apologias, poems and occasional pieces by Charles Upton. The author is a noted younger Beat poet who turned to Sufi Islam as illuminated by the metaphysical doctrines of the French mystic René Guénon (1886 – 1951). (Mr. Upton has a considerable body of metaphysical work, which it seems to be one of the purposes of Sophia Perennis Press to keep in print; perhaps the best known of these works is his exercise in applied eschatology, The System of Antichrist.) Guénon's Traditionalism, in its own understanding, is a systematic exposition of transcendental principles that are believed to primordially underlie all the world's great spiritual traditions in their esoteric forms. Findings explains that the Traditionalist School has already fallen away from the integrity of its first two generations (the author is a follower of a principal member of the second generation, Frithjof Schuon (1907 – 1998)) and is now in danger of becoming a tool in the hands of its enemies, human and otherwise.

The danger Traditionalism faces is success. Traditionalism has long had a quiet but important influence on Religious Studies; certainly a doctrine which holds that there have been multiple, independent divine revelations would seem to be uniquely well suited for the development of nonsectarian survey courses. However, in recent years Traditionalism itself has become the object of academic interest, thanks in no small part to Mark Sedgwick's study, Against the Modern World. On that book Mr. Upton heaps both praise and blame. It is gratifying for a small esoteric school to become more widely known, perhaps, but Revolt was a sociological and historical survey of a doctrine whose adherents have principled objections to sociology and historicism. As Findings notes, there are now scholars who are interested in Guénon but not in his metaphysics, which is a little like owning a candy store and not liking chocolate. One might reasonably object that this shift of emphasis will ensure that many students miss the point of the exercise.

More serious, however, is the danger that elements of Traditionalist doctrine could become features of global public policy. The essentials of Traditionalism, Findings reminds its readers, is the transcendental unity of religions, commitment to orthodoxy, and an understanding of universal eschatology and its implications. The first point is that the traditional religions are united in their divine object and especially in spiritual experience of it, but not necessarily in doctrine. The third holds that progress is impossible, that history moves from the spiritual through the material to the demonic, and that the world system has no future but catastrophic disintegration. And that's the upside.

The great danger lies in the corruption of the second point, which holds that each of the world's genuine religions is a product of the divine will. Each religion's exoteric system of practices should be respected by other religions and not mixed with those of other religions. How there can be a plurality of true and contradictory religions might seem to present some logical questions, to which the author makes this answer:

Traditionalism itself, however, is neither a religion nor a means of salvation; it is simply an aid in understanding them. A fusion of religious practices held together by Traditionalist metaphysics would be the devil's counterfeit of a religion.

Such a fusion was pretty much what Theosophy attempted in the late 19th century; Guénon's Traditionalism was largely a reaction to it. What has Charles Upton so exercised in the early 21st century is the interest by foundations and the UN in ameliorating the unexpected late modern uptick of religious conflict by fostering a planetary civil religion to which the traditional confessions would have to defer. One of the items in the book is a review of Lee Penn's The United Religions Initiative, Globalism and the Quest for a One-World Religion. That book seems to simply add to the almost century-long literature about Hell's campaign for a universal religion in support of a universal state, but then efforts like the UN affiliated United Religions Initiative are by no means rare these days, and they do in fact require the sort of skills and knowledge that students of Traditionalism would be likely to possess.

This brings us to the Catholic Issue, and indeed the Christian issue. René Guénon doubted whether Christianity still counted as a traditional religion, because he could not detect a system of esoteric initiation in it, a linkage of master to student going back to the founding revelation. Frithjof Schuon said that the sacraments of the various branches of Christianity, notably baptism, performed that function quite well, as did the apostolic succession. Charles Upton, however, belongs to that generation of persons raised Catholic who feel that the Church deserted them at the time of the Second Vatican Council. We may note that, in some ways, this is a very odd claim for a Traditionalist to make. Aside from the liturgical experiments that the Council permitted (often with unhappy results, admittedly), the chief gravamen that Catholic traditionalists in the ordinary sense of “traditional” have against the Council is the claim that it moved the Catholic view of other religions very close to that of Traditionalism in Guenon's sense. (The claim is not actually true, but that is another issue.) The author characterizes the Catholic Church of today as “the apostate Novus Ordo Church,” which is willfully withholding the Third Secret of Fatima, press reports to the contrary notwithstanding. Far more important (though the point is addressed only in a footnote), Benedict XVI is applying for the job of False Prophet in the coming planetary pseudo-religion; the encyclical Caritas in Veritate, dealing with the ethics of globalization, is his résumé.

On the other hand, readers may be struck by how much of the author's theological arguments remain Christian, indeed specifically Catholic. To some extent, this is simply a characteristic of Traditionalism: a passage from the Summa Theologica may be quoted before an argument from the Bhagavad Gita, and before a conclusion based on a line from Hermes Trismegistus. Still, the discussions of the Fall of Man seem more consistent with the Christian version than with the Muslim. If that is explained as the Muslim author simply reciting the venerable orthodoxy of another revelation, then one might reasonably ask how he can switch from one orthodoxy to another while still adhering to one over the other. In one of the articles in the book, the author answers a Muslim interlocutor, apparently another convert, on the subject of whether his theological orientation is fundamentally Traditional or Islamic. The answer includes a fascinating explanation of how the Intellect (in Aquinas's sense, more or less) can directly perceive the divine element in a revealed Tradition. A not implausible response, but is it Islamic?

Part of the explanation for this seeming ambivalence may be a product not so much of Traditionalism as of the increasingly contested role of Sufism within Islam. Mark Sedgwick came across Traditionalism while studying the still more esoteric subject of the effect during the 20th century of Sufi orders on Western intellectuals. Within Islam, Mr. Upton tells us, Sufism is Traditionalism. For two hundred years at least, however, Sufism has been in retreat before rigorist or politicized doctrines, the sort of movements that in the 21st century are called “Islamist.” Sufi doctrines are suppressed in much of the Islamic world, and Sufi practitioners sometimes persecuted. This leads to a dual emigration that the author finds one of the darkest features of a darkening age:

Meanwhile, Traditionalism's intended role as a bridge between the living Traditions is more and more attenuated. Traditionalist Muslims now often argue that Islam must have primacy of place among the revealed religions, because it is the only religion that contemplates the existence of other true religions. We may note that, in the 1950s, William Ernest Hocking made similar claims for Christianity, based on Christianity's deep experience with confronting the challenges of modernity. One of the things that have changed is that there are fewer non-Muslim Traditionalists. Thanks in part to the efforts of the wonderfully ubiquitous Seyyed Hossein Nasr, however, Traditionalism has had an influence on Islam that it has not had on Christianity. Outside the sphere of religion entirely, Traditionalism continues to be mined as a storehouse of ideological weapons. The pattern goes back to the very beginning. The esoteric Fascist ideologue, Baron Julius Evola, is probably better known than his older contemporary Guénon, and his influence is by no means exhausted, particularly in Europe. Guénon's best-selling book in the United States is The Crisis of the Modern World. That is one of his early works, written in the 1920s, when he was more like an ordinary French conservative. It can be read as a call to create elites to restore Western Tradition, and conservative Americans of a certain persuasion seem to feel that it is talking about them. Mr. Upton points out that Guénon abandoned this relatively hopeful attitude: The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, published just after the Second World War, is wholly apocalyptic. In any case, Mr. Upton says that Traditionalism needs desperately to update what it is against. In the early 20th century, Traditionalists warned against socialism and the revolt of the masses. They are still warning against these things, even when the real danger is the revolt of the elites and the likelihood that the Throne of Antichrist will rest on global capitalism.

In dealing with Traditionalism, we should remember that its conclusions are sometimes far more valuable than its premises. Here's a bit of mythological analysis from an essay in Findings that readers of The White Goddess might think Robert Graves would envy:

That said, though, the book is sprinkled with brilliant notions. For instance, against the argument that Traditionalists have an unrealistically romantic view of society, the author responds that a romantic society is the only kind in which God seems plausible. Most important, it seemed to me, is a thread of criticism that runs throughout the book against reaction.

Satan was a reactionary when he revolted against God. Before the creation of the world, there was no possible conflict between his will and the divine will, and so his role in the chain of being was rightfully very high. In the new conditions of a contingent world, he still clung to that position, though his place there had become anachronistic, and his attempts to exercise his new discretion evil.

The same applies from one historical epoch to another. A sacred monarchy in the proper spiritual context is good government; when that context dissipates, such a government is tyranny. Dante supported the Holy Roman Empire in order to make the political system of Europe mirror the great chain of being. When he saw that the spiritual climate of Europe had decayed past the point where that was possible, he wrote The Divine Comedy, an esoteric expression of the principle of hierarchy. As history follows its course of inevitable decay, one great truth after another passes from exoteric expression to esoteric principle. Readers may amuse themselves by considering which current institutions it would be reactionary to maintain.

The point applies to Islam in its terminal decay, the author notes. There are Muslims who hope to restore the Caliphate, and return civil society to the days of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. That would be a great mistake. The Caliphate was the only just form of government for the Muslim world at one time; to restore it in the present spiritual atmosphere would be to invite nightmare. The authors suggests that the days of the Lesser Jihad, the days of physical combat for the political defense of Islam, may be almost over, since no polity today can be other than heretical. Rather, he says, Muslims must remember the hadith, “Islam began in exile and will end in exile.” Christians remember the catacombs, and so, in a way, they have a script to follow after Christendom. What the world needs now, Charles Upton says, are “Seed Muslims,” Muslims of the Greater Jihad, who can persevere through the end of the age.