We have just mentioned Guenon’s role in bring awareness of Tradition to the West, but there are two other very important figures: Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (AKC) and Julius Evola. Operating on three different continents, they kept in contact with Guenon via post, exchanging letters and even books. That was the precursor of the Internet, in bring together the scattered remnant of Tradition, spiritually and intellectually, if not physically. Both men were accomplished thinkers in their own right, but their respective encounters with Guenon were transformative and heavily influenced their own writings.

There are some who would exclude Evola as a Traditional writer, but the other two did not see it that way. AKC wrote a favourable review of Julius Evola’s “Revolt Against the Modern World”, which was published in the Feb-Apr 1940 edition of The Visva-Bharati Quarterly and included an English translation of the chapter “Man and Woman”. Guenon himself reviewed several of Evola’s works.

There are clearly differences in interests and interpretations among the three authors, which Evola would attribute to differences in the “personal equation”. However, these differences could never be over metaphysical principles, but rather differences in the interpretation of contingent historical events. For example, there were disagreements over the Traditional characteristics of Hermeticism or Buddhism, but in the latter case, Guenon was later to alter his opinion.

AKC was an enormously erudite man and his contributions not just in metaphysics, but also in traditional art, crafts, folklore and mythology are important to anyone not just seeking to understand Tradition abstractly, but also in its potential applications. Similarly, Evola’s interests were in the forgotten Traditions of the West, whose characteristics he sought to reconstruct from the analysis of myths, sagas, and legends. He also applied his understanding of Tradition to current political and cultural events.

Another important difference is that whereas Guenon eventually opted to live within a specific tradition (Sufism), AKC and Evola were those rare men who could live outside tradition and caste.

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The terms “Traditionalism” and “Traditionalist” have been gaining currency, reflecting an unfortunate and misleading trend. Presumably used to describe the intellectual ideas promulgated by Rene Guenon, then further developed by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Julius Evola, it instead treats those ideas as merely another perspective or school of philosophy. As such, it would then be subject to criticism and debate at that level.

First of all, it is necessary to be clear about what Tradition is and what motivated Guenon. “Tradition” must be understood in its literal sense as something “handed down” or “given across”, not as the “repetition of the past” for its own sake. What is handed down, then, is a transcendent knowledge which cannot be considered as just another perspective or worldview. In actuality, due to historical contingencies and the resultant isolation of cultures, several traditions have arisen, each reflecting the primordial Tradition.

As such, each authentic tradition is complete in itself. Thus, the “traditional man”, who follows one of those traditions has no need whatsoever to know anything about the teachings or symbols of another tradition. Everything he needs for his own self-development or self-transcendence is already there within his own tradition. Hence, it is absolutely absurd to call him a “traditionalist”, since he is simply a Hindu, or Taoist, or Sufi.

It is only In the modern Western world, which has lost its own tradition, that the question of multiple traditions is forced to arise. Guenon, in his search for authentic tradition in the West, studied the various traditions and noted their commonality – not in their empirical manifestation, but in the transcendent knowledge they carry. Guenon compared this knowledge, hidden in the metaphysics and symbols, of the traditions in his voluminous writings. Nevertheless, not even Guenon was a “traditionalist”; instead he embraced the authentic tradition of a Sufi lifestyle, in his intellectual (not religious) conversion.

As for those who dare call themselves “traditionalists”, Guenon writes:

[“traditionalists” refer] to people who only have a sort of tendency or aspiration towards tradition without really knowing anything at all about it; this is the measure of the distance dividing the “traditionalist” spirit from the truly traditional spirit, for the latter implies a real knowledge …

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Ref: Chapter XXXI: “Tradition and Traditionalism” in The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times

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One’s circle is never closed, one’s past is not the future, one’s work is never finished …

… the primitive craftsman leaves in his work something unfinished, and that the primitive mother dislikes to hear the beauty of her child unduly praised; it is “tempting Providence”, and my lead to disaster. That seems like nonsense to us. And yet there survives in our vernacular the explanation for the principle involved: the craftsman leaves something undone in his work for the same reason that the word “to be finished” may mean either to be perfected or to die. Perfection is death: when a thing has been altogether fulfilled, when all has been done that was to be done, potentiality altogether reduced to act, that is the end: those whom the gods love die young. This is not what the workman desired for his work, nor the mother for her child. It can very well be that the workman or the peasant mother is no longer conscious of the meaning of a precaution that may have become a mere superstition; but assuredly we, who call ourselves anthropologists, should have been able to understand what was the idea which alone could have given rise to such a superstition, and ought to have asked ourselves whether or not the peasant by his actual observance of the precaution is not defending himself from a dangerous suggestion to which we, who have made of our existence a more tightly closed system, may be immune.

~ Ananda Commaraswamy, “Primitive Mentality”

This, too, is the practice of the metaphysician. No matter how deep is his understanding or broad his knowledge, there is always something undone: something else to learn, another connection to see, another experience to integrate. The idea that someone can believe in a closed system that encompasses all knowledge, or that the repetition of old practices is totally sufficient, or that the recovery of old beliefs and rites will be the guide for the future are all temptations that too often “lead to disaster”.

Guenon points out that death comes when all one’s possibilities have been exhausted. Even if that death is not physical, it will be spiritual. For as soon as we believe we are spiritually perfect, then we become spiritually dead, no longer able to grow, thrive or pass on an inheritance. The metaphysician is convinced that the Absolute is Infinite, and thus is in no danger of running out of possibilities.

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Lacking nothing, contemplative, immortal, self-originated, sufficed with a quintessence: he who knows that constant, ageless, and ever-youthful Spirit, knows himself and does not fear death.
~ Shankara

In his important but little read essay, The Vedanta and Western Tradition, A. K. Coomaraswamy points the way for Europeans to come to an understanding of the metaphysics of the Vedanta. He begins with this advice:

The educated man of today is completely out of touch with those European modes of thought and those intellectual aspects of the Christian doctrine which are nearest those of the Vedic traditions. A knowledge of modern Christianity will be of little use because the fundamental sentimentality of our times has diminished what was once an intellectual doctrine to a mere morality that can hardly be distinguished from a pragmatic humanism. A European can hardly be said to be adequately prepared for the study of the Vedanta unless he has acquired some knowledge and understanding of at least

• Plato
• Philo
• Hermes Trismegistus
• Plotinus
• Gospel of John
• Dionysius the Areopagiite
• Meister Eckhart
• Dante

Eckhart, with the possible exception of Dante, can be regarded from an Indian point of view as the greatest of all Europeans.

Here are some of the major highlights:

• Metaphysics is not a system, but a consistent doctrine
• It is concerned not only with conditioned and quantitative experience, but also with universal possibility
• There are things which are beyond the reach of discursive thought and which cannot be understood except by denying things of them
• The immanent Spirit within you is teh only knower, agent, and transmigrant
• Ultimate reality is a Supreme Identity in which the opposition of all contraries, even of being and not-being, is resolved
• Its “worlds” and “gods” are levels of reference and symbolic entities which are neither places nor individuals but states of being realizable within you
• For the metaphysician, it suffices to show that a false doctrine involves a contradiction of first principles
• The quest is achieved only when he himself has become the object of his search
• The Vedanta can be known only to the extent that it has been lived
• Man is unaware of this hidden treasure within himself because he has inherited an ignorance that inheres in the very nature of the psycho-physical vehicle which he mistakenly identifies with himself
• What is called “creation” in religion, is called “manifestation” in metaphysics
• Only when we are convinced that nothing happens by chance that the idea of Providence becomes intelligible
• Each human life has run its course when all its possibilities have been exhausted
• Whatever has been an eternal reason or idea or name of an individual manifestation can never cease to be such; the content of eternity cannot be changed

All the states of being are within you, awaiting recognition

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