Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order
by Mark Sedgwick
Pelican, £25, 432 pages
Traditionalism has lately been used, confusingly, to label phenomena as diverse as the geopolitics of (alleged) Putin guru Aleksandr Dugin, the psychology of Jordan Peterson and King Charles III’s views on architecture and the environment. Mark Sedgwick’s new book does much to clarify the picture.
Traditionalism boasts an intellectual lineage stretching back to the Catholic priest and Venetian humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Ficino developed an integrative approach to what we would now term “comparative religion”. For Ficino, echoes between Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts dealing with mystical experience posed prima facia challenges for Christianity’s claims to a monopoly on revealed truth.
Today’s historians usually attribute those synchronicities to the (historically contingent) common influence of Platonism/Neoplatonism on all three Abrahamic religions. In Christianity’s case, it entered chiefly via the Muslim world, especially through the 13th-century scholastic theologians’ reading of Greek Platonic texts transmitted through Latin translations of Arabic manuscripts.
Ficino’s ingenious solution, however, posited a primordial – or “perennial” – origin identified with Christianity but anticipated by Plato, thanks to traditions transmitted through the Jewish diaspora from Moses himself. For Ficino, Kabbalist and Sufist commonalities with this tradition were partial (flawed) refractions of the Truth or, in modern parlance, only “rumours of God”.
Antiquity thus confers authority, and the progress of time is liable to cause fragmentation and decay of truth, rather than its progression and fulfilment. This historical view of religion became fused with cosmic, theological and moral conceptions of the Fall; it proved adept at harmonising features of pagan and Abrahamic religions.
For Ficino and his heirs, history falls into a tripartite structure. First a “Time of the Gods”, or at least of Edenic divine-human harmony; second, a time of corruption and division; finally, a time of restoration and unity with “The One” – a lasting recovery of the primordial age’s essence.
In art and architecture, Traditionalism privileges the classical style both as that which comes from the time of Man’s innocence and because, in basing its ratios on idealised “harmonic” proportions, it reaches back beyond nature as observed in particular objects to pure forms subsisting in the mind of God.
Yet Traditionalism implies reverence for, and care of, the actual natural world as the means by which divine ideas are mediated to us. Correspondences with King Charles’s 2010 work Harmony: A New Way of Looking at our World – synthesising perspectives on the environment and architecture – are clear.
Reverence for the past as the measure of truth renders progress suspect. Traditionalism’s politics thus tend towards the reactionary. Recently, political Traditionalism’s relationship to religion has shifted. Earlier Traditionalists appealed either to the truth of a particular tradition or a “higher divine reality” residing beyond historical religion to establish a strong public role for religion. Recent proponents have instead been more pragmatic. They accord religion importance on account of empirical recognition of faith’s usefulness as an identity-forming social stabiliser and source of common values.
This disjunction causes Sedgwick to label recent political manifestations “Post-Traditionalism” and to endeavour to place a cordon sanitaire between these and the forgoing family of philosophical ideas he has described. This is well-supported in his presentation of the French “New Right”, Hungary’s Jobbik party and Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon. For them, what matters is religious-tradition’s opposition to fragmented modernity, rather than its specific positive content.
Sedgwick’s argument is, however, a harder sell in respect of Aleksandr Dugin. The latter’s strongly metaphysical orientation is closer to older forms of Traditionalism – as the author reluctantly acknowledges.
It may be that the book’s analysis of Traditionalism’s politics would have benefitted from a more comparative approach. An illuminating contrast might, for example, be drawn between Traditionalism and Conservatism as theorised classically by the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97). Like Sedgwick’s Traditionalists, Burke fought modernity’s disruptions by stressing the importance of organic culture – including religion – in shaping political institutions. Yet Burke’s Toryism exhibits a discerning calculus allowing for measured embrace of new developments.
Questions are begged about Traditionalism’s relationship to other “post-Liberal” trends. Its combination of a radical critique of modernity, a stress on “virtue”, and fusion of left and right critiques of Liberalism finds echo in the “Radical Orthodoxy” school of political theology championed by John Milbank and Phillip Blond. Radical Orthodoxy, like Traditionalism, is rooted in Neoplatonism.
Are these resemblances a matter of correlation or of causation? We are left wondering. No book, however, can do everything. As a reliable and readable introduction to Traditionalism, Sedgwick’s volume is an achievement.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist.
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