Traditonalism again

[porphyry]

The topic of my religious beliefs was brought up in another thread. Better to answer it here rather than bury it completely (or perhaps not).

I was educated as a New Testament critic, but any professional work I would do would concern Late Antiquity (Marcus Aurelius to Justinian). My particular interest is the intersection of Philosophy, religion, and magic.

About the age of 9 I saw through religion, then about the age of 25 I saw through atheism.

The only religion that would satisfy me would be the religion of the Roman Empire in all of its variation. But of course we’re not having that again. There are a number of people actually trying to revive that, but in general they are cranks. They saw Gladiator and wanted a new flavor for their wicca.

It seems to me that we have lost something authentic by entering modernity. I am hardly the first to think so. The Romantics did not understand much about history, but they looked to Greece as their main ideal; for them whatever virtues Greece possessed were lost with the Enlightenment and industrialism, yet they could not dispute the validity of the insights of the modern skeptical, scientific progressive manner of thinking, for all that its ability to look at the antique objectively made it impossible to naively and purely participate in the antique. They wanted to find some way of reconciling the two views into a new synthesis. But of course they failed and now we move ever further away from Tradition, wandering through what Eliot called ‘a heap of broken images.’

At the beginning of the 20th century Traditionalists, starting from the position in French culture occupied by The Salon Rose + Cross, Symbolism, and Blavatsky, wanted to revolt against all that pseudo-occultism (and corruption within the Church and a few other things) and establish a new link with Tradition, by which they meant the whole body of ancient culture from which modern man is alienated. I share that goal. The founders of the movement, Rene Guenon and Fithjof Schuon, converted to Islam because they felt that possessed the last untainted connection with the past (if I were to that it would have to be with the Parsees, but they don’t take converts)…but once again, they were all crackpots. I’ve read Guenon’s works, and his idea of ancient tradition is a contained little box built out of prejudice, ignorance, and misinterpretation and rather malign fantasy. Schuon went on to found a hippy commune in Indiana. As for subsequent generations—Julius Evola tried to interest the Nazis in Traditionalism, with little success, and his followers seem to spend their time alternating between trying and failing to blow up public buildings in Italy and using ceremonial magic to summon up devils of all things. At Oxford and Cambridge there is a community of Traditionalists that call themselves Aristasia who have some superficially attractive ideas (for instance calling the post-modern world that emerged from the counter-culture of the 1960s the Pit), but they turn out to be a group of lesbians whose main interest is in spanking.

So what would give me spiritual satisfaction would be to tear down the mass culture of the West which is perfectly happy to destroy art, beauty, faith, justice, and anything else good and pure, not really as part of any horrible conspiracy, but because that is simply the nature of modernity, and to replace it with something authentic, original, pure, and beautiful…and not forgetting ancient. Of course there is no way to do this.

So if anyone asks I tell them I am the same religion as Sokrates and Plotinos which in once sense is true, but in another is a sort of test. If anyone objects that it is ridiculous then they are probably worthwhile indeed. If you want to reconcile those two, you have to falsify a great deal, and that fiction, I suppose is the very essence of the idealized, mythical antiquity that so many have aspired to with so little understanding. Being a Classicist actually gets rather seriously in the way of that.

Comments

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

You don't give the Aristasians enough credit and then you give them too much in the wrong place, which people normally do.

The Feminine Universe is the best explanation of Traditionalism there is. Putting such complex ideas into such a tidy and accessible package is a feat worthy of admiration. The other Aristasian writings are equally worthy of consideration simply as good English prose. It's worth reading through the Aphrodite Cocktail Bar archives for the gems like the Philosophy of Stockings, the spooky television script, and the review of The Well of Loneliness. And the bongo typology is sheer brilliance. I will link you to these things if you don't want to wade through the nine hundred pages of ladies talking about hats.

But the most important contribution of the Aristasians is that they are really doing it, they are really out of the Pit, or at least dealing with it on their own terms. They are solvent, own property together, and are planning for the future together. They protect their weaker members. They have managed to clear the hurdle that almost all anti-modernist groups fail to clear - they are managing to live together and handle money.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Some of it reads well, but, then again, when my wife was subscribing to their e-newsletter abut the only thing she learned was that they were setting up some kind of on-line service where they could interact with each other as cartoon characters. I can't iamgine anything more bongo.

Incidently, what do you think of Sedgwick's Agaisnt the Modern World?

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

I've only read the excerpt on Amazon but it looks good. I keep asking for it for my birthday but no one loves me that much apparently. I think it's hilarious that they managed to convince him there are 40 of them. I'd be surprised if there are 15.