What Perennialism Is Not

A Clarification

A few quick words on what Perennialism or Traditionalism isn’t, if only to clear up some common misconceptions.

Perennialism is not New Ageism. Unlike New Age philosophy, Perennialists do not believe that all religions are true. There is such a thing as heresy. Ultimate reality in itself may be all encompassing, but there is an order and logic to forms. If certain arrangements of symbols can point towards the truth, others can lead us away from it. Unlike exponents of the New Age, Perennialists insist on the formal integrity of each individual religion. This means that, pace New Age thinking, the teachings of different faiths should not be combined arbitrarily. One cannot be a Muslim Buddhist or a Hindu Christian. An exception to this requirement is where we find a complementary synthesis of religions – for example, the concurrent practice of Ruism, Buddhism, Daoism and Shintoism in the Sinic world – but this phenomenon is circumscribed and certainly not capricious. Although Perennialism teaches that the truth can manifest in a plurality of forms, this is not the same as religious relativism. There is an absoluteness in each valid articulation of the truth, such that it is better for someone to believe ardently (albeit erroneously) that their own religion is the only true faith, than to be lukewarm or largely indifferent in their spiritual convictions.

Perennialism is not a ‘far right’ political philosophy. As I will argue in a future essay, adopting a simplistic left-right dichotomy is worse than useless (hence the scare quotes). What is usually meant by ‘far right’ when applied to Traditionalism is the charge that it represents some form of fascism or other cognate ideology. This is partly due to the sensationalism of scholars like Mark Sedgwick and Benjamin Teitelbaum. As mentioned in the previous instalment, these gentlemen do good work when they confine themselves to other subjects, but their characterisation of the Perennialist School is highly objectionable. While I intend to give extended critiques of Evola, Dugin, Bannon, Carvalho, Devi and others in due course, suffice it to say for now that I categorically reject the claim that these people are Perennialists. Rather, they are best described as advocates of counter-Tradition. Nationalism and racism – integral to the thought of these political thinkers – are part and parcel of modernity, and no orthodox Perennialist considers figures like these to be representatives of their school.

I also contend that the Perennialist movement is not conservativism tout court. It certainly seeks to preserve the best of what Tradition has bequeathed to us, and it’s also suspicious of change, which it sees as invariably tending towards decline. However, it is not conservative in the sense of the political views associated with, for example, Edmund Burke – which is often nothing more than a reluctant liberalism (although on occasion some of its variations are antecedents to fascism).

The Traditionalist School is therefore not to be confused with traditionalist conservativism – a genus of the conservative political ideology. Even temperamental conservativism is an unsuitable way to describe the Perennialist outlook. As we descend further into modernity, there is increasingly less about the status quo that Perennialists would want to conserve. I will make the case, in subsequent posts, that they should, nevertheless, prefer to maintain existing conditions (despite their largely unsatisfactory nature) than to facilitate any kind of accelerationism.

The vision of Perennialism does not lend itself to a crude understanding of historical decline (especially of the sentimentalist type). It is more subtle than that as it readily admits of peaks and troughs throughout the ages (notwithstanding an overall trajectory towards degeneration). However, its perspective might only be seen in this way if we limit ourselves to viewing history in its modern sense because – considered from a much broader vantage point – Perennialism sees time as cyclical (and qualitatively so).

Finally, it is important to be aware that the Perennial Philosophy is also known as Traditionalism – although not traditionalism. The latter (with a lower-case ‘t’ ) refers to followers of the traditional, orthodox and authentic teachings of an authentic religious dispensation, whereas the former are adherents of the Perennialist School. So, all Traditionalists are traditionalists, but most traditionalists are not Traditionalists.