Was Gandhi a Traditionalist?

Michael Allen, a philosopher at East Tennessee State University, has worked on protest movements for many years, and has just published a book about Gandhi in which he asks the unexpected question of whether Gandhi has a Traditionalist. The answer, he argues, is no, but the question still gives rise to an interesting discussion, in chapter 7 of Allen's Gandhi’s Popular Sovereignty of Truth: Devotional Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), available here.

Gandhi was, like Guénon, a fierce critic of modernity, and also a perennialist. So far, so similar. The difference, according to Allen, is that while the Traditionalist route to personal or political realization is esoteric, Gandhi’s route was exoteric: his “devotional democracy” depended on “the whole sovereign people together speaking God’s voice,” not just on an elite.

Allen also compares Gandhi to the contemporary Identitarians, who draw on Traditionalism. Here the difference is about “pluralism of ethno-cultural traditions.” While the Identitarians suppose that “each discrete culture may flourish only in its own territory of origin,” which Allen sees as “an impossible global ethno-cultural apartheid,” Gandhi rejects this idea and looks towards "a wide pluralism" instead.

I am not sure that Allen has got the Identitarians quite right, but I am certainly convinced that Gandhi was not a Guénonian. He was closer to Guénon than I had thought, though, perhaps because I have not previously thought about him enough.

Update on Passages

The first number of a new Traditionalist journal, Passages, edited by the American Traditionalist Jafe Arnold, was released in 2023 (and reviewed here). The second number was released earlier in 2025. It is much the same size as the first number (382 pages, fifteen articles) but has grown more Russian, with six Russian contributors (including Alexander Dugin), as against two in 2023. There are about the same number of Italians (five as against six) and Hungarians (three, unchanged). Unlike 2023, there are no American, English or French contributors, perhaps because of the Ukraine war.

A note on Guénon’s sources for Dante

A new article on the esotericism of Dante focuses on the way in which the Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854) of Eugène Aroux, a major source for Guénon’s L’Ésotérisme de Dante, is plagiarized from La Beatrice di Dante (1842) by Gabriele Rossetti. It is Piero Latino, “The Forgotten History of an Indirect Influence: From Gabriele Rossetti to Eugène Aroux, «L'eminente Plagiario», and the Spread of a Silent Idea in European Literature,” Studi Medievali e Moderni 29 (2025), pp. 135-156. 

Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854) was an Italian poet, nationalist revolutionary activist (and consequently later exile in London), and an enthusiast of Dante. One of his sons, Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828-1882), was among the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London. Eugène Aroux (1793-1859) was a less distinguished French politician and writer, and in his Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste, révélations d'un catholique sur le Moyen Âge (Dante: heretic, revolutionary, and socialist: Revelations of a Catholic about the Middle Ages) reversed the central message of Rossetti, still basing that new version largely on Rossetti’s work. 

On Philip Sherrard

Christopher W. Howell has just published an article on Philip Sherrard (1922-1995, photo here), the English, Traditionalist, Greek Orthodox writer and translator who helped the English poet and Neoplatonist Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) to found the Temenos Academy. It is Christopher W. Howell, “The Holiness of Creation: Philip Sherrard and the Climate Apocalypse,” in Orthodox Christianity and the Study of Nature: Histories of Interaction, ed. Kostas Tampakis and Ronald L. Numbers (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2025), pp. 213-240.

Howell knows Sherrard well, and had access to his unpublished as well as published writings when researching this article. It starts with a biography and an account of Sherrard’s postwar “search for tradition” and his 1956 conversion to Greek Orthodoxy, and then moves on to his Traditionalism, asking whether Sherrard was actually a Traditionalist. Sherrard mentioned René Guénon in a letter in 1953, before his conversion, and the answer would be yes, argues Howell, were it not for Sherrard’s rejection of Frithjof Schuon’s syncretism and his disagreement with René Guénon’s view of Christianity. He also disagreed with Guénon’s conviction that in the modern world the tradition was lost save, perhaps, for an elite: Sherrard had previously found the tradition in the peasants of Greece. Finally, he preferred the Orthodox understanding of creation to that of Guénon.

Rejection of Schuon’s syncretism means one is not a Schuonian, but one can still be a Traditionalist. The disagreements with Guénon that Howell identifies are important, but may be seen as a development of aspects of Guénon’s thought; they are certainly not a rejection of the whole of it.

Howell goes on to discuss Sherrard’s view on modernity, evolution, and finally “climate change,” perhaps not the best phrase. The title of Sherrard’s 1987 book, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science, gives a better view of how he saw the problem, even though wildfires later became a special problem for Greece. Sherrard, then, sits with Seyyed Hossein Nasr as a Traditionalist environmentalist.

This is a well-informed and well-written article that fills one gap in our knowledge of later twentieth-century Traditionalism beyond the Maryamiyya.

Online lecture series by Schuonians

A new lecture series entitled the “Schuon Lectures” is available online.

In 2025 they will be delivered by Harry Oldmeadow, formerly of La Trobe University Bendigo, Australia, author of Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy (2000) and Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions (2004). Other Schuonian speakers are planned for later years: M. Ali Lakhani (2026), Michael Oren Fitzgerald (2027), and Patrick D. Laude (2028).

Oldmeadow’s lectures will be on:

• The Rhythms of Time and Traces of Primordiality (Primordial Worlds) 
• Revealed Tradition as Mediator between Time and Eternity (Traditional Worlds) 
• Signs of the Times: The Reign of Scientism, Evolutionism and ‘Progress’ (The Modern World) 
• Metaphysics and the Spiritual Life (The Eternal Present) 

As well as the lectures, the website offers networking: “Expand your professional network and connect with leading scholars and thinkers in philosophy and theology. Schuon Lecture series provides a platform for networking and collaboration, allowing you to engage with experts from different backgrounds and disciplines.”

For more details, see schuonlectures.respectgs.us/