Tradition is the ritual abolition of time—this, in a sentence, was Guénon’s discovery and his revelation to the West. To a culture formed by Greek philosophy and biblical religion, he argued that no lasting society could be built on the contemplation of nature or the hope for a life beyond it. Time could be resisted only through tradition—only through the unceasing repetition of acts whose archetypes were thought to be as old as humanity itself. By imitating his ancestors, Guénon argued, the man of tradition was made contemporary with them and so transcended time. He lived in timeless solidarity with the generations that had preceded and would follow him. Neither nature nor history, therefore, could defeat him—for he had nothing of his own, did nothing by himself, and stood for nothing unique. He was merely a member of a sacred series. As Guénon’s greatest interpreter, Mircea Eliade, observed, the life of a traditional man had meaning only under one condition: that he was not an individual at all. What he did had always been done. What he believed had always been believed. His life was one of holy repetition.
As Guénon saw it, the postwar West was littered with mere fragments of knowledge. Modernity had succeeded in severing each branch of knowledge and every practical skill from the “sacred sciences” that once ordered them to wisdom. Guénon lamented that social roles, now dominated by technology, transmitted no spirituality and offered no portals to contemplation. Modern life instead imposed its own empty rituals, which were nothing but a “parody” of the sacred rhythms of traditional life—exacerbating our exposure to historical change, rather than protecting us from it. Guénon concluded that the West was indeed an exceptional civilization: It was exceptionally abnormal in seeking “the destruction of all traditional institutions.”
At the time of his death in 1951, Guénon had largely given up hope that the dissolution of traditional societies could be stopped. He encouraged his followers to hold inwardly to the eternal doctrines that he, in a conspicuous break with tradition, had committed to writing.
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We need not agree with Guénon in order to recognize that he was right about the dismantling of tradition in liberal societies. He understood the civilizational calamity, to say nothing of the human cruelty, of making each generation a stranger to those that precede and follow it. Who we will be, what we will believe, where we will live, how and when we will die—we are now burdened with building our lives from scratch, precisely at the moment when we most need the wisdom of tradition. Guénon was rightly horrified by the nihilism of a culture whose past is stolen through enforced forgetting. And though he was not a believer in any traditional sense, he sought the same consolation many religious people do: refuge in a realm of imperishable truth.
But in imagining a primordial tradition, existing beyond the flow of time, Guénon, paradoxically, drained human life of its meaning. Guénon ignored the personal and embodied dimensions of human experience. No individuals mattered when seen from the horizon of deep time, and no great men or women could shape our common destiny. Guénon’s vision of eternity prevented him from seeing any real human beings, whose unfolding lives form the drama of history. His “tradition,” hidden in secret symbols and encoded rituals, was disembodied from the ways in which any inheritance is transmitted. Guénon showed almost no interest in Western art, literature, or folkways, and his failure was no accident. For he could not acknowledge the animating core of our culture, with its basis in the Bible, whose message he could not bear to confront. Scripture sees time as fraught with meaning. It imagines that eternity is glimpsed in the small dramas of ordinary lives whose every moment is charged with meaning.
Guénon’s return to tradition was no return at all. It was an escape—from the finitude of creaturely life into the imagined citadel of tradition. His error was fundamental and prevented him from being the steward of any tradition that might be renewed. He did not understand that our involvement in history, including our vulnerability to it, is what allows us to seek what is truly human and what is infinitely beyond history. With his vision turned to the mystery of human prehistory, Guénon failed to appreciate the mystery before him. It is the mystery that the deepest human potentialities become full, rich, and perfected only through the adventure of history, where they are tested, illumined, and enhanced. Human beings must live in time, and it is only within a world of change that we can give shape to our souls. Our responsibility to do so gives our lives a perpetual restlessness and discontent. Guénon experienced as a crisis and a loss what is, in truth, a task and calling. And when we see time not as the place of our dispossession, but as our journey toward home, then a more exalted vision of human life opens before us.