Tradition (Perennialism)

In perennial philosophy, tradition means divinely ordained truths or principles that have been communicated to humanity as well as an entire cosmic sector through various figures such as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos, or other transmitting agencies. The purpose of these sacred truths or principles is to continuously remind human beings of the existence of a "Divine Center" and an "Ultimate Origin." According to this perspective, tradition does not refer to custom, habit, or inherited ways of thinking and living. Contrarily, it has a divine foundation and involves the transmission of the sacred message down through the ages. Used in this sense, tradition is synonymous with revelation, and it encompasses all forms of philosophy, art, and culture that are influenced by it.

Traditionalists assert that there is also a Primordial Tradition, which serves as the archetype of all traditions.

Tradition has exoteric and esoteric dimensions. The exoteric aspects of a tradition are primarily represented by its ceremonies, rituals, and rules, whereas the esoteric aspects are concerned with its spiritual and intellectual qualities. Traditionalists often compare the term "tradition" to the term "modern" or "modernity". While "traditional" refers to something that has a transcendent origin, "modern" signifies that which is disconnected from the transcendent.

Although the term was first used in relation to perennial philosophy by René Guénon, and was further developed by his followers, including Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, it was most notably conceptualized by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who cited Guénon as an influence on his concept of tradition.

Etymology

The word "tradition" is derived from the Latin term traditio, which means "to hand over."[1] Etymologically, the term tradition refers to the transmission of knowledge, practice, skills, laws, forms, and a variety of other oral and written aspects.[2] For Nasr, tradition is analogous to a "living presence" that leaves its imprint but is irreducible to that imprint.[3] There are at least two levels of meaning here. First, tradition is defined as the passing down of knowledge from one generation to the next, which is reflected in the word's Latin etymology. Nasr considers the Arabic din and Sanskrit dharma to be roughly similar in meaning 'tradition,' while he recognizes that they do not correspond with the Latin root, which indicates the concept of transmission. Second, tradition entails some kind of "living force", and the mark it leaves behind, with the force "ontologically transcending the mark". This resembles to a Platonic form whose appearance in the universe is only a shadow of its "true reality", but Nasr has spoken of something "living" and "present", which is a recurring theme in his works.[2]

Concept

According to Beverly J. Lanzetta, "tradition forms the backbone" of perennial philosophy.[4] The term "tradition," as used by Nasr and other "traditionists," such as Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, does not refer to custom, habit, or inherited patterns of life and thought. On the contrary, tradition "is of sacred and divine origin", and it encompasses the continuation and transmission of the sacred message through time.[5] Used in this context, "tradition" refers to revelation and all forms of philosophy, art, and culture that are shaped by it, spreading the reverberations of revelation on earth and thereby reminding humans of the "Divine Center" and "Ultimate Origin".[6]

For Nasr, "tradition":

...means truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact, a whole cosmic sector through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos or other transmitting agencies, along with all the ramifications and applications of these principles in different realms including law and social structure, art, symbolism, the sciences, and embracing of course Supreme Knowledge along with the means for its attainment.[7]
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Sallie B. King, The Philosophia Perennis and the Religions of the World, 2000

Tradition, according to Nasr, is pure and divine, and it represents God's will. Similarly, tradition, as a sacred concept with its origins in God, is the only way to communicate with God, who fully encompasses the universe and is constantly present "in the very depth of all human beings". As a result, tradition is perfectly in harmony with the prophetic revelations, which represent the "highest order of reality", capable of elevating man to "higher altitudes of personality".[8]

The traditionalist thinkers use the word to refer to "both the Sacred as revealed to man through revelation and the unfolding and development of the sacred message in the history of the particular humanity for which it was destined", in a way that represents both horizontal and vertical continuity with "the Origin", tying every moment of the concerned tradition's life "to the meta-historical Transcendental Reality".[9]

...[tradition refers to] a set of principles which have descended from Heaven and which are identified at their origin with a particular manifestation of the Divine along with the application and deployment of these principles of different moments of time and in different conditions for a particular humanity.[10]
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Md. Abu Sayem, The Eco-Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2019

Exoteric and esoteric dimensions

For Traditionalists, Tradition has two fundamental aspects, namely, exoteric and esoteric.[11] Exoteric aspect is predominantly manifested in its rites, rituals, and laws. It also comprises the theologies or doctrines that give a tradition its uniqueness and particularity. The esoteric or the inward dimension of tradition, on the other hand, encompasses "not only its spiritual substance, but also its intellectual qualities". Islam, for example, divides its esoteric and exoteric aspects into the Shariah and Tariqa, respectively. The Kabbalah is considered esoteric in Judaism as opposed to the exoteric understanding of the Talmud. The esoteric aspect of tradition is considered its essence and its core. This aspect, it is claimed, is only accessible "to those who are able to appreciate the inward dimension of tradition".[11]

The Primordial Tradition

Together with various traditions and religions, Traditionalists also believe in the reality of the Primordial Tradition, which is said to encapsulate "all truths of all religions".[11] For Guenon, the Primordial Tradition represents "the unity of thought and action which, transcending the arbitrary rule of culture and society, serves as the one common denominator between men and leads them to an awareness of Unity, supreme and indivisible".[12] For Nasr, this Primordial Tradition "flows from an Absolute Truth that has been expressed in diverse ways through the ages".[13] Nasr holds that the existence of different religions is not evidence against the Primordial Tradition. The assumption that all religions hold a fundamental truth, contrarily, is supported by such variation when one approaches religions from an esoteric viewpoint.[11] According to Nasr:

All traditions...are earthly manifestations of celestial archetypes of the Primordial Tradition in the same way that all revelations are related to the Logos or the Word which was at the beginning and which is at once an aspect of the Universal Logos and the Universal Logos as such.[11]
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Adnan Aslan, Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy: The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1998

For Nasr, "each tradition is based on a direct message from Heaven and cannot be seen simply as the historical continuation of the Primordial Tradition". Its acceptance does not imply that any of the revealed religions are devoid of divine origin. Rather, it is to affirm the "presence" that is inextricably linked to the sacred.[11] Nasr finds similarities between the concept of the Primordial Tradition and the Islamic understanding of al-din al-hanif, the faith of the prophet Abraham. The Primordial Tradition is thus viewed as "a block of principles which were often revitalised through revelation". For him, all religions are united not just by a common source but also by a common substance, the Primordial Tradition.[11]

History

According to Damian Howard, one of the major challenges of Traditionalist philosophy was defining the term "tradition" in order to claim an underlying unity while explaining away the wide variety of all those civilizations and forms.[14]

René Guénon

Rene Guénon, the founder of the traditionalist school, believed in the existence of a "Primordial Tradition", which "was revealed to humanity at the beginning of the present cycle of time, but was partially lost".[15] According to William W. Quinn, Guenon employed the term Primordial Tradition "almost interchangeably with sophia and philosophia perennis".[12] He associated tradition with "civilization," but he did not include Western modernity in his definition. He also emphasizes the contrasts between two types of traditions: religious and metaphysical. Religion requires the involvement of an element taken from the sentimental order, whereas the metaphysical point of view is solely intellectual. Religion, Guénon claims, is only "an epithet" for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it includes the sub-disciplines of theology and mysticism.[14]

Ananda Coomaraswamy

According to William W. Quinn, Coomaraswamy's idea of Tradition is similar to Guénon's Primordial Tradition. Coomaraswamy saw no difference between the concepts of Tradition and philosophia perennis.[16] For Coomaraswamy, their application differed, with philosophia perennis being used to represent a collection of interconnected metaphysical principles that could be explained either without reference to any particular Traditional culture or with reference to all of them, while the term Tradition was almost always used in relation to a specific culture.[16]

Frithjof Schuon

Frithjof Schuon understood tradition "as being the semidivine and semihuman reality that provides mankind with a general climate conducive to the consciousness of the Absolute".[17] The word tradition appears in Schuon's writings frequently, usually in close proximity to the word religion.[18] Following in Guenon's footsteps, Schuon theorized the causes of the historical origins of a wide spectrum of religious traditions. For him, religions differ because human societies and cultures differ, and God's revealed truth adjusts to local situations in this way. According to Howard, Schuon's view of cultures echoes cultural views of Renan and other race-based theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He assigns essentially distinct traits to the chief racial kinds into which he divides mankind, with these differences in mentality necessitating the heterogeneity of religious forms. However, racial diversity for Schuon is not an arbitrary phenomenon.[14] To comprehend the significance of races, one must first recognize that they are derived from essential qualities of mankind rather than anything accidental in nature.[19] It is not only a question of a Platonic form being instantiated in the cosmos in such a way that it bears "the traces of its contingent insertion point" (i.e. one or other specific culture) but also of allowing for the possibility "that even the highest and most general point of the form could also be very different from one tradition to another", because racial differences relate to fundamental aspects of the constitutional formation of humanity.[2]

For Howard, Schuon "struggles to make sense of all this" and ends up avoiding the issue by postulating the existence of a "human margin" in religion, a space removed from immediate divine intervention in which human speculation takes inspiration from revelation based on the nature of the particular human beings engaged in their real context. This is how religions lawfully generate concepts and teachings that appear to contradict one another. A notable example is the Christian and Muslim viewpoints on Christ's death.[2]

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

According to Howard, Tradition was finally to be defined by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, whose writings provided a comprehensive framework.[20] Nasr credits Guénon from whom he derives his idea of Tradition.[21] For Nasr, Tradition comes from the divine source and affects all aspects of a society's life. This divine source "is both the content and the means of revelation", which is "effected" by various "transmitting agencies". The revelation's guiding principles gave rise to a number of subsidiary sciences and arts, which were creatively enlarged to incorporate different elements of social, political, and cultural life. For Nasr, tradition is a repository of "Supreme Knowledge", which is another name for the philosophia perennis. It provides humanity with "the means" for attaining supreme knowledge and spirituality.[22]

Tradition and modernity

Nasr and other "traditionists" refer to "tradition" as a reality that is as old as man himself. He believes that the contemporary usage of the term and references to the concept of tradition are, in some ways, an aberration necessitated by the anomaly that is the modern world as a whole. The purpose of using the term is therefore to raise consciousness of the underlying differences between reality represented by this specific sense of the term "tradition" and everything that lacks a divine origin but arises from the merely human and, at times, the subhuman.[9]

If "traditional" refers to something that is still connected to its transcendent origin and can be traced back to it, "modern" refers to that which is detached from the Transcendent, from the immutable principles that govern everything in reality.[9][23] Modernism and modernity are thus the polar opposites of tradition, implying everything that is essentially human and, progressively, subhuman, as well as everything that is detached and disconnected from the Divine Source.[9]

References

Aslan 1998, p. 48.
Howard 2011, p. 103.
Liu 2000, p. 255.
Lanzetta 1996, p. 93.
Lumbard 2013, p. 178.
Lumbard 2013, pp. 178–179.
King 2000, p. 203.
Khoei & Arabshahi 2013, p. 401.
Lumbard 2013, p. 179.
Sayem 2019, p. 274.
Aslan 1998, p. 50.
Quinn 1997, p. 15.
Gangadean 2009, p. 138.
Howard 2011, p. 102.
Oldmeadow 2004, p. 186.
Quinn 1997, pp. 12–13.
Aymard & Laude 2004, p. 80.
Nasr 2005, p. 6.
Howard 2011, pp. 102–103.
Howard 2011, pp. 103–104.
Nasr 2006, p. 177.
Howard 2011, p. 104.
Lakhani 2010, p. 53.

Sources

Aslan, Adnan (1998). "Religion and Tradition". Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy: The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Routledge. ISBN 978-0700710256.
Aymard, J.B.; Laude, P. (2004). "Esoterism and Tradition". Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings. SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-6205-8.
Gangadean, A.K. (2009). "The Quest for the Universal Global Science". Meditations of Global First Philosophy: Quest for the Missing Grammar of Logos. SUNY series in Western Esoteric Traditions. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-7606-2.
Howard, D. (2011). Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview. Culture and Civilization in the Middle East. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-136-82027-4.
King, Sallie B (2000). "The Philosophia Perennis and the Religion of the World". In Hahn, Lewis Edwin; Auxier, Randall E.; Stone Jr., Lucian W. (eds.). The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Open Court. ISBN 978-0812694147.
Khoei, Ehsan Shakeri; Arabshahi, Zohreh (2013). "Tradition in Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Dariush Shayegan's Thought". International Research Journal of Applied and Basic Sciences. 7 (7): 398–404.
Lakhani, M.A. (2010). "Understanding Tradition". The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom. Library of perennial philosophy. World Wisdom. ISBN 978-1-935493-19-8.
Lanzetta, Beverly J. (1996). "The Mystical Basis of Panikkar's Thought". In Prabhu, J. (ed.). The Intercultural Challenge of Raimon Panikkar. Faith meets faith. Orbis Books. ISBN 978-1-57075-056-4.
Lumbard, Joseph E.B. (2013). "Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Tradition and Modernity". In Marshall, D. (ed.). Tradition and Modernity: Christian and Muslim Perspectives. Georgetown University Press. ISBN 978-1-58901-982-9.
Nasr, S.H. (2005). "Introducing the Writings of Frithjof Schuon". The Essential Frithjof Schuon. G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. World Wisdom. ISBN 978-0-941532-92-1.
Nasr, S. H. (2006). "Religious Art, Traditional Art, Sacred Art". In Nasr, Seyyed Hossein; O'Brien, Katherine (eds.). The Essential Sophia. Word Wisdom. ISBN 978-1933316109.
Liu, Shu-hsien (2000). "Reflections on Tradition and Modernity: A Response to Seyyed Hossein Nasr from a Neo-Confucian Perspective". In Hahn, Lewis Edwin; Auxier, Randall E.; Stone Jr., Lucian W. (eds.). The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Open Court. ISBN 978-0812694147.
Oldmeadow, Harry (2004). Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom. ISBN 978-094153257-0.
Sayem, Md. Abu (2019). "The Eco-Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr". Islamic Studies. 58 (2): 271–295. ISSN 2710-5326.
Quinn, W.W. (1997). "The Tradition". The Only Tradition. G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-3214-3.