A Blog for the study of Traditionalism and the Traditionalists
moderated by Mark Sedgwick
Against the Modern World is now available in Polish, as Przeciw nowoczesnemu światu. Tradycjonalizm i sekretna historia intelektualna XX wieku.
It is published by Instytut Myśli Politycznej in Warsaw, and sells for 45 zł. Available here.
The translation includes a short preface written by me for the Polish edition.
So far, so unremarkable. What was remarkable was the article made frequent use of references to Julius Evola to drive its message home, without any explanation of who Evola was, other than that “Julius Evola taught that decadence must be met with the sword, that the regression of the modern world is not to be negotiated with but to be crushed.”
Evola, we are told, “reminds us that true authority requires the destruction of that which defies hierarchy. That is precisely what the home ministry has done.” “Evola, the article concludes, “taught us that modernity must be resisted with transcendence. India is now fighting not merely for land or law but for Dharma. The forest has been cleansed with fire. The citadels of ideology have been breached. The Kali Yuga still lingers, but the hammer has struck.”
Kishan Kumar, the author of the article, evidently knows his Evola and appreciates Evola's message. Whether he refers to him without introduction because he thinks his readers will all know who he was, or whether he is the only BJP supporter who has ever heard of Evola, is unclear. There are no other references to him in Swarajya, so perhaps the latter.
Maybe a BJP expert will read this post and help out with a comment
Gilis was a leading French Traditionalist (of Belgian origin), an expert on Ibn Arabi, and a follower of Michel Valsan (1907-1974), the most important Traditionalist Sufi shaykh in France during the later twentieth century.
His first two books, published in 1960 and 1964, dealt with the Belgian Congo. His later books, of which there were many, dealt mostly with Islam, but he also wrote on other Traditionalist topics such as Free Masonry and on Guénon himself. His books on Islam included titles like Marie en Islam (Mary in Islam, 1990), La Doctrine initiatique du Pèlerinage (The Initiatic Doctrine of the Pilgrimage, 1994), and L'Intégrité islamique ni intégrisme, ni intégration (Islamic Integrity: Neither Fundamentalism nor Integration, 2011). Several were translated, most often into Italian. In addition, he published several translations of classic texts with notes and commentary, most notably a two-volume translation of Ibn Arabi’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, as Le livre des chatons des sagesses (1997). In addition to writing and translating, he served as Friday preacher in a Paris mosque.
An unsigned obituary on the website Conscience Soufie concluded:
Charles-André Gilis was… a combination of Ibn 'Arabî and Ibn Hazm, an eagle with a hieratic posture and a contemplative nature, who could swoop down on his prey at any moment like a marksman. Like everyone else, he had the qualities of his faults and the faults of his qualities. But it is up to believers to consider the greatness of a man by what he leaves behind, a legacy that is, in this case, essential for anyone who wishes to immerse themselves in the serious study of Ibn 'Arabi and Sufism in its speculative mode of expression.
Grant Havers, a professor of philosophy at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, has brought Julius Evola into the mainstream of political philosophy with a chapter on “Evola’s Critique of Machiavellianism” in a 2025 volume in the American series “Political Theory for Today.”
Havers draws mostly on Men Among the Ruins, briefly presenting Evola’s perspectives on “the meaning of the aristocratic mindset” before proceeding to his critiques of Machiavelli and of Machiavellian Bonapartism, the core of the article, and ending with a short section on the possibility of “a return to aristocratic politics amid the ruins of modernity.” Regarding Machiavelli he brings Evola into conversation with the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), regarding Bonapartism with the American philosopher James Burnham (1905-1987), and regarding a return to aristocratic politics, briefly, with the English politician Winston Churchill (1874-1965). Strauss, Burnham, and Churchill are all mainstream figures, though certainly on the political right. Evola is not normally found in such company.
Havers introduces Evola as an “Italian neo-pagan mystic” and notes that there was a “sympathy with certain features of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism.” Despite this, he proposes, Evola “articulates important and original insights into the self-destructive nature of modern democracy.” As he goes on to demonstrate, avoiding any reference to the esoteric, though he does use the terms “spirituality” and even “metaphysically.”
The chapter appears in a volume on Aristocratic Voices: Forgotten Arguments about Virtue, Authority, and Inequality (Lexington Books, 2025) edited by Richard Avramenko (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Ethan Alexander-Davey (Campbell University, NC), a follow-up on their earlier volume on Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times (Lexington Books, 2018). As they write, “In the 21st century, political debates appear to center on fundamental conflicts between ‘the people’ and ‘elites.’ Most of these discussions emphasize strategies to protect and empower the oppressed masses against a predatory ruling class. Much of classical political thought, however, was written from an aristocratic point of view: that is, it ascribed paramount importance to the question of elite formation.” Hence their two volumes, which look at figures from Tacitus, Hobbes, Burke, and Tocqueville, to Konstantin Leontiev, José Ortega y Gasset, Henry Adams, and Oswald Spengler. And now also Evola. A wider focus than his critique of Machiavellian Bonapartism might have been in order.
At first sight, Corbin and Guénon were very different types of people. Corbin was a scholar who spent his life within French academia, occupying several prestigious posts. Guénon was rejected by French academia, and spent his life outside it, often criticizing it. On the other hand, their paths did somehow cross, given the close relationship between Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Italian scholar Francesco Piraino has recently drawn our attention to their very similar contemporary impact: reading Corbin, like reading Guénon, is often important for the trajectories of French converts to Sufi Islam. The Traditionalist author Patrick Laude has written about Corbin together with Guénon and Schuon (see here).
Fakhoury’s volume helps make clear where Corbin and Guénon agreed and where they differed. Firstly, Corbin was not a self-distancing academic scholar. He was never just a historian of ideas, or even a philosopher in the normal sense. He engaged actively in the exploration of the human relationship with the transcendent, and was as interested in actual spiritual experience as in written attempts to explain it. Secondly, he was in many ways a perennialist, believing in an “Oriental” or “Iranian” “Hellenism” that included Zoroastrianism, Plato, Proclus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi—not as a succession of historical figures, but as ways of accessing truth. Thirdly, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was central to his thought, as was—to a lesser extent—initiation. Fourthly, he had a low opinion of the modern West, preferring Oriental Hellenism to “Latinism,” and seeing modernity as lamentably desacralized. Finally, at least towards the end of his life, he sought for surviving transmissions of what Guénon would have called the primordial tradition in ancient orders (the Order of St Jean of Jerusalem) and Freemasonry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s chapter on “Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple” in Fakhoury’s volume sheds much light on this quest.
And yet Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s. Even if Corbin was never just a scholar, he worked on original texts in their original languages with considerable scholarly rigor. When it came to perennialism, Corbin was interested in Christianity and Iranian Hellenism, while Guénon was interested in Hinduism and Arab Islam. Corbin was a Protestant, and Guénon abhorred Protestantism. Corbin valued Plato, and Guénon did not. Guénon’s perennialism derived from Theosophy, while Corbin’s (perennial) Hellenism derived from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). The esoteric/exoteric pair is hard to avoid if one looks in certain areas of Islam, and while Corbin’s esoteric was located primarily in what he famously termed the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginary” between the realm of the forms and the experiential world, Guénon’s esoteric was mostly in the teachings of the primordial tradition. For Guénon, anti-modernism was primary, but for Corbin it was secondary.
In the end, the two men were also of different generations. Most of Corbin’s (1903-1978) work was published after Guénon’s death in 1951. Corbin's crucial Sohravardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative was published in 1939, but—presumably because of the disruption caused by the Second World War—was not reviewed in Études traditionnelles until 1947. And even then it received only one (rather dismissive) paragraph, which can be read here.
