Tradition (perennialism)

In perennial philosophy, tradition means divinely ordained truths or principles revealed or unveiled to mankind, and refers to their implications and applications in different areas of human life and thought. Traditionalists employ the term to refer to immutable principles—the sophia perennis or primordial wisdom—that are rooted in the Transcendent, as opposed to the term "modern," or "modernity," which is divorced and disconnected from the reality of God. The term "tradition" is also used synonymously with revelation, and it encompasses all forms of philosophy, art, and culture that are influenced by it.

Etymology

Etymologically, the term tradition refers to the transmission of knowledge, practice, skills, laws, forms, and a variety of other oral and written aspects. For Nasr, tradition is analogous to a "living presence" that leaves its imprint but is irreducible to that imprint. 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.

Concept

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. 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".

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.

— 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".

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".

...[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.

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Md. Abu Sayem, The Eco-Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2019

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. 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". 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, Guenon claims, is only "an epithet" for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it includes the sub-disciplines of theology and mysticism.

Frithjof Schuon, following in Guenon's footsteps, 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, Schoun'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. 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. 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.

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.

According to Howard, the task of defining Tradition ultimately falls to Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Tradition and modernity

Nasr and other "traditionists" refers 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.

If "traditional" refers to something that is still connected to its "Transcendent Origin" and can be traced back to it, "modern" is identical with "secular," and refers to that which is detached from the Transcendent, from the immutable principles that govern everything in reality. 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.

See also

• Scientia sacra
• Resacralization of knowledge

Sources

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Further reading

• 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.
• Aziz, Taimur; Nasr, Seyyed Hossein (2017). "On Tradition, Metaphysics, and Modernity". The Harvard Review of Philosophy. Philosophy Documentation Center. 24: 63–70. doi:10.5840/harvardreview2017241. ISSN 1062-6239.
• Diaz, Marta Dominguez (2014). "Traditionalism". Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Boston, MA: Springer US. pp. 1803–1807. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_703. ISBN 978-1-4614-6085-5.
• Jome, S. Mahdi Emam; Talebi, Zahra (2011). "Tradition and Traditionalism from the Viewpoint of Frithjof Schuon and Dr. Nasr". Comparative Theology. 3 (7): 37–56.
• Keeble, Brian (2000). "Tradition – the radical option?" (PDF). Sacred Web. 6: 15–22.
• Lakhani, M.A. (2010a). "What is Tradition?". The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom. Library of perennial philosophy. World Wisdom. ISBN 978-1-935493-19-8.
• Nejad, Seyed Mehdi Sadati; Ghamarian, Nahid (2017). "Analysis of the Concept of Tradition From Perspective of Iranian Thinkers: Dariush Shaygan and Seyyed Hossein Nasr". Political Quarterly. 47 (2): 393–410.