What is Tradition (and Quaker Tradition), Anyway?

A fascinating interview, with Mark Sedgwick, on the philosophical roots of "Traditionalism": Rene Guénon's legacy today. Sedgwick has a website at http://www.traditionalists.org/.

What Sedgwick calls "Traditionalism" is not what I call "traditionalism," which is why I find it so fascinating. How do we connect with our past and how do we think of that connection? Sedwick's "Traditionalism" is a very Twentieth Century intellectual mysticism that sought some eternal truth located elsewhere:

In the nineteenth century, at a time when progressive intellectuals had lost faith in Christianity's ability to deliver religious and spiritual truth, the West discovered non-Western religious writings.

The interviewer parses out two types of Traditionalism which Guénon inspired:

there seems to be today two trends among Traditionalists: those who feel encouraged by their reading of Guénonto look for a firm anchoring in a specific religious tradition, and those who seem to consider Tradition as explained by Guénon as a kind of "supra-religion"...

I've met many "supra-religionists" (though in my own philosophical worldview, I've been defining them as the "ultra-liberals"): those who believe that all religions are the ultimately the same, don't sweat the details of religious peculiarities or duty and proudly hyphenate their religious life. (Modern Quakerism is full of hypenated Catholic-, Buddhist-, Jewish- and Native-American- Quakers and an argument can be made that many Christian-Quakers are hypenated mishmashes as well.)

I appreciate the impulse that both appreciates and tolerates other religions, but the results are often "me"-centric and superficial. It's often only the language that's really changing. A few years ago someone put up a series of signs on the lawn at the FGC Gathering, reading "Jesus Saves," "Budda Saves," "Allah Saves," as if the particularly Christian concept of salvation could just be casually extended to any religion. Not long afterwards someone asked me to look up an quote that appeared in The Little Book of Peace, a project associated with the American Friends Service Committee. Attributed only to "Islam," the quote sounded particularly inspired by Christ's Sermon on the Mount. With some dogged persistance, I discovered it was a translation by a turn of the century British intellectual who wrote in the hope of bringing his brand of Islam to upper-class English society. I eventually found a modern academic translation, which had no Christian echos and was not the kind of pithy peace quote the AFSC would want to put on their website.

The superficiality continues: I've heard people try to make a basic Christian point using hopelessly stretched Buddhist metaphors. Indeed, much of the reason I started calling myself Christian was that so much of my own understanding and worldview can be best expressed in that language.

I'm reminded of the people I meet who grew up in a little dinky Midwestern town but now crave to be seen as urban sophisticates and world travelers. In today's world, it's certainly possible to construct an internationalist identity that includes one's variegated past (the Palestinian taxi driver in New York who grew up in London), but I'm talking about an identity built on amnesia. The Midwestern flee'ers and the "supra-religionists" refuse to examine their own influences and seek affirmation in a syncretism of their own making.

Perhaps I'm so passionate about this these days because I've been redefining myself over the last few years. I've become more particular, more peculiar. I've moved from the Philadelphia area to a small town you've probably never heard of, I've acknowledged the Christian basis of many of my understandings, and I've embraced Quaker pecularisms in dress and theology.

This makes my relationship with other Quakers more difficult. I find it hard to take seriously people who are Quaker more or less by chance--because they were born into it or because it's a welcoming community--rather than by convincement. Relgious communities are more than theological constructs, certainly, and not everyone should go out and get a PhD in religion (egads!). But there should be a curiosity about the peculiarities and particularities of our faith and practice. We don't need to agree, necessarily, but we do need to be open and curious. This means getting off the cloud of supra-religiosity and getting oneself dirty working the soil of history and culture.