The Crisis of the Modern World (Collected Works of Rene Guenon)
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René Guénon was a French thinker who is often regarded as the founder of Traditionalism. He wrote "The crisis of the modern world" in 1927. It's his most accesible work, and arguably the only well known one. The book is rather short and should be considered an introduction to Guénon's philosophy, rather than a final statement of it.

Guénon was a dissident Catholic when he wrote "The crisis of the modern world". Later, he moved to Egypt and converted to Sunni Islam. Meanwhile, Traditionalism became a very heterogenous movement, evolving in all kinds of unexpected directions, many of whom Guénon would have disapproved of. (The story is told in Mark Sedgwick's scholarly study "Against the modern world".)

Being "modern", I find relating to Guénon's book difficult. He rejects virtually everything in the modern world: philosophy, science, democracy, social equality, individualism, nationalism and materialism. He criticizes modern Western religion, seeing it as shallow, materialistic or sentimentalist. German idealism isn't good either, and Theosophy is also in for a whipping. Guénon's rejection of modernity is very radical. Some conservatives long for the Holy Alliance or the ancien regime, others want to revive the spirit of the Renaissance or classical Greece, and still others simply want Ike and Jim Crow back. Guénon, on the other hand, rejects the Renaissance and also criticizes classical Greece and Rome. To him, the kind of philosophy that makes human reason paramount and hence rejects "tradition" is already on the slippery slope to modernity. In a sense, he is quite correct: it's difficult to imagine modern science without a prior development of philosophy, and this kind of philosophy did indeed start in ancient Greece.

Guénon is more positive towards the Middle Ages, but he places the beginning of the modern world in the 14th century rather than the late 15th or early 16th centuries. Modernity is older than both the Renaissance and the Reformation. Again, he has a certain point. In another book, he points to the dissolution of the Knights Templar as the decisive event. Despite their attack on the Templars, Guénon nevertheless regards the Catholic Church as the only traditional organization left in the Western world, and he hopes that it's medieval spirit can somehow be revived. (As already mentioned, he later abandoned this hope, and converted to Islam.)

However, Guénon's alternative isn't a simple return to some traditional religion. Rather, he believes in the existence of a primordial and secret spiritual tradition, which isn't identical to any of the established religions. Those who reject modernity should convert to a traditional religion and follow its precepts, but this is simply a matter of outer forms. The real message of Guénon is the secret doctrine supposedly underlying all religions, a doctrine known only to a small group of elect.

But what is this esoteric message? In "The crisis of the modern world", Guénon liberally uses Hindu terminology. He talks about the kali yuga, the blending of castes, the roles of the Brahmanas and the Kshatriyas, and so on. He mentions the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. However, he also incorporates ideas of a more uncertain provenance: legends of sunken or lost continents, ideas about frequent pre-columbian contacts with the New World, and something that sounds like conspiracy theory. Finally, he mentions ancient astrology and alchemy, two ideas presumably derived from the Hermetic tradition. Thus, Guénon isn't simply calling for a return to pre-modernity or conservative religion. His Traditionalism turns out to be a blend of many different ideas, some of whom are suspiciously similar to those of Theosophy, a new religious movement Guénon vehemently opposes!

"The crisis of the modern world" isn't simply an attack on modernity. It's also an attempt to create what is, in effect, a new religion. But what could be more modern than that? Ironically, René Guénon might have been more modern than he imagined.

To a modern (!) reader, Guénon's book also sounds hopelessly naïve and idealist. He attacks the constant agitation and strife of the modern world. Point taken. But there was plenty of agitation and strife during the Middle Ages as well, not to mention the ancient world, and it's difficult to imagine that India was any better in this regard than the rest. Guénon also hopes that East and West will understand each other and come to live in peace, if only the West could return to its traditional culture. But Muslims and Christians constantly fought each other during the Middle Ages. Yet, the book never mentions the crusades. It's difficult to imagine that a Catholic Europe and a revived Muslim world would enter into ecumenical negotiations.

Perhaps a Traditionalist will respond, that this observation is correct but beside the point, since we have lived in the kali yuga (the dark age) for about 6000 years. But this leads to another problem: there were indeed peaceful civilizations before this time, such as the Indus Valley Civilization, and perhaps Minoan Crete, and many Neolithic settlements. However, these societies, with their strangely egalitarian traits and/or worship of nature or the Goddess, doesn't seem to conform to the "traditional data" expounded by Guénon.

Somehow, it feels as if René Guénon might have been following the wrong tradition...

No doubt a prophetic genius, one has to wonder ,though, if Guenon was not also a bit of a fanatical lunatic. His assertions about the tremendous flaws in Western civilization are etched in such clear-cut shades of black and white that they leave no room for argument or compromise. In short, these are revelations that brook no opposition. However, I must admit I felt a powerful sympathy with his description of how unsane our modern world has become. But I am very cautious and skeptical about his proposal of a return to a more "traditional" culture run by an intellectual elite. This sounds like a recipe for another totalitarian system of rule. As always, who is to decide which are the "elite" worthy to rule? Bracing and stimulating, this work seems inspired, but one might wonder by whom or what.


Just how this Elect would be elected, and how they would effect their beneficial influence toward the coming catastrophe is not specified in this book. I think it might likely be supposed that they would be elected by a suprahuman agency, and that their mitigating powers would be derived from a special wisdom gained through some sort of initiation or other rite. Guenon's conception was that this Elect would work behind the scenes as guardians to protect the mass of mankind as best they could. The idea as proposed by Guenon had nothing to do with hoarding worldly power for the purpose of domination.

As for my remark about Guenon being a bit of a fanatical lunatic, undoubtedly that is how he would be viewed by many in the modern West. But trying to see this objectively, how is his quest different than that of any other devotee to a faith who takes it literally and means to pursue it with everything he has? It is that his brand of faith is clothed in more exotic forms than we are used to. As to who or what inspired him, it was probably his experiences of the deeper levels of Catholicism, Freemasonry, Hinduism, Taoism, and Islam, as well as his belief in cosmic cycles and a suprahuman wisdom transmitted by ritual to humans from a non-human source.

In sum, it appears I treated the subject too lightly and even misread it somewhat. I hope this emendation does it better justice. It is an interesting, even fascinating, book, though quite vague about the details of the processes which would be practiced by the Elect. I guess that is understandable, given that only the Elect would have full understanding.

Having said all that, I would like to insert some personal opinion here at the end. My worldview differs greatly from the views in this book. I would not embrace this doctrine myself, and would encourage anyone to look at it as objectively as possible before becoming deeply involved in it. The allure of attaining a special wisdom which is not known to the masses is very attractive, but my innate feeling is that the pursuit might exact a price in other areas of life. I, too, see modern culture as a big disgusting mess, but I doubt if we can get out of the mess by going backward. It seems to me we can only try to work through the process of becoming truly civilized. That is just my opinion, and I could be wrong, of course. Guenon did not have much use for personal opinion. Each person must pursue his/her path as they see best.>

In this short book, the supremely intelligent Rene Guenon manages to crystallize some of the most fundamental ailments of modern society. He is neither afraid to examine from a traditionalist viewpoint all recent intellectual "developments" in science along with the callow, bigoted perceptions of modern philosophy, nor does he shy away from criticizing democracy and the notions of socio-political "progress," or the diluted and comical nature of modern religion. Consistency and holistic understanding are Guenon's hallmarks, and he demonstrates it well with this succinct volume.

This work is genuine treasure for all those capable of fully comprehending reality and naturally find themselves alone and at odds with contemporary civilization. Serves as a good introduction to the general orientations of authentic traditionalist thought. Guenon expands on this work significantly in its companion volume, The Reign of Quantity.

The scholarly world is never too short of what is in vogue as `critiques of modernity' that another addition to this stock would have been redundant. Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World however, is not simply `another' of this but is distinguished by its profound wisdom, transcending conventional approaches that either diagnosed the symptoms and not the real disease or carried from an exclusively `philosophical' viewpoint, oblivious to the fact that `philosophy' itself is among modernity's offspring. Guénon's theme is sophia perennis, or primordial Wisdom, which seeks to resurrect the sacred metaphysics that lies at the root of the world's major religions.

Guénon begins with the premise that the modern world as we know it corresponds exactly to the period of Kali Yuga (or Dark Age) in Hindu cosmology, similar to the Iron Age in Western traditional doctrine, a time when the forces of matter reign supreme and spirituality has been thoroughly eclipsed. In fact, history itself is a gradual process of declining spirituality and "progressive materialization", so that at the last phase of the human cycle (or the darkest of the Dark Age), mankind shall witness the abundance of material prosperity as has never been witnessed before, while simultaneously impoverished spiritually and utterly divorced from true intellectuality and hence truth itself.

Intellectually, this decline is especially evident in science and philosophy. Philosophy - `love' of wisdom - became wisdom unto itself; `physics' - the science of `nature' in its totality - became a science that deals with only a portion of nature; astrology degraded into astronomy; alchemy degenerated into chemistry; and all that was once meaningful and bound to truth transcending the domain of matter and the world of sensible experience is reduced to bare facts bereft of truth, meaning and purpose. It is no wonder that the modern man today feels alienated from the world, from each other and from himself. The ancient sciences were invariably bound to metaphysical principles found in the world's great religions, made possible by the eminently religious and theocentric character of the earlier people. Truth for them is one, just as God is One. The different orders and aspects of Reality are but reflections of this same, single and universal truth. Whichever angle the truth is approached, contradictions only appear at the surface so that `specialization' would eventually lead to the convergence of the various disciplines, which explains why the ancients were so adept at mastering several different branches of knowledge at the same time, insofar as mastery of certain basic laws underlying all of reality permits their application to many different domains.

Modernity by contrast, is built upon the spirit of opposition to religion (think of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Enlightenment) and therefore hostility to metaphysics and truth. Once the ultimate Truth is denied, the ground is cleared for the manufacture of many different "truths", tending naturally towards relativism and nihilism that are so prevalent in today's world. Indeed, relativism is the logical outcome of rationalism, this in turn being the result of humanism and individualism, which of course, is the "determining cause of the present decline of the West." Descartes' rationalism, instead of raising man to transcend himself towards truth, seeks to drag truth down to the "purely relative and human faculty" of rational thought. The mental outlook that made this possible is materialism, "a conception according to which nothing else exists but matter and its derivatives." Now this is significant even symbolically, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, hence the source of strife and conflict.

This decadence even manifests itself in the social order - from the separation of religion from the state, the triumph of mediocrity over the wise (democracy), the spread of `mass education' (which compromises the uniqueness of each individual) to the rise of the cult of `originality' in the intellectual domain, for whom it is better to create a new error than repeat an old truth. All this are but manifestations of the same catastrophe - neglect of spirituality, hence the loss of unity.

Materialism is also tied to Western domination. The East has been traditionally religious, but in the face of (material) challenge and encroachment by the modern West, is now compelled to adopt the materialistic worldview to compete in this profane realm and in this regard, its religious past is certainly no guide. Where else would they seek guidance and `light', if not from the very civilization in which materialism organically springed forth? This is in fact how the present age fits neatly into that last phase of Kali Yuga as Guénon understands it, namely that the darkness of materialism will ultimately bring the whole world into its dominion (long before `globalization' and `end of history' became common lingo), marking finally the end of an era, i.e. the end of a human cycle, or Manvantara, where `the wheel stops turning.' This is when chaos, conflict and strife will erupt as never before, a time known in Christianity as the reign of the Antichrist and in Islam as the era of Dajjal.

There is a way out - for the establishment of a spiritual elite to lead the masses out of this darkness. This elite necessarily has to operate covertly, like a secret puppeteer when others could not see the strings, for the masses have become deeply entrenched in their materialism, which continuously creates in them more artificial needs for materiality than it can satisfy. In the West, the only institution capable of bringing about this change is the Catholic Church, which alone is in possession of the sacred traditional doctrine of Christianity. Yet even then, Guenon remains skeptical and calls for the Western world to summon aid from what modicum of true spirituality is left in the East, unadulterated by the `modernized' outlook that is fast making headways throughout the Orient.

This book show us the roots of our modern world. This book is for those that, unsatisfied with the course os the modern world and it?s oppressive materialism, are looking for convincing explanations, out of the common political and economical vision. The author examines the deep factors that conducted our world to it?s present unbalance, demonstrating that, since the Middle Age, the Occident went further and further away, with increasing velocity, from the principles that ruled all the humanity until that momment. Principles that presume an hierarchy of values, from the highest (spiritual) ones to the basic (material) ones; principles that are within the essence of the traditional civilizations, that harmonize man and nature. We find examples of traditional civilizations with the north-american native tribes (as the Hopi and Sioux, among others); the Tibet, before the chinese invasion; the medieval Japan... Ren? Gu?non (1886-1951), with this book that is at once masterly and accessible, don?t give us illusions about the future of our civilization. Instead he provides us with new and wide horizons, with tools that enables us to evaluate and stand up to the great challenges of the modern world crisis. It's the best way to make a first contact with Ren? Gu?non and the traditional view.

Luiz Pontual (irget@reneguenon.net), director of Ren? Gu?non's Institute, April 9, 1999. See our site irget@reneguenon.net and buy our book at Amazon.com