A few days ago, we said that we intended to post Guénon's reviews of
Evola's books. We shall start with Guénon's review of 'Revolt against
the Modern World'.

"In this new work, the author contrasts traditional and modern
civilisation, the former as possessing a transcendent and essentially
hierarchical character, the latter as being based on purely human and
contingent elements ; after that, he describes the successive phases
of spiritual decadence which have led from the traditional world to
the modern one. We have some reservations about various points made
by him : in the first place, in relation to the original and unique
source of the sacerdotal and royal powers, he shows a very marked
tendency to place all his emphasis on the royal power, to the
exclusion of the sacerdotal ; and in the second place, when he
distinguishes between two types of tradition which he ascribes
respectively to the North and the South, the second of these terms
seems to us somewhat inappropriate, even if he does not intend it in
a strictly 'geographical' sense, since it appears to refer above all
to the Atlantean, which corresponds to the West rather than the
South. We also fear that he sees in primitive Buddhism something
other than what was really there, since he addresses an elegy to it,
although, from a traditional point of view, it contains hardly
anything of value ; contrarily, he deprecates Pythagoreanism to a
quite unjustified extent ; and we could bring up various other
considerations of the same sort. None of this prevents us from
recognising, as is appropriate, the merit and interest of the work
taken as a whole, or of drawing it especially to the attention of all
who concern themselves with the 'crisis of the modern world', and who
think, as we do, that the only efficacious method of remedy is a
return to the traditional spirit, in the absence of which nothing
truly 'constructive' can be undertaken to any benefit."

Here we see three main criticisms. The first one will not come as a
surprise to those who already know the work of both authors : it
concerns the hierarchic relationship between spiritual authority and
temporal power. According to Guénon, Evola inverted it, asserting -
in the Aryan context - a superiority of royal, virile and solar
spirituality over sacerdotal and lunar spirituality. As Giovanni
Monastra explains in 'La Recezione internazionale di Rivolta contro
il mondo moderno' (1) : "Evola asserted that both the king and the
priest, each deriving from the splitting of a unique original figure,
retained a direct connection with the sphere of the sacred, the
former through action, the latter through contemplation : he wrote,
as a matter of fact, that, as the Bhagavad-gita puts it, 'action
leads to the heavens and to liberation' (2), since each has an
intrinsic metaphysic dimension in the context of traditional and
hierarchic realities. By underlining the predisposition of Westerners
for the sphere of action, Evola sought to restore to the foreground a
metaphysic of action, which constituted an autonomous, orthodox path
towards transcendence practicable in a non-oriental context (3).
Besides, it cannot be denied, quite apart from the examples recalled
by Evola in 'Revolt against the Modern World', that, in the most
ancient Upanishads, the Brhad-aranyaka and the Chandogya, there are
dialogues in which a wise man of the warlike caste teaches brahmans
sapiental sciences of the highest rank (for instance, the doctrine of
atman)." Actually, we dare to ask whether this might not represent a
degenerative stage, both of solar spirituality and of lunar
spirituality, in the sense that the doctrinal field, no matter how
traditional its content, is not the one in which a Kshatriya is
supposed to be superior to a Brahman, and that the speculative field
is not the one in which he expresses himself most in accordance with
his true inner nature.

The second point of divergence concerns Pythagoreanism. Guénon
considered it "a restoration in a new form of Orphism" ('La Crise du
monde moderne') and as a perfectly orthodox traditional doctrine ;
while, to Evola, it appeared as a dubious spiritual phenomenon.
Guénon, who, as previously mentioned, acknowledged that he didn't
know anything about the Graeco-Roman world, saw in
Pythagoreanism "obvious links with the Delphic cult of the
Hyperborean Apollo", to the point of considering it as " a continuous
filiation of one of the most ancient traditions of humanity" ('La
Crise du monde moderne'), and the "readaptation" of previous
traditional expressions to a period of spiritual crisis, that of the
sixth century BC. ('Formes traditionnelles et cycles cosmiques').

The third point of divergence concerns Buddhism. In his early
writings, Guénon criticised the Westerners for having given too great
an importance to Buddhism, which, he said, was a "deviation and an
anomaly" with respect to orthodox Hindu thought. Later, however, he
was persuaded by Pallis and Coomaraswamy that he had placed excessive
trust in the so-called "Orientalists", and following them, had
confused the original Buddhism with a Buddhism distorted by some
heterodox schools ; in other words, Guénon now ascribed the mistakes
he had made in his earlier assessments to people he anyway criticised
harshly. He explained his "mistakes" in the second edition
of 'Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues', in which
the chapter on Buddhism is altered from that in the first edition.
Paul Sérant, comparing the two versions, noticed that the changes
were, in the last analysis, rather superficial ; basically, Guénon
never ceased to consider Buddhism as a sentimental form of Hinduism.
Guénon came to think that the mistakes he had made in his original
assessment of Buddhism applied to altered forms of Buddhism, and not
to the original Buddhism. To him, these altered forms of Buddhism
correspond to Hînayâna, while Mahâyâna is the authentic Buddhism
('Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues', second
edition). As Evola shows in a masterly analysis in 'The Doctrine of
Awakening', however, both represent in fact expressions of a series
of alterations of the real 'original Buddhism' - Aryan Buddhism.

Notes

1. See www.estovest.net

2. See 'Autorità spirituale e potere temporale', in 'Introduzione
alla Magia', Ed. Mediterranee, Rome, 1971, vol. III, p.357.

3. And, we would add, especially in a non-Oriental context.