If the intellectual elect comes one day to be constituted, the essential end which it will have to work for is the return of the West to a traditional civilization and we have the example of the Middle Ages … It would be a question, not of copying or reconstituting purely and simply what existed then, but of drawing inspiration from it for the adaptation made necessary… It can only be done by using both what the East has to offer and also whatever traditional elements remain in the West.

The superiority of Europeans over Asiatics is their trained ability to give reasons for what they believe—something of which the latter are wholly incapable … Europe was made Europe by reason in the schools; in the Middle Ages Europe was on the way to becoming a piece and an appendix of Asia again—by losing the scientific sense that it owed to the Greeks. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The civilization of the modern West has, among other pretensions, that of being eminently “scientific”. ~ Rene Guenon, East and West

Nothing can be clearer than this contrast between Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of the postmodern world, and Rene Guenon, the prophet of Tradition. Guenon calls the idols of modernity, viz. Science, Progress, Civilization, Right, Liberty, a sort of religion that replaced Tradition, but is better called a counter-religion. This faux religion originates the modern epoch. In Nietzsche’s words:

The anti-traditional spirit showed itself at once by the proclaiming of “free examination,” or, in other words, the absence, in the doctrinal order, of any principle higher than individual opinions. The inevitable result was intellectual anarchy; hence the indefinite multiplicity of religious and pseudo-religious sects, philosophic systems aiming above all at originality, and scientific theories as pretentious as they are ephemeral, in short, unbelievable chaos which is, however, dominated by a certain unity, there being beyond doubt a specifically modern outlook which is the source of it all, though this unity is altogether negative, since it is nothing more or less than an absence of principle, expressed by that indifference with regard to truth and error which ever since the 19^th century has been called “tolerance”.

Guenon mentions the irony that the apostles of tolerance, like all propagandists, are often the most intolerant men. Those who wished to overthrow all dogma have created new dogmas, which are really caricatures of dogma. We leave it to the reader to discern those dogmas, keeping in mind that a dogma is that which can never be doubted, whether or not it be true. Nietzsche’s specific complaint against the Eastern cast of mind is this:

Asia still does not know how to distinguish between truth and poetry, and is not conscious of whether its convictions are derived from personal observation and methodical thinking or from fantasies.

Guenon addresses the same point from the opposite end:

Westerners, who advertise so insolently on every occasion belief in their own superiority and in that of their science, are really very much beside the mark when they call eastern wisdom “arrogant,” on the grounds that is does not submit to the limitations that they are used to, and because they cannot allow what goes beyond these limitations.

Hence, Nietzsche’s praise of the scientific spirit comes at the cost of rejecting all that is not science, such as poetry or “fantasy”. Let us recall that fantasy is one of the five wits of the Medievals. Thus, a Dante becomes for him a piece of Asia in the West. Now Guenon does not deny it.

There is one fact which is incontestable: medieval Europe had from time to time, if not continuously, relations with the Orientals, and these relations had considerable effect in the realm of ideas; it is known, but perhaps not fully as yet, how much medieval Europe owed to the Arabs, who are the natural intermediaries between the West and the more distant parts of the East; and there was also direct contact with central Asia and even with China.

Not only does Guenon not deny it, but he encourages it, and not only encourages it, but deems it mandatory. He gives us our task, the mission of the future elect:

It is only an indirect assimilation of the eastern doctrines that could bring to birth the first elements of the future elect; we mean that the initiative would have to come from individuals who had developed themselves through their understanding of these doctrines, but without being too directly connected with the East, and on the contrary keeping in touch with everything valid that may still exist in the western civilization, and especially with the traces of traditional outlook that have managed to survive there, despite the modern outlook, chiefly under the form of religion.

All they can do is to expound their [Oriental] doctrines in a form more suited to the West, and to bring out the possibilities of agreement which their understanding of these doctrine still has revealed to them.