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The other founding figures of the Traditionalist School were Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese scholar and the Swiss Mystic Frithjof Schuon. To these were added over time such imposing figures as Titus Burckhardt , Martin Lings , Gai Eaton and Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Other major figures of the twentieth century have been profoundly influenced by the school, including T.S. Eliot, the Romanian anthropologist Mircea Eliade and the Italian esotericist and political thinker Julius Evola.
The fundamental tenets of this school or philosophy may be stated as follows:
In addition to this, the Western world, unlike other cultures, has lost its connection to the Primordial Tradition. This took place first in the Classical era, was rectified by Christianity, which re-introduced a modified form of the Primordial Tradition, but the severance began again at the time of the renaissance (this is a somewhat truncated account. The reader is referred to Guénon's Crisis of the Modern World for a fuller one).
The Aristasian theorist, Alice Lucy Trent has elaborated the theory further by an application of the Hindu science of the three Gunas to the process of the Western history of the past millennium, accounting for both the descent into "modernism" at the time of the renaissance and the "post-modernist cultural collapse" of the twentieth century. (Vide The Feminine Universe, by A.L. Trent).
In accordance with the two preceding positions, Traditionalists accord a high value to the intellectual activities of the pre-modern world and non-Western societies, and a good deal of their work lies in the sciences of metaphysics and symbolism, as well as the discussion and elucidation of the various spiritual traditions. Where they venture into such realms as social criticism it is clearly from a Traditionalist perspective which turns the Progressist/Evolutionist assumptions of modernist theorists (both "left" and "right"), and of post-modernists alike, on their heads.
A recent history of the Traditionalist School and its influence in various different spheres and countries has been written by Dr. Mark Sedgewick under the title Against the Modern World.
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