The Middle Ages are so called because it represents the era between Antiquity and modernity. We can also regard it as the Traditional society between the Ancient traditional world and the coming Traditional society of the future. That the Middle Ages represent Tradition is beyond dispute. Now, there may be some contemporary Europeans (or their descendants) who do not feel part of that tradition and identify with some alleged northern tradition that has no relationship to either the Ancient or Medieval worlds. That, however, does not change the facts; furthermore, we accept that Northern tradition as an integral part of the one Western, or Hyperborean, tradition, which has taken several forms.

To make clear the reasons, we shall rely on the wisdom of Rene Guenon. The reader can then proceed as he likes, whether to seek to renovate and renew the Medieval tradition, or to use it as a model for the next great Tradition. In the end, they may very well amount to the same thing. Let us begin at the beginning.

Christianity originally had both in its rites and doctrine an essentially esoteric and thus ‘initiatic’ character… the earliest Christian church would have had to be a closed or reserved organization.

So Guenon comments on the impenetrable obscurity that surrounds the origins and early stages of Christianity, which points to a deliberate design. Why, then, did the Church become open and exoteric? He explains:

If we consider the state of the Western world in the age in question, it is easy to see that, had Christianity not ‘descended’ into the exoteric domain, this world would soon have been deprived of all tradition, for the traditions that had existed until that time, especially the Greco-Roman tradition, which naturally was predominant, had reached an advanced state of degeneration heralding the imminent end of their cycle of existence.

The conversion of Constantine implied, by a sort of official act of imperial authority, a recognition of the fact that the Greco-Roman tradition had thenceforth to be considered extinct.

Nevertheless, the initiatic tradition with Christendom continued. Back to Guenon:

From Pythagoras to Virgil, and from Virgil to Dante, the ‘chain of the tradition’ was undoubtedly unbroken on Italian soil.

This continuity is not unknown. The monk Dom Odo Casel recognized a continuity between the rites of the pagan mysteries and those of the early Church. Guenon admits the possibility of both

1. Spontaneous initiation
2. Exceptional cases in which a virtual initiation that had remained attached to the sacraments might have become effective

He recognizes the certain writings from the Middle Ages were “manifestly initiatic in character”. He mentions the Order of the Templars and the Chivalric Orders, for example, and the Fedeli d’Amore, which included Dante as well as several other Italian poets, whose origins can be traced back to the earlier Sicilian poets and the Troubadours. Guenon points out that it was a requirement that initiates write love poetry, which is really an allusion to the Divine Sophia. This is also found among the Sufis such as Attar, Hafiz, or Rumi. At a certain point, the trail goes cold, ending with the more secretive Rose Cross. This does not mean necessarily the total end of initiatic rites in the West, just that they went deep underground.

Nevertheless, the Eastern Church did maintain a valid initiation in Hesychasm, whose “initiatic character is indisputable”, according to Guenon. Guenon had always recognized, even in an early book such as his Hinduism, that there was a valid metaphysic in the Alexandrian fathers in the East and in neoplatonism in the West. As Gornahoor has pointed out, the French follower of Guenon, Albert Gleizes recognized in Plotinus, Augustine, and Boethius, the founders of Western Christendom.

Hesychasm teaches a technique of invocation which is called in Greek, mneme, that is, remembering, on which any reader of Gornahoor can recall our emphasis. So, we can observe a closed and secret Church that became exoteric, while retaining an initiatic tradition. That then went underground. Now should we really be surprised that the esoteric teaching should now make itself visible? We have mentioned the “coincidence” of two specific events. In Mouravieff, there is a claim to an initiation on Mount Athos itself, along with an instruction to make its teaching public. In Valentin Tomberg, again beginning in the East, we witness a sudden conversion to the Roman Church. The two books, different in tone, but similar in depth, reveal an esoteric teaching. Won’t it suffice to repeat what Tomberg writes about remembering and evocation.

Memory is the magic, in the subjective domain, which effects the evocation of things from the past… The present remembrance is the result of a magical operation … where one has succeeded in evoking from the black void of forgetfulness a living image from the past.

Nothing is ever lost. If we can only learn to remember, the mysteries of the past will be revealed again. As the Nordic adage states, the divine sleeps in the rock: Forgetting is to remembering as sleeping is to waking.

Back to the earlier point, why was it necessary to forget? It was to re-establish the traditional arrangement of spiritual authority and temporal power, Christ and Caesar, the Pope and the Emperor, Jesus as Priest and King. Jesus as prophet, represented in the Tarot as the unnamed Hermit, and the Church of John, had to be submerged, even to the point that Evola regarded its revival as an Utopian dream. Yet there was an erstwhile monk who, a century ago, was aware of it and expected its return.

The more important reason for the exoterism of the Church was so it could provide a path for salvation. This may mean nothing to many people in our day, but perhaps the need to meditate on the Four Last Things to be convinced otherwise. For those who insist on going deeper, for whom ‘Paradise is still nothing but a prison’, the answer is less clear.

They say, when the student is ready the master appears. So to trust in that is to make oneself ready — by study, prayer, meditation, spiritual exercises, and right action — and trust in initiation will come, whether by ordinary or extraordinary means.

Some may chose a valid initiation elsewhere, for example, by a Tibetan lama or a through a Hindu mantra. It is a mistake to believe, as apparently some readers of Gornahoor do, and many others that I have read about, that such an initiation commits one to a specific path. Quite to the contrary and for a Westerner it is almost always an error and hindrance. Guenon is quite clear about this and explains it in detail.

The question was whether Dante was Catholic or Albigensian. For others it seems rather to be whether he was Christian or pagan. For our part, we do not think that such a point of view is necessary, for true esoterism is something completely different from outward religion, and if it has some relationship with it, this can only be insofar as it finds a symbolic mode of expression in religious forms. Moreover, it matters little whether these forms be of this or that religion, since what is involved is the essential doctrinal unity concealed beneath their apparent diversity. This is why in the past initiates participated in all forms of worship, following the customs established in whatever country they happened to be. [my emphasis]

This is why one should be suspicious of those who make a big show of donning Buddhist or Hindu garb in a Western country while reciting foreign texts. A true initiate will follow the customs of his home, recognizing legitimate spiritual authority and temporal power, honoring his ancestors, participating in its rites, and building solidarity with his kith and kin. He can accomplish more by explicating the symbols and dogmas of his own Tradition rather than by introducing an alien vocabulary. The mark of understanding is to be able to rephrase things in one’s own words rather than in repeating someone else’s wisdom.

All quotes are from Insights into Christian Esoterism and The Esoterism of Dante by Rene Guenon unless otherwise indicated.