Three Generations of Argentine Traditionalists

Mark Sedgwick

Note
This is an English version of “Tres generaciones de tradicionalistas
argentinos,” published in Gnosis y tradiciones sagradas : Ensayos y
epistolario en torno de la obra de Francisco García Bazán, ed.
Bernardo Nante and Leandro Pinkler (Buenos Aires: El Hilo de Ariadna,
2015), pp. 238-44.

René Guénon became known in Argentina relatively early, in the 1920s.

His work first came to the attention of Catholic intellectuals participating
in the Cursos de Cultura Católica (courses on Catholic culture, CCC).
These courses had been established in 1921 or 1922 by scholars unhappy
with the “positivism and liberalism” then dominant at the University of
Buenos Aires,1 initially under the direction of Atilio Dell'Oro Maini
(1895-1974), then president of the League of Catholic Youth, later a
professor of law and finally minister of education,2 in which capacity he
passed legislation in 1956 allowing the CCC to became the Catholic
University of Argentina.3 The CCC group was in some ways the
Argentine equivalent of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael
with which the young Mircea Eliade was at that time associated, except
that it was purely intellectual–it had no associated mass movement. A
further echo of Europe was the CCC’s admiration for Jacques Maritain,
once Guénon’s sponsor at the Institut catholique in Paris. Maritain
visited Argentina in 1936, lecturing to the CCC.4 Guénon most interested
two members of the CCC, César Pico (1895-1966) and José María de
Estrada (1915-97). Their interest was shared outside the capital by Fray
Mario Pinto and Rodolfo Martínez Espinosa, a professor at the
provincial Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, who corresponded with
Guénon in the 1930s.5
Pico, though originally a physician, became a professor of sociology
at the University of La Plata in the 1940s. He was best known for his
participation after 1927 in La Nueva República and Criterio, two
publications which promoted what has been called “rightist
traditionalism” and inspired General José Uriburu,6 who took power in a

1 “Cursos de cultura católica: los inicios.”

Available www.geocities.com/tomistas/c_c_c.htm. January 17, 2008.
2 Biographical notes, available www.geocities.com/tomistas/delloro.htm.
3 “Historia de Nuestra Universidad,” available www.uca.edu.ar/esp/sec-
universidad/page.php?subsec=institucional&page=n-universidad/historia.
4 Derisi, “Una evocacion de los Cursos de Cultura Católica.” Available
200.16.86.50/digital/DERISI/DERISI-articulos/derisi318-318.pdf
5 Francisco García Bazán, “La presencia de René Guénon en Mircea Eliade y Carl

Schmitt,” unpublished conference paper. Available

www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1856/Bazan.htm.
6 Allan Metz, “Gustavo Juan Franceschi and the Jews: The Overcoming of Prejudice

by an Argentine Prelate,” Church History 62, no. 2. (June 1993), pp. 209-10. For Criterio,
biographical note at www.geocities.com/tomistas/pico.htm.
2 Mark Sedgwick

military coup in 1930. Both newspapers stood against the Radical

president, Hipólito Yrigoyen, whom Uriburu deposed, and drew
inspiration primarily from this opposition and from rightist Catholic
currents in Europe, notably José Antonio Primo de Rivera (the Spanish
founder of the Falange) and Charles Maurras (the French founder of
Action Française).7 As well as dealing with then current political and
ideological issues, the newspapers also dealt with more fundamental
questions, the context in which Pico applied a Guénonian understanding
of modernity (though, it seems, without mentioning Guénon by name).8
He wrote on the decadence of occidental civilization, the unfortunate
replacement of spiritual values by material ones, and the need for a
return to tradition–not the Hindu tradition, which would presumably
have been too much for his ultra-Catholic readers and fellow-
contributors, but that of medieval Europe.9 Pico also had some influence
on some of his fellow intellectuals, and is for example credited with the
conversion to “rightist traditionalism” of Ernesto Palacio,10 a talented
writer who was the most notable figure in the group.
Pico ceased participation in these newspapers in 1930,11 but drew
attention with an open letter to Maritain, published in 1937, in which he
argued for an alliance between fascism and the Catholic Church.12
The first translation of Guénon into Spanish, of The Introduction to the
Study of the Hindu Doctrines, was published in 1945, translated by Pico
according to some,13 and by Rafael Cabrera, who has not been identified,
according to library catalogs. This translation was read soon after its
publication by a young philosopher, Armando Asti Vera, who–after
some initial resistance–was converted by its arguments.14 The second
generation of Traditionalism in Argentina begins with Asti Vera, during
the Peronist period. In the first generation, with Pico, Traditionalism had
been in some sense associated with national politics. In the second and
subsequent generations, it became purely intellectual.
Asti Vera initially attempted to introduce Guénon to the Argentine
academic milieu with articles such as “El concepto de inversión en el
pensamiento” (published in the Argentine philosophical journal Episteme
in 1947) and “Teoría y práctica de la realización metafísica” (published in
another Argentine scholarly journal, Logos, in 1952). He was disappointed

7 Fernando J. Devoto Nacionalismo, fascismo y tradicionalismo en la Argentina moderna

(Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 2002), pp. 187-94.

8 Devoto, at least makes no mention of Guénon, despite a close reading of both

periodicals.
9 Devoto, pp. 198-99. Devoto gives the title of one of Pico’s articles as “El problema

de Oriente y Occidente” (La Nueva República, December 25, 1927), but does not expand on
the Oriental element. I have been unable to consult the original text.
10 Devoto, p. 186.
11 Devoto, p. 290.
12 Tzvi Medin, “Ortega y Gasset en la Argentina: la tercera es la vencida,” Estudios

Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe 2, no. 2 (July-December 1991). Available

www.tau.ac.il/eial/II_2/medin.htm.
13 Francisco García Bazán, interview, Tübingen, July 2007. Pico’s “Señal de los

tiempos” was published in a short-lived journal, Arké in 1953.

14 Armando Asti Vera, introduction to the translation of Simbolos Fundamentales de la

Ciencia Sagrada (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1969), p. 6.

 Three Generations of Argentine Traditionalists 3

by the lack of positive reaction,15 which the experience of Traditionalists

elsewhere might have led us to expect, but which he interpreted as a
“conspiracy of silence.”16 Asti Vera’s more standard philosophical works
(notably his George Boole, precursor de la lógica simbólica, and his Metodología de
la investigación, 1968) were better received, and he finally became chair of
the department of philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, in
which capacity he established a Center for the Study of Oriental
Religions and Philosophies, where Sanskrit was taught,17 as well as
Arabic, taught informally by Osvaldo Machado Mouret.18 Mouret was
the former Argentine ambassador to Cairo19 who had known Guénon
there, and who reported that Guénon did not speak classical Arabic.20
Asti Vera, who taught Traditionalist works in his courses, passed his
interest to a later generation of Argentine philosophers, most notably
Francisco García Bazán (b 1940), the key figure in the third generation
of Argentine Traditionalism. García Bazán studied at the University of
Buenos Aires, was dismissed for his political views, and was later
appointed chair of the department of philosophy at the private
Universidad Argentina JF Kennedy. Interest in Traditionalism has,
according to García Bazán, now moved from the public to the private
universities.21
García Bazán worked on gnosticism, and published a number of
Traditionalist books both in Argentina and in Spain, where Traditionalist
works began to be printed after the end of the Franco regime.22 He also
established links with French academic Traditionalists during the late
1960s. Although he formed a small and informal group of other
Argentine academics interested in Traditionalism, no spiritual group was
ever established. The masonic route was considered, but dismissed given
the strongly secular nature of Argentine masonry. The convinced
Catholicism of the group excluded Islamic possibilities, and academic
skepticism made other initiatic groups suspect.23
By the end of the twentieth century, interest in Traditionalism in
Argentina had evidently become somewhat specialist. In August 2007,
for example, a series of conferences held at the Argentine Library of
Congress as a “Guénonian week” to mark the centenary of the birth of

15 His article on inversion was dismissed in The Journal of Symbolic Logic as “a rambling

essay in analogy and contrast” by W. V. Quine. Review, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 16, no.
3. (Sept 1951), p. 214.
16 Asti Vera, introduction, pp. 6-7.
17 Juan Miguel de Mora, “Sanskrit Studies in Latin America,” Journal of the American

Oriental Society 103 (1983), pp. 615.

18 Damián Blas Vives and Martín LoCoco, “Entrevista a José Luis Moure: Un filólogo

en la corte de Saladino,” SEDA: Revista de Estudios Asiáticos 4 (Jan 2007), available

www.revistaseda.com.ar/seda_04/entrevista.htm.
19 Identified as Hector Madero by Chacornac.
20 García Bazán, interview.
21 García Bazán, interview.
22 Gnosis. La esencia del dualismo gnóstico (1971); Neoplatonismo y Vedanta (1982), René

Guenon y el ocaso de la metafísica (1990); Aspectos inusuales de lo sagrado (2000); Presencia y ausencia
de lo sagrado en oriente y occidente (2001); La gnosis eterna: antología de textos gnósticos (2003); La
concepción pitagórica del número y sus proyectos (2005).
23 García Bazán, interview.
4 Mark Sedgwick

Eliade attracted eight speakers24 and, to judge from photographs, a fairly

small audience. One of the speakers, Marcos Ghio, was Argentina’s main
proponent of Evolian Traditionalism.
Traditionalism also interested Silvestre Byrón, an experimental film
maker who established the studio Filmoteca (1969-76) and promoted “an
ethic and an aesthetic based in optionality as an escape from the modern
world’s structure of thought and domination, towards a space free of
bureaucracy and centralization.” Filmoteca’s “metaphysical realism” was
reflected in two movies, “Iniciación teatral” (Theatrical initiation, 1971)
and “Arte y rebelión contra el mundo moderno” (Art and rebellion
against the modern world, 1980).25
The role of Traditionalism in Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s
merits some further investigation. Argentine Traditionalism since then is
notable principally as a rare example of Traditionalism flourishing, to a
limited extent, in an academic milieu–a phenomenon otherwise found
only in Iran and Russia, and to a limited extent in Italy.

24 Program at nyermia.blogspot.com/2007/08/semana-guenoniana-de-buenos-aires-

2007.html.
25 Silvestre Byrón, “Los itinerarios del misterio,” 7 July 2002. www.nettime.org/Lists-

Archives/nettime-lat-0207/msg00015.html.