Sazetak

Abstract:

In the modern world, religion and tradition were under the formidable pressure of contemporary conceptions of what man and society should be, which resulted with the penetration of certain non-religious ideas about the meaning of human society into the very centers of official religious organizations. This is particularly true in the case of belief in the traditional and ancient character of national culture, which is promoted by official religious communities in the Balkans, and which gives the impression that national culture is a natural extension of a religious tradition – that it is ancient and eternal, and binding on believers, just like faith itself. From this character of the antiquity and eternity of nation, some have even drawn a conclusion that nationalism is fully compatible with the doctrine of the Traditionalist school which is known by its profound critics of the modernity and its exposition od the traditional metaphysics. In this paper, we will not discuss the theories of various authors who believe that their, rather sinister, ideas about how a traditional society of today should be organized, are based on the doctrine of the Traditionalist school, but we will try to show that the ideas of "nation and national culture" are built at the very metaphysical antipodes of that what the main traditionalist authors called Tradition and not only that these ideas cannot be effectively founded on the doctrine of this school, but also, in the original traditionalist perspective, they can only be seen as one very pernicious modern deviation.

Key words: nation, national culture, democracy, tradition, quantity, individuation, uniformity