At the Corner of Religious Studies, Classics, and Theology
A Perennial Digression is an online magazine dedicated to comparative religion, philosophy, and cultures, ancient and modern, and how the human being and the world together reveal the God from whom they proceed and to which they return.
My bhakti, or specific religious point of view, is that of a liberal Catholic with Anglican and Orthodox background, graduate education in biblical studies and classics, and lifelong love affairs with many other faith traditions, especially Judaism and Hinduism. I write about religion from this point of view, sometimes happily, sometimes not. I write mainly for inquirers and wrestlers, thinkers and feelers, those seeing visions and dreaming dreams.
What’s With the Title?
A Perennial Digression is a play on words. It is, on the one hand, a joke about my penchant for going off topic (and for not shutting up). On the other hand, it also identifies something about my own jñāna, or philosophical point of view, as a perennialist. I haven’t always been comfortable openly identifying that way, so it’s worth clarifying what I mean.
Perennialism is a family of philosophies. With some perennialisms I have no sympathy: especially those that trade in regressive social and political views, anti-modern screeds, and fascistic civilizational projects. I’m a fairly lefty, modern, democratic-egalitarian kind of guy, and I don’t think that the ancients solved all of humanity’s deepest questions about life, even if I do think they retain an important role as guides.
My specific kind of perennialism is very much in the tradition of the Neoplatonists, Christian mystics, Sufis, Vedantins, and 20th century mystics. Embracing a metaphysical monism, in which I believe God is the source and summit of being, mind, and life, I also embrace an irreducibly pluralistic view of the meaning of the created world and the human experience, that celebrates the infinite, changing diversity of creation as the self-expression of God. As a scholar of religion and antiquity, I employ critical and comparative methods that value close understanding of people, practices, and texts, texts, contexts, and subtexts, and the conversations between them as fruitful sources of meaning about that revelation. I think that to do all the human things—living, learning, loving, literature, art, history, science, philosophy, theology, etc.—is to participate in this divine mystery, because humans are a microcosm of that macrocosmic divine revelation. And so embracing human diversity brings us closer to God.
For me, perennialism means not that all religions and philosophies teach the same thing, but that all human experience is apocalyptic, revelatory of the divine. And so, the specific cultures that humans form, including religions, all specialize in some real vision of the divine. The perennialist outlook I espouse encourages us to synthesize and syncretize between these perspectives, to acknowledge the possibility of multiple points of view being true at once, and in different ways.
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Caveat Lector
Any and all views expressed here are mine, and all views so expressed are either my own or those of my guests, and are in no way affiliated with any institution that I have belonged to past or present by day. Should they cause offense, my hope is that the reader, not unlike the audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will count them as “[n]o more yielding but a dream” (MSND V.1.419) or, in this case, a digression.
