Q: How perennialist is A Perennial Digression?
A: As with anything, it’s best to define our terms. In the broadest sense, “Perennialism”—the idea that underlying all religions and philosophies there is a common core of experience, knowledge, and wisdom about the unity of God, world, and self that is simply received and transmitted in culturally diverse forms—is just a corollary of philosophies like Neoplatonism and Advaita that want to suggest a common existential, noetic, and psychic unity to reality. If reality itself is genuinely One, then it stands to reason that the epiphanic and theophanic encounters with reality that inspire religions and philosophies would all really be experiences of the same thing, and this would also account for the real parallels or points of shared teaching, metaphysically and ethically, that we find when we do comparative work. The term and the corresponding idea first appears in Agostino Steuco’s De perenni philosophia, a piece of Renaissance Neoplatonist Christian writing that makes one of the first explicit iterations of this argument. It was this assumption that guided the architects of modern traditionalism: Aldous Huxley, whose The Perennial Philosophy (1945) was massively influential on many 20th century religious seekers, and the book’s continued success is largely a consequence of his simple, winsome style and reference to primary sources. Huxley is just one of many representing a number of different schools and movements in the 19th and 20th centuries: in no particular order, Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Madame Blavatsky, Huston Smith, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, René Guenon, A.K. Coomaraswamy, Alan Watts, and more can be added to this list. These thinkers, it should be said, do not have identical intellectual commitments to “perennialism”: each articulates their own concept of the philosophia perennis that works from its own premises and usually with one or two (often Eastern) traditions as its anchors. And so the first part of my answer to the question at hand is that neither I nor this Substack are committed to perennialism qua perennialism, nor do I regard all perennialist thinkers as equally authoritative or useful. The title of the dispatch is, as I have noted a few times on the YouTube channel, a running joke about my penchant for going off topic. I want nothing to do, for example, with the backwards social views that Guénon and Evola took perennialism to entail. I am not a “traditionalist” in their sense (or in the sense of the perennialism of King Charles III), if by that one means an abiding sense that the current epoch is somehow more spiritually corrupt than previous ones on the ground of certain social and political changes, especially in the direction of liberation for previously socially oppressed or repressed groups. Surely, ours is a spiritually corrupt epoch, but for reasons of rampant greed and abuse of power, not because of the freedoms more people than ever before now enjoy in most of the world.
The second part is to distinguish perennialism as a philosophical judgment about comparative religion from a method of comparative work. In a nutshell, I think that in the former mode, perennialism is both necessary and true, but it is obviously false if one tries to demonstrate it in the latter sense. That is to say: there are real differences in the cults, myths, and philosophies of individual traditions, which are often humanly irreconcilable. Perennialism cannot change that, but it can offer a transcendent horizon in which to conceptualize how those traditions might still all have access to the truth of reality despite their differences. Perennialism is best understood, in other words, as a hypothesis of final nonduality or unity which alone can make sense of present pluralism, not as a reading of the real, present content of comparative religions or always of mystical experiences.
This would have been a hard pill to swallow for popularizers like Huxley or Watts, both of whom insisted that when one simply clears away creed and commitment one can find the same fundamental experience everywhere, often represented by the mahavakya tat tvam asi, “Thou art that.” The point is not that nonduality between self, world, and God is not really the final truth of reality or the height of mystical experience—I happen to believe it is both, and to think this unavoidably logical—but that brushing aside distinctions can blind us to the more specific things that religious thinkers and mystics alike are trying to say, which may or may not attain to this height. It is obviously not true, for example, that Buddhists are generally trying to advance a nondualism of the sort that Advaitins are: one who does not believe in a self (anatman) and/or who asserts that all things are empty of essential content cannot very easily confess tat tvam asi. A Christian for whom nondualism, if it is in view, is filtered through the person of Christ—the tropos hyparxeōs of the Son, manifest in the world as the humiliated and exalted Jesus, is the metaphysical locus of the cosmos in God and God in the cosmos—cannot really expect agreement from Jews or Muslims, even in principle, given that the Trinitarian and Incarnational logic of this vision is rooted in the specificity of the encounter with Jesus and the response of faith to the apostolic kerygma about him. If there is a unity between such traditions, it will have to be one that is constructed by comparison of their actual beliefs and spiritual goals, in which case the contingency of all their constructions will have to be admitted, even if one is being privileged as the interpretive key to the others. A helpful parallel to this dilemma might be from the world of linguistics and secondary language acquisition: it is now widely acknowledged that the best way to learn a language, even classical languages like Latin and Greek, is viva voce, “with living voice,” and through full immersion in hearing, reading, writing, and speaking that language. In that process, it should become clear to the learner that, for instance, oppidum does not mean “town”; it signifies the reality that in English is also signified by “town.” This is why something is genuinely lost (but also something gained!) in every act of translation. Languages are self-contained worlds, punctuated by a thousand doors to one another; one can visit any one of them, but can only really naturalize by actually coming to speak, think, even dream in them. So too with religions: the only way to really understand them is from the inside, believing them if one can, at least understanding the way they shape the minds of their adherents if not. Perennialism is a better universal translator when it claims to be the space between these worlds, so to speak, than when it claims to accurately describe the inner content of each. But even so, its own assumptions are always necessarily one of the linguistic/religious worlds themselves, with its own contingent points of view at work; it, too, intends to signify a reality its own language cannot contain.
Third, then, a responsible perennialism has to deal not just with the particularities of the religious traditions it seeks to encompass but also with the very nature of human knowing and reality’s intelligibility. What are we doing when we conceptualize and name things? What are we doing when we try to conceptualize and name ultimate things—the self, the world, God? Do our words and names correspond exactly to the things we seek to represent as they really are in themselves?
This dilemma is apparent as early as Plato’s Cratylus, which involves a debate over exactly this issue, of whether names are ontological or merely conventional. Socrates in that dialogue appears to take a middle ground: names are conventional, but they are rooted in the real forms we perceive in the things we name. Carelessness about this distinction is the substance of the Nicene case against Arius and his arguably more important successor, Eunomius: Eunomius makes the mistake of confusing God with his own ennoia, or “concept” of God, and in assuming that the names he applies to God—some of them not even scriptural!—are cataphatically descriptive of the divine essence. Instead, so argues St. Gregory Nyssen, while the ennoiai are born from what we can conceptualize of God, divine infinity and simplicity mean that all of our abstracted divine attributes are always subject to apophatic review or qualification. And so, quite apart from the fact that Eunomius’ centralization of the ennoia of God as agennetos, “unbegotten” or “ungenerated,” as the ultimate truth of God grates against the problems this idea makes for the God-Christ and therefore God-world relationship, it is also, more basically, an epistemological misstep. So, too, there is a kind of perennialism which can easily confuse the terms of one’s lens with the thing itself. If APD is to be thought of as perennialist, it is ultimately a kind of apophatic perennialism I embrace: seeing as I do the whole of reality proceeding from the One God as an intelligible, psychic, and sensible manifestation of infinite being, consciousness, and bliss, I find it can only be the case that all religions are accessing the same fundamental divine, sophianic, and cosmic thresholds, albeit perceiving and articulating those thresholds in often incompatible ways, including with perennialist language itself.
So, no traditionalism, appreciation of real difference at the level of the contingent, and of linguistic, epistemic, and even gnostic pluralism as regards access to ultimate reality. I might also add that, as a Christian, I myself am committed to a particular kind of perennialism that perennialists and ordinary religious practitioners alike are likely to find disagreeable: namely, an identification of the Divine Nous or Logos within whom subsists the entire noetic creation with his descent as Jesus Christ, whose ascent fills all things with his incarnate mystery. That is to say, perennialism is for me at least a consequence of good Christology as much as it is a corollary of Neoplatonic or Vedantic metaphysics. For the Christian, as St. Maximos teaches (and as Jordan Daniel Wood has rightly demonstrated in his recently released book), Christ the Logos subsists in and as the logos of every creature, just as the Spirit is the true pneuma breathing forth the rational soul into every being and the cosmos as a whole. There is nothing then to finally encounter, on a Christian read of reality, than Christ. This caveat exemplifies the previous one, for a bhaktic Hindu perennialism would center another god or avatar, perhaps Krishna, while Judaism or Islam would posit their own traditions as the crescendo of ethical monotheism, and Buddhism would see at best “skillful means” on the path to enlightenment. That my specifically Christian perennialism must coexist with other specific perennialisms does not depreciate its value: it simply means that like all genuine religion and philosophy, my perennialist inclination is a deeply personal response to the mystery of things as I’ve encountered and learned to name it. That I cannot demonstrate by objective standards the premises of my own outlook puts me in no better or worse a position than anyone else who works from a tradition (so, everyone, since everyone is epistemically dependent on mediation of some kind), and the notion that I must demonstrate the superiority of a Christian perennialism over its alternatives can only stem from a kind of arrogance (mine or someone else’s). I am not trying to get around or behind anyone’s religion, let alone my own, in engaging in perennialist kinds of thinking; I am trying to “look along the beam,” to use an expression of Lewis’, and see as far as I’m able to where the light is coming from.
Is this justifiably still perennialism? Yes, but one hopes, a chastened, more humble perennialism, more attuned to the academic and lived specifics of individual religions, more open to silence in the face of the ultimate, able to operate within and from a specific tradition as much as through and beyond one. It is a perennialism carefully observant of the distinctions between cult (bhakti and karma), myth and scripture, philosophy and mysticism (gnosis, jnana), as each having their own limits and possibilities, their own closures and openings onto participation in the sacred and receptive dialogue with the other. As a Christian, I do not worship other gods, and I do not worship idols; these things are so ingrained into my cultic and religious psyche that even should I acknowledge at the level of scripture and philosophy that these practices are more complicated than their moralized polemic makes them appear, for me to do so would constitute a genuine betrayal of the divine as I particularly know it. Likewise, Pinchas Lapide could acknowledge that Jesus probably was raised from the dead and that he was clearly therefore a deified prophet like Moses or Elijah; but to become a Christian would have meant an existential betrayal to his inherited identity so grave as to be unthinkable for him. There are some among us who can engage in practiced multiple religious belonging e with ease; in a way, this has been my own practice among Christian sects, as I earnestly feel myself to be Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican at heart, and feel in my bones the genuine call to the communion of saints around the eucharistic mensa that precedes and encompasses all three of them roundabout. No amount of philosophical attraction to or appreciation of any other tradition, no degree of mystical love for other religions, could ever quite erase that in me. Were I to go elsewhere, some part of me would forever be unassimilated. No matter how many other myths and scriptural texts I genuinely love—and there are many—there is something unchosen, given, and irrevocable about the imaginal control the biblical tradition exercises over my own psyche, something proper to beginning there in my ongoing search for truth that I will not find elsewhere. Perennialism that ignores the incommunicable bond of the soul to its virtue of religion in the culturally familiar form of the particular life it does so within is not getting at the ultimate, really, because the ultimate and infinite do not ignore the particular. God, in being everyone’s and everything’s God, indeed, in being everyone and everything and more, does not fail to be my God, or to be me.
We are I am
Very well written. I agree wholeheartedly with you, as I think we share much the same journey and viewpoint (though I definitely lack your education!). Just as you say, though I find it easy to acknowledge that, say, Vishnu, Krishna, Shiva, and Ganesh are God as He appears beyond my tradition, I cannot worship them even though intellectually I know it is not idolatrous - it would still be a betrayal of my bhaktic experience with Christ.