A Further Defence of the Perennial Philosophy
This article is a response to and commentary on a recent article by Jeremy Armiger entitled ‘To Say All Religions are the Same is Demeaning and Ridiculous’, and subtitled ‘The Danger of Religious Reductionism’. I don’t know whether this was intended as a response to a recent statement by the Pope in Singapore that all religions are paths to God, but Armiger’s timing is significant in that context.
The statement by the Pope has shocked some Christians, even those at the Vatican, who apparently have doctored the transcript of the talk in order to tone it down (see this article by Jonathan Poletti, who also explains that the Pope has been promoting this message since 2019).
This will not be the first time I’ve argued against this suggestion recently. A few weeks ago I responded here to an article by Matthew, entitled ‘Are All Religions Teaching the Same Truth?’, and subtitled ‘Not Really’. Matthew is a Christian, who presumably believes that his religion is superior in some way to the others. I’m not sure what Armiger’s position is, apart from his general interest in religion.
Here I don’t think I will be agreeing with the Pope, who argues that the various religions were all willed by God (!). I think it’s far more likely that religious traditions were created by humans, based on their experiences and their level of understanding. I will, on the other hand, be defending what is known as the Perennial Philosophy, otherwise known as Traditionalism, the idea that at their core all religions are teaching the same message — I would add that, if they aren’t, they should be.
The term Perennial Philosophy, although it had been coined before, was made famous in modern times by Aldous Huxley’s book of that name. Also significant are Kenneth Oldmeadow’s Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy, and A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom by Whitall N. Perry, a compilation of quotes he thinks relevant over 1000 pages long. One of the figures that Oldmeadow focuses on is Frithjof Schuon who has written The Transcendent Unity of Religions. This extensive literature suggests that Armiger’s claim (with the three simple slogans in his article) cannot be so easily dismissed.
It’s strange that he doesn’t say what the claimed common belief between religions is that he rejects, what it is that makes people say “deep down, every religion is the same”. Instead he lists the outward manifestations of the various religions, precisely what makes them appear different — the practices, rituals, beliefs about God etc. There may indeed be much “richness and diversity” there, but is that the actual core of these religions?
The Perennialist religions share a common cosmology, a hierarchical universe based on the idea of a Great Chain of Being, but I won’t focus on that here. The central idea is that the essential nature of human beings is divine but, having been incarnated into physical form, we lose touch with that and are therefore in a state of alienation. It is the purpose of spiritual practice to reconnect with our divine nature (which in Christianity is called the soul, in Hinduism atman, and in some esoteric traditions the monad), therefore to search for the divine within us. There may indeed be different roads towards this goal (for example in Hinduism there are the paths of action, devotion, knowledge, and meditation), but the goal remains the same. It is hard to understand why Armiger uses the word ‘dangerous’ to describe such an idea.
Traditions which subscribe to this idea, thus examples of the Perennial Philosophy, are: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, mystical or esoteric Christianity, Neo-Platonism (most notably the Enneads of Plotinus), and esoteric movements like Theosophy. (Taoism will be discussed below.)
A frequently used image to describe this process involves a great ocean, which symbolises the divine state of oneness, and smaller quantities of water — rivers, streams, drops. Thus the Sufi mystic Rumi wrote: “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop”. This expresses perfectly the idea that our ultimate nature is divine.
Using the same image, these three quotes from Perry’s book (there are many more there) describe the goal of the spiritual process:
- Richard of Saint-Victor: “The desirous soul no longer thirsts for God but into God, the pull of its desire draws it into the Infinite Sea”
- Sister Consolata: “Thou shalt disappear like a drop of water in the boundless ocean”
- Shabistari: “…dying to self, you will be freed from the spell of self. Then will your being, as a drop, fall into the ocean of the Eternal”.
Armiger asks: “In Taoism, what does a road leading to God even look like?” However, as this quote from the Tao Te Ching shows, Taoism is in line with the above idea: “To Tao all under heaven will come, as streams and torrents flow into a great river or sea”. Taoism also shares a similar cosmological viewpoint to the traditions of Perennialism (I discussed this in my earlier article), and other quotes from Taoism do make it into Perry’s Treasury of Traditional Wisdom.
Armiger also asks: “How can all roads lead to God when a major religion like Buddhism does not even believe in a God?” I hope he will forgive me for saying so, but this suggests to me that he doesn’t really understand the claim that he is trying to disprove. For the sake of the argument, let’s take it for granted that Buddhism does not believe in an anthropomorphic, personal, creator God who intervenes in history. However, its focus is upon a profound transformation of consciousness, a dissolution of the ego until it reconnects with what other traditions might call its divine source — the ocean as in the above quotes. Buddhism is therefore completely in accord with the central belief of the Perennial Philosophy, is therefore another road which leads to ‘God’. (I wrote more about Buddhism in my previous article.)
It all depends upon one’s understanding of the word God. The religions of the Perennial Philosophy conceive ‘God’ as the ultimate source of everything that exists, not a personal Creator. Paradoxically, this exists in two states, one of nothingness (Brahman in Hinduism, Ayin in Kabbalah), and one of complete fullness (Brahma and En Sof), thus the creative principle that some people call God, otherwise known as the One.
In Gnosticism both are called the Pleroma. Here is a modern example, the opening of Carl Jung’s Gnostic outpouring The Seven Sermons to the Dead: “I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness… Nothingness is both empty and full… This nothingness or fullness we name the Pleroma”.
One real difference between religions that I do agree exists is that the major ones have an outward exoteric version, alongside a deeper mystical or esoteric one. The latter is usually in accord with the Perennial Philosophy. Examples would be Judaism/Kabbalah, Islam/Sufism, and the early Catholic Church/Gnosticism.
The exoteric (outward) versions are often extremely hostile to the esoteric ones, and persecute them. Historically, Islamic mystics have been executed for claiming that they had obtained divine consciousness, misinterpreted as claiming that they were God. The Roman Catholic Church is the worst example, given the condemnation and burning of Gnostic texts, the massacre of the Cathars, and the persecution of heretics. Three well known examples are Giordano Bruno who was burnt at the stake, the mystic Meister Eckhart who was tried for heresy but apparently died before the verdict was received, and Jakob Boehme who was denounced as a heretic but escaped the ultimate penalty. Historically the Catholic Church clearly did not subscribe to the Perennial Philosophy. Perhaps the current Pope wants to take it in a different direction.
CHRISTIANITY and the PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY
I wrote about this at some length in the previous article. Here are a few more thoughts.
If Jesus was indeed the great teacher we believe him to be, then I assume he must have been a believer in the Perennial Philosophy, the Ancient Wisdom.
As I argued in my most recent article, there was a religious schism in the culture of that era. There was an ancient pre-exilic Israelite tradition derived from Moses, which became revised and downgraded in the post-exilic Judaism of Ezra. I believe Jesus, as he appears in the gospels, represented the ancient Israelite tradition, which may ultimately have been derived from Egyptian religion (Hermeticism, thus the Perennial Philosophy), given that “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7.22).
According to John’s Gospel (10.30), Jesus said “I and the Father are one”. Christians have interpreted this to mean that he was a one-off incarnation of the deity. A perhaps more likely interpretation would be that as a human he had achieved divine consciousness — had become enlightened, as Hindus or Buddhists might say.
It would seem that Paul, following his conversion, became a convert to the Perennial Philosophy. He says in Galatians (3.28): “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. In similar vein he writes in 1 Corinthians (12.12–13): “The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit”.
Paul seems to be clearly saying that he recognises the existence of the Oneness from which everything that exists comes into being, the Pleroma. Extraordinarily, presumably based upon his visions, he identifies the figure of the historical Jesus with this divine Oneness. (Statements like this are obviously the source of much Christian theology.) I interpret Paul as saying that no matter what role we may be playing down here in the material world, and how unfair that may sometimes seem, we are all ultimately an equal part of the One.
To my surprise, earlier this year in a radio interview I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury (the head of the Church in England) comment upon the Galatians quote, saying that it meant that “we are all equally loved by Jesus”. If that is what Paul meant, he presumably would have said so; this shows how lacking in understanding the exoteric religions can be.
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