The writings and thoughts of the Perennialists of the last
Century, in particular Rene Guenon, Julius Evola and Frithjof Schuon, seem
accurately to diagnose much that is pathological in Modern and Post-Modern
society. We have an increasingly
dispersed and disintegrated world, in which the profane science of the
particular rather than the metaphysical universal is our focus, Perennialism identifies
our progressive disengagement from metaphysical truth as the cause of our decline. This seems convincing. Furthermore Perennialism does much to
challenge a simplistic positivism that assumes an inevitable Progress towards
something unidentified but assumed to be better.
Only on its own materialistic and individualistic terms have
we seen the positivist goal of Progress being achieved. By any normal and more humane perspective
this is surely a story of decomposition and disintegration. Science has made leaps and bounds in its analysis
of the world of becoming, thereby luring away human focus from the world of
Being. As a consequence men have become
slaves of the technology that they created and evermore attentive to the transitory
world of meaningless becoming, meaningless when without the metaphysical context
of Being. We are now on the cusp it
seems of a dark era of trans-humanism.
The advances trumpeted by the Progressives, such as
feminism, equality, the open borders causing mingling of peoples and nations,
trans-rights, consumer choice – all are only advances from within the
Progressive perspective, which gives no account of Being or Telos for
Mankind. On the other hand, the account
given by Guenon and others of a progressive detachment from the metaphysical
that had given meaning to the world of becoming is a very
compelling alternative perspective.
In many ways we can learn from the school of Sophia Perennis,
but nonetheless in important ways there are fundamental problems with their
outlook. Perhaps in the most profound
sense there is something Manichean, an unspoken hostility to Creation, that is
the major concern. As much as we can
understand the Perennialist Golden Age as a way of speaking about Eden, we must
also realise that the narrative of continuous decline, while matching some
understanding of Christ’s teaching that faith would not be found on the earth
and that the AntiChrist would reign in the End Times, also omits the central
and ultimate meaning of the Incarnation.
If the Edenic Golden-Age were better than the postlapsarian condition of
Man, it is surpassed by the Incarnation, which reunited God and Man in a new
way. For the Perennialist the
Incarnation is in the era of the Dark Age and that era continues towards the
Kali Yuga notwithstanding.
Furthermore, just as God is willing to be comingled with the
temporal world, so the world as God’s creation is, in a fundamental way,
good. And through the Incarnation the
world of becoming is reunited with the world of Being, in a specific and new
way.
In a schematic way, for the Perennialist, the Incarnation is
one manifestation of a general trend found in all of the world religions. For Christians the Logos, universal and divine,
becomes specific in time and space, albeit not limited because divine, as the miracles
demonstrate. For the Perennialist, reliant on the
mysteries of a universal religion (however respectful of tradition to avoid the
shallowness of theosophy) the Incarnation is one specific example of many such
manifestations. In that sense the
Perennialist doctrine inevitably falls into Gnosticism. The outward and exoteric practices of each
traditional world religion are contingent upon a hidden and esoteric mystery. This is not acceptable from the perspective
of the Church. Christ was incarnate once
and only once in First Century Judaea, He called simple fishermen, not the sophisticated
and esoteric wise ones. There were no
hidden mysteries to be accessed. The
mysteries of the Church – the liturgy, baptism, marriage, ordination – are potentially
open to all, not through gnostic and secret wisdom, but through faith and love.
We can understand the cyclical story of a decline to the end
of the age, but the Trinity reigns from ages to ages. Thus the Perennialist belief in cyclical time
is not true. Instead there is only one
pattern that culminates in the ultimate event of the Second Coming.
The problem with Perennialism is that it relativises Christ,
the Second Person of the Trinity. Indeed
the personal nature of the Trinitarian Godhead is not accepted. Buddhism, Islam and Paganism are equally
manifestations of the same Truth in the Traditionalist’s eyes. Beyond the personal manifestations is a
divine that is impersonal – more like the Platonic “One”. We thus see again that Perennialism is a
continuation of pagan religion without any acknowledgement of the cosmic and ultimate
event of the Incarnation.
Now it is of course true that Western Christianity has
fallen and that Guenon is right in much of his specific criticism of Western
Christianity. Nonetheless the modernisation
of Christianity in the West is a decline from the true form of Christianity, as
Guenon himself asserts. The trouble is
that Guenon goes too far in asserting there is a truth beyond
Christianity. The conventionalisation of
Western Christianity to the temporal values of the world does not mean that the
Church itself is corrupted by the spirit of disintegration – for the gates of
Hell will not prevail against it. (In
this context it is more helpful to speak of the Church as specifically
embodying the true Tradition, in a vertical sense, rather than “Christianity”
in all its various denominations).
Guenon was simply looking in the wrong place for the
Church. As was his wont to look
East, he should have looked more closely at the Eastern Church, which as he
himself acknowledged was the truly Traditional Church. Unfortunately Guenon went further in seeking
some mysterious pagan truth beyond all traditional religion, while asserting
only traditional religions manifested this deeper mystery.
In the West we saw the philosophy of nominalism that
detached Western Christians from the universal and eternal. This is indeed where the problem lay and
Western Christianity can rightly be singled out as a culprit for the decline
into what Traditionalists would consider the final stages of the Kali
Yuga. This nominalism was only another
stage in a process of thought that went as far back as the addition of the
Filioque to the Creed. The Filioque being a step towards the idea of
created grace, detaching the West from the transcendental. William of Ockham’s theories were almost an
inevitable development after the Filioque, moving us further and further away
from participation in the transcendent and towards a focus on the temporal in
its mechanical and broken-down state – the spirit of profane science as Guenon
would see it.
Now it is true, as expressed famously by Schuon, that the
Traditionalist School is not relativist and that is of course highly in its
favour. The problem is not relativism, because
it holds to a higher mystery lying behind the authenticity of the traditional practices
of the major faiths (which to its credit it defends from liberal
relativisation). The problem is that
higher mystery is really something pagan.
It is placing something esoteric above the Trinitarian God of three
Persons, hypostases that manifest the energy within which we may
participate. It treats the teaching of
the Church in a schematic way as simply one manifestation of many. Christ is one manifestation of the Word, not
the ultimate manifestation of God in the flesh, so that flesh might be redeemed
and transformed.
In this sense Traditionalism is akin to the old mystery
cults, Neoplatonism, the ideas underpinning freemasonry – all of which are
inimical to the Church. Furthermore, its
is akin to the Gnosticism of the non-canonical gospels, such as that of Thomas
and Mary Magdalene. These writings were
Gnostic and not Christian.
There are of course advantages in engaging with
Traditionalism. It effectively refutes
the Positivist and Materialist idea of inevitable Progress. It points out the error of nominalism in the
West by emphasising the metaphysical Transcendent. In every case where it contributes something
though, it goes too far. It is an
over-correction. It ends up denying that
the world of the New Testament is a fundamental improvement upon the Old
Covenant. It also places so much
emphasis on the immaterial as to paint the material as somehow irrevocably
fallen.
The Incarnation is the answer to the Perennialist. It is evidence that the universal and the particular
meet, that the temporal has been pierced by the eternal, that the metaphysical
and the physical become one, that matter, never originally evil, is redeemed,
that the universal does not abolish the particular in some form of
Nirvana.
This is the heart of the matter: divine love is the solution. This is not the sentimental statement of a
belief that there is no sin or fallen-ness, no need for change in us. It is instead the point made by Jonathan Pageau
that love is where the universal does not dissolve the particular. Where this happens is in the event of the
Incarnation and behind the Incarnation the idea of the relationship of Three
Persons in the Godhead, not an impersonal “One” as in Neoplatonism. In reaction to nominalism, a corrosive heresy
in the West, Traditionalism overcompensates for the first error. It is therefore devoid of love in the fullest
sense. For that reason its advocates
have been somewhat cold towards their fellow humans, as can be found particularly
in the work of Evola, but it is also latent in the work of all the
Traditionalists. For the Traditionalists,
like the Muslims, there is a greater emphasis on the power of God, rather than
His love. Like the Buddhists, there is
no personal God, but something eternal that is of greater power than the
personal. This means that the
dissolution of the personal is acceptable and not problematic.
For Christians God is not an abstraction that can be manifested
symbolically by various personal divinities.
He is three Persons in One and the second of those three divine Persons
became incarnate once in a specific place and time. The metaphysical Tradition is only manifested
vertically into the one Church through the third Person of the Holy Spirit. God is not so distant and abstract that he
dissolves the irrelevant person in a higher level of transcendental
existence. On the contrary, through love
He grants that very transcendental divine existence to us as persons, because
we are infinitely precious in His eyes.
The human being is the icon of Triune God. “God became Man that men might become gods”.
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