The Perennial Ideology

Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools. --Dávila

As often as not the title comes to me before the post. This one is apparently in reference to the perennial philosophy (and religion), the school of thought to which folks like Schuon, Guenon, and Cooomaraswamy belong. For Schuon,

Strictly speaking, there is but one sole philosophy, the Sophia Perennis; it is also -- envisaged in its integrality -- the only religion.

The latter is "the primordial, universal and underlying religion," which comes down to "discernment between the Real and the illusory, or between the Permanent and the impermanent," the practice of which involves an "attachment to the Permanent or to the Real."

Now, the Permanent and the Real are precisely what postmodernism denies, or in other words, it affirms sophistry, Gnosticism, and post-Christian neo-barbarism. And here we are. 

Schuon would say that an orthodox religion represents a more or less adequate expression of this a priori and universal one. 

I don't disagree -- after all, there is only one Cosmos and one human nature. But what is the the content of this perennial religion? For Schuon, Vedanta is the most adequate expression of it, whereas I am a Trinitarian man, and both can't be true, at least not without some tweaking. Recall Augustine's crack that

that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.

One way or another, religion conveys an implicit metaphysic that is more or less adequate to the full range of reality. For example, we recently published a post on The Metaphysics of Jesus, which claimed that

one should not be a Christian for any other reason than its truth. Or at least Christianity should be truer than any alternative -- meaning that it should simultaneously explain more than any other metaphysic on offer, without unexplaining anything important.

For us, a Trinitarian metaphysic accounts for a lot of things that the non-Trinitarian must yada yada over, in particular, relation, which turns out to be irreducible to anything less. 

Conversely, a radical monist framework is static, immutable, impersonal, and unrelated. As we've suggested before, this is a Greek import that cannot be easily reconciled with a Trinitarian metaphysic.

For Schuon, the first principle is Beyond-Being. But Guess What? It is actually related to Being. He would say that Being is an emanation of Beyond-Being, but we say the Relation between them is the indispensable Thing.

If we're in an adventurous mood, we might even say that Father and Son is a way of speaking of Beyond-Being and Being, respectively -- or generative Source and engendered Word, Origination and Procession, Begetter and Begotten. This originating Source never stops speaking the Word it has always spoken, which speaks to their eternal relation. 

God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.

From, through, and begotten are all relations, which is why we say that ultimate reality is neither substance nor relation, but substance-in-relation. Am I wrong?

But the title of this post is The Perennial Ideology, so let's deal with that. The first thing that occurs to me is Genesis 3 All Over again, or, in the words of the Aphorist,

The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error.

Yesterday we mentioned Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which puts some flesh on this bony assertion. Where Dávila is a man of few words, Chesterton is a man of many, although liberally sprinkled with aphoristic nuggets such as

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.

As mentioned in the previous post,  

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

We also alluded to Gödel's Theorems, which prove that a logical system can be consistent or complete, but not both. Similarly, Chesterton writes of how   

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.

However, 

his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.

 Along these lines,

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.... 

the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way (emphasis mine).

Put another way, 

The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.... He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.... He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.

This is "the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense," for example, vis a vis materialism:

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. 

He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.

Recall what the Aphorist says about one truth and countless errors, each of the latter a philosophical non-starter founded upon principles that reduce to absurdity -- for example, the denial of free will: 

It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will.

More generally,  

The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.

This latter being the human -- or all too human -- end instead of the divine one; or Ø instead of O. Do this long enough, and everyone is living in darkness and tenure: 

one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

 Another non-starter is evolutionism, or metaphysical Darwinism:

Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.

This is self-evident: a strictly consistent Darwinism can never even account for the truth of Darwinism, for  

it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.

This attack on the intellect comes down to a systematic violation of the three rules of thought: the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. It reminds me of the gag that the worse your logic, the more *interesting* the consequences to which it gives rise.

And we live in interesting times.  

the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania (Chesterton).