From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Mar 30 2003 - 22:36:46 BST
Sam and all:
Sam asked:
Can you point to anyone who articulated 'the perennial philosophy' before
the Enlightenment got going?
DMB quotes W.T.S. Thackara:
The idea of a perennial philosophy, of a common denominator rather, a
highest common factor -- forming the basis of truth in the world's manifold
religious, philosophic, and scientific systems of thought, goes back
thousands of years at least. Cicero, for example, speaking about the
existence of the soul after death, mentions that not only does he have the
authority of all antiquity on his side, as well as the teachings of the
Greek Mysteries and of nature, but that "these things are of old date, and
have, besides, the sanction of universal religion" (Tusculan Disputations,
C. D. Yonge, trans., George Bell & Sons, 1904; Book I, xii-xiv).
It was the 17th-century German philosopher Leibniz, however, who popularized
the Latin phrase philosophia perennis. He used it to describe what was
needed to complete his own system. This was to be an eclectic analysis of
the truth and falsehood of all philosophies, ancient and modern, by which
"one would draw the gold from the dross, the diamond from its mine, the
light from the shadows; and this would be in effect a kind of perennial
philosophy." A similar aim, with the goal of reconciling differing religious
philosophies, was pursued by Ammonius Saccas, founder of the eclectic
theosophical school of Alexandria in the 3rd century A.D. and inspirer of
Plotinus and the Neoplatonic movement.
Leibniz, however, laid no claim to inventing the phrase. He said he found it
in the writings of a 16th-century theologian, Augustine Steuch, whom he
regarded as one of the best Christian writers of all time. Steuch described
the perennial philosophy as the originally revealed absolute truth made
available to man before his fall, completely forgotten in that lapse, and
only gradually regained in fragmentary form in the subsequent history of
human thought. Orthodox Christianity, in his view, was its purest
restoration, and the history of redemption includes the long quest for this
wisdom ("Perennial Philosophy," Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Philip
P. Wiener, ed., Charles Scribners Sons, 1973, III, 457-63).
Prior to Steuch there is, to my knowledge, no mention of the term
philosophia perennis, although similar phrases expressing essentially the
same idea are to be found in earlier writings. The most notable of these is
"the perennial wisdom of God" -- "theosophia perennis" in Latin texts.
More recently, about forty years ago, Aldous Huxley compiled an anthology of
the world's religious and mystic traditions which describes many features
common to this "philosophy of philosophies." In his preface, he defined it
as follows:
Philosophia Perennis . . . -- the metaphysic that recognizes a divine
Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the
psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical
with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge
of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being -- the thing is
immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found
among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the
world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the
higher religions (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper &
Brothers, 1945; p. vii).
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