Schmidt-Biggemann does not consider any modern perennialists, so there is no mention of Guénon or even Blavatsky. His starting point is the Renaissance, from where he proceeds backwards to Proclus and Plato, and then forwards to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. There is a special focus on the Christian Kabbala, on which Schmidt-Biggemann published a monumental three-volume work, in German, in 2012-2013.
The book is about what Schmidt-Biggemann calls "theological ideas that cannot be separated from philosophical speculation," notably God's self-revelation and the theology of time. This is what gives the book its organisational scheme. Within this, he looks at all the main thinkers of ancient, medieval and early modern perennialism, including--as well as Proclus and Plato--Dionysius the Areopagite, Raymond Lull, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Guillaume Postel, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme, and, finally, Leibniz. He also mentions al-Kindi, whose name he consistently misspells (as "Khindi"), but then he is not a specialist in Arabic thought.
As well as a very wide coverage, the book has some interesting insights. For example:
Seen from the modern perspective of philological historicism, philosophia pernennis was, of course, a syncretistic movement, for it adopted and assimilated all available philosophical topics into its theologico-philosophical system. This was, however, precisely the working idea of perennial philosophy. Since all possible wisdom stemmed from God's original Edenic revelation, no human philosophy could be conceived independent of this origin (xiv-xv).
2 comments:
Hi there Mark thank you for still doing what you do and also sharing what you can in this blog that you have. I merely just discovered you. I know a few decades too late.
Anywho I was curious as to your own views regarding perennialism and panentheism. Namely, if you have any contentions, or agreements and why or why not.
I think perennialism is attractive to some, particularly by those who are repelled by modern exclusivism and fundamentalism, in the idea that somehow all religions are pointing to a transcendence, a core.
There is difficulty however, in that they (religions) are naturally mutually exclusive in some of their fundamental truth claims.
If one claims the truth to be relative, then they would be denying the religions the right to tell people what is the nature of reality, in the name of some undifferentiated ultimate concern; or vague, not even theistic reality or truth behind them all...which is not really any religion at all but a kind of misty deism.
But anywho I digress.
I don't know about my own views--I'm just a historian--but the way that the Traditionalists solve the problem of mutually exclusive truth claims is to focus not on the exoteric, which is where such truth claims generally are, but on the esoteric, where the problem does not really crop up. Frithjof Schuon did some work on reconciliation at an exoteric level too, but I'm not sure how successful that was.
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