The Perennial Philosophy surveyed and compared

A recent book provides a guide to the various versions of the Perennial Philosophy, including the Traditionalist one. It is Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Publishing Company, 2024), 128 pages.

Sawyer taught religion at the Maine College of Art & Design, lectured at a range of other places including the Esalen Institute, and was a friend of Huston Smith, whose authorized biography he wrote. He also wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley. He knows Traditionalism well, but is not himself a Traditionalist, placing himself half way between René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, who he sees as unusually dogmatic, and Huxley, who—in his view—held that all truths are provisional. He lists the most important influences on his thought as Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Frances Vaughan, Stanislav Grof, and Ram Dass.

The book’s main argument is that the Perennial Philosophy is an approach to understanding “life’s bigger questions” that is a permanent part of human thought, and that although its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s has now passed, it still answers life’s bigger questions pretty well, and is still the part of what is taught by many contemporary spiritual teachers. The key concept is the UME or Unitive Mystical Experience.

The book is written in a very accessible style with short chapters and uses many anecdotes to make its points. It is divided into three parts, “Starting Out,” “Looking Deeper,” and “Exploring Specific Topics.” “Starting Out” leads up to what Huxley called the “minimum working hypothesis,” the common ground shared by so many mystics—one way of defining the Perennial Philosophy. “Looking Deeper” takes us through the nature of being and the path to enlightenment. The “Specific Topics” explored in the last part are religion, God, enlightenment, science and knowing, law, psychology, nature and art. Then comes a chapter in “The Perennial Philosophy Today” that lists some major contemporary teachers and explores their positions on particular issues. In all these chapters, Sawyer explains the perspectives of the major Perennialist writers, including the Traditionalists, as one school among others.

The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded is an excellent introduction for the general reader, especially the seeker. It is also an interesting comparative study, though the accessible style and anecdotes that make it appealing to the general reader can become an obstacle for the more specialized reader, who is evidently not Sawyer’s intended audience. Even so, an important book, and recommended.

New book on Traditionalist thought published (coming soon in US)

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order is now available in Europe and Canada. Readers in the US will have to wait until July 6. 

Official UK price is £25, but Amazon.co.uk is selling for £22 and £12.99 on Kindle. In Canada, $53.95 and $17.99 Kindle, and in Europe €22.19 and £18.75 Kindle. 

One of the first reviews is in The Scotsman, and says (in part) "This very fine book is a forensic look at the movement and its influence, and has several points where you both realise something and ponder 'why did I never realise that?'” That is rather what I had hoped for.

The book looks at the intellectual foundations of Traditionalism, its application both to various projects, and "post-Traditionalism." Each chapter looks first at the general intellectual background to the issue it discusses, and then at Traditionalist understandings, starting in most cases with René Guénon and ending as much as possible with living Traditionalists.

Forthcoming book on Traditionalist thought

One of the criticisms that have been made of my original Against the Modern World is that I did not pay enough attention to Traditionalist thought. I agree, and therefore a new book will come out in June 2023 focusing on ideas: Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order. The book is a companion to Against the Modern World, not a replacement--it goes over different ground.

The publishers are Oxford University Press in the US (see cover without tree) at $29.95 (pre-order here) and Pelican in the UK (see cover with tree) at £22 or £9.99 on Kindle (pre-order here). Two very different covers, but the text is the same. 

 

The chapters are:

INTRODUCTORY
1. Traditionalism and the Traditionalists  
2. Historical perennialism  
 
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
3. Traditionalist perennialism   
4. Traditionalist history   
5. The Traditionalist critique of modernity   
6. Traditionalism, thought, and society    

PART II: CORE PROJECTS
7. Self-realization    
8. Religion    
9. Politics    

PART III: FURTHER PROJECTS
10. Art    
11. Gender    
12. Nature    
13. Dialogue  
  
PART IV: POST-TRADITIONALISM
14. The radical right   
 
CONCLUDING
15. Conclusion    

Schmidt-Biggemann on the earlier philosophia perennis

I have just come across an interesting book on the earlier philosophia perennis, written by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, professor of philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. It is Philosophia Perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004). This is a somewhat modified version of an earlier book in German,  Philosophia perennis. Historische Umrisse abendländischer Spiritualität in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998).

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). 

New book on Western Sufism

A new book on Western Sufism is due out some time around October 2016: Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (New York: Oxford University Press).

Western Sufism is in some ways the continuation of Against the Modern World, but also goes a long way back in time, as the subtitle suggests. Actual Guénonian Traditionalism is only one topic among many, but perennialism is a topic that comes and goes throughout the book, and Guénonian Traditionalism appears in a new light (as do many other things, from Maimonides to Gurdjieff). Ivan Aguéli is covered in more detail than in Against the Modern World, as Swedish sources have been used.

The table of contents can be seen on the companion website, which also has a gallery which gives a good idea of the book's contents. There is also a companion blog, which will be used for posts that are not relevant to Traditionalism.

It is possible to pre-order the book now: $35.00 from Amazon in the US or from Oxford, or £22.99 from Amazon in the UK.

María Zambrano

I have just stumbled across the work of María Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher and sometime poet who died in 1991.

Zambrano is interesting because she read and was influenced by Guénon in the 1930s and 1940s, during a period when Traditionalism seems otherwise to have had little impact on the Spanish-speaking world, and because she was herself a leftist--the daughter of a member of Socialist Workers Group, the wife of a diplomat of the Spanish Republic that lost the Civil War to Franco, who returned to Spain precisely because the war seemed lost, who left Spain for exile as Barcelona was about to fall to the Nationalists, not to return until 1984. Finally, she is interesting because she was a woman--there have been female Traditionalists, but all the major figures and writers have been male.

Zambrano is in fact so unusual in Traditionalist terms that a careful examination of her relationship with Guénon's work is required. There seems to be general agreement that she was a perennialist and that Guénon was important to her, and that the mystical is central to her work, but she of course had many other sources, from Plotinus to the Spanish tradition, in which some include Ibn Arabi. Zambrano was also involved with the circles around Eranos. Some of these issues are examined by Adele Ricciotti in "Método y simbología en la razón poética de María Zambrano,"Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska 36, 1 (2011), pp. 27-39. But more work is needed.

For those who know Spanish,  a beautiful reading of a beautiful passage from Zambrano's Claros del Bosque (1977) is to be found on YouTube.

The remoter origins of the perennial philosophy

For those interested in the remoter origins of the perennial philosophy, I will be presenting a paper on "Orientalists and Sufis: The European Reception of Sufism and Its Consequences" at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in San Diego, California, November 18-21, 2010. The earliest date mentioned is 1577, but we don't really get down to business until 1671. Isaac Newton makes a guest appearance. The most recent name to be mentioned is Inayat Khan. Traditionalism will not be mentioned explicitly, but those who know it will spot something familiar.

Panel #2330, "Middle Eastern-European Intellectual Encounters," Saturday November 20, 8:30-10:30 am.

On the early history of the perennial philosophy

An old but excellent article on the early history of the perennial philosophy of which I have just become aware is Charles B. Schmitt, "Perrenial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz," Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966), pp. 505-532.

Schmitt traces uses and development of the term from Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) to Agostino Steuco (1497-1548), and finally to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), passing along the way Symphorien Champier (c. 1472-c. 1539), Francesco Giorgio (1460-1540), Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), and Guillaume Postel (1510-81). Among the moderns, he mentions briefly Jacques Maritain, Erwin J. Auweiler, Paolo Rotta, Aldous Huxley, Roberto Ardigo, Cornelius Kruse, Otto Willmann, Maurice de Wulf, and S. Radhakrishnan.

On Leibniz, he concludes:

Although it is more fashionable today to see Leibniz as a "precursor of modern logic and mathematics" or as a brilliant metaphysician, his affinity to the tradition of perennial philosophy as envisioned by Steuco is most clear. Leibniz's whole philosophy of harmony is very similar to that expressed by Steuco and the others we have discussed, although in Leibniz the metaphysical foundations of such a Harmonistik are much more carefully worked out, recalling in some ways Cusanus' attempt to give a metaphysical basis to a "philosophy of concord" . . . In a sense, Leibniz is the most eminent defender of the tradition called by Steuco philosophia perennis. Moreover, Leibniz's attempts to bring about religious unity-in a century not reputed for its ecumenical spirit-hark back to Cusanus, as well as to Ficino and Pico.

For more on Leibniz and the perennial philosophy, see

• H. J. De Vleeschauwer, “Perennis quaedam Philosophia,” Studia Leibnitiana supplementa I (1968), pp. 102-22.
• R Meyer, “Leibniz und die Philosophia perennis,“ in Tradition und Kritik, Festschrift für Rudolf Zocher zum 80. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1967) pp. 223-54.

These suggestions are from Renato Cristin, Heidegger and Leibniz: Reason and the Path (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 1998, p. 83.

My thanks to Anders Klostergaard Petersen for bringing the Leibniz connection to my attention in the first place.