Gnosis simply means knowledge, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the Gnostic heresy which Schuon attacks as metaphysically unsound although he’s does point out some latent, though not yet necessarily unhealthy and unorthodox(ie they’re still within the remit and possibilities of orthodox Christianity.), leanings to Gnosticism in St.Paul himself.

I read both, and disliked much of what I read. As I suspected, in offering a way to harmonize world religions, he stripped Christianity of its essence: no mention of atonement, of Easter as the central purpose of Christ and defining theme of Christendom. It is appropriate he repeatedly uses the word gnosis, as Christianity has been dealing with such for millenia. It is probably not appropriate for this to continue on FPR; yet I don’t desire to post my contact information globally. I hereby give FPR permission to send my contact info to you if they so desire. If not, well I pray that someday you will return to true Christian faith. I appreciate your genial attitude here, demonstrating that religion CAN be discussed on a porch without it devolving into conflict. And I agree with you on Dawkins; he may have been a decent scientist but he is an atrocious philosopher, as anyone who skims his writings can immediately see. In any case, may you live long and prosper.

http://religioperennis.org/documents/Schuon/religioperennis.pdf

“To paraphrase the well-known saying of Saint Irenaeus, the religio perennis is fundamentally this: the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return into the Real. It is this mystery, together with the metaphysical discernment and contemplative concentration that are its complement, which alone is important in an absolute sense from the point of view of gnosis; for the gnostic—in the etymological and rightful sense of that word—there is in the last analysis no other “religion”. It is what Ibn Arabi called the “religion of Love”, placing the accent on the element “realization”.
The two-fold definition of the religio perennis—discernment between the Real and the illusory and a unifying and permanent concentration on the Real—implies in addition the criteria of intrinsic orthodoxy for every religion and all spirituality; in order to be orthodox a religion must possess a mythological or doctrinal symbolism establishing the essential distinction in question, and it must provide a path that guarantees both the perfection of concentration and its continuity; in other words a religion is orthodox if it provides a sufficient, if not always exhaustive, idea of the absolute and the relative, and thus of their reciprocal relationships, and a spiritual activity that is contemplative in its nature and effectual with regard to our ultimate destiny. For it is notorious that heterodoxies always tend to adulterate either the idea of the divine Principle or the manner of our attachment to it; they offer a worldly, profane, or—if one prefers—“humanist” counterfeit of religion or else a mysticism containing nothing but the ego and
its illusions.”

Jon actually it would not make Christ’s death unnecessary for a particular section of mankind, you leave why his death was so late and only for one section of mankind unanswered. The doctrine of atonement is a particular perspective, as Schuon et al are quick to point out. It is one way of considering the soul’s journey from God, via the fall, to reunite or come back to him. Christians, or Western Christians at least, focus on original sin and atonement but that is just one perspective and emphasis on the journey of the soul by another perspective it can be seen as the shedding of desires and earthly attachments or indeed submission to God.

I know Dawkins et al will stil scoff(though I skimmed Dawkins’ The God delusion recently and it was pathetic, the chapters on the proofs of God were terrible and the rest was appeals to Darwinism and the dubious, particularly from a conservative/traditionalist perspectives historical, and sociological attacks on religion.) but I’m saying they can particularly scoff at this because it makes no sense. It makes no sense that the formless can be captured within one limited, human form bound by a particular culture. It makes no sense why even when one accepts God that one should instantly accept Christianity and not Vedanta and it makes no sense why the Lord would send his revelation so late in human history to only one section of mankind.

They may scoff as amateurs at Perennialism but they would not be so quick if they read the work of Schuon or his colleagues. One must differentiate between the exoteric out shell of the different revelations and their inner, esoteric core. It is this inner core, this transcendent unity, where the most important similarities lie. As many before have commented the similarities between the various global schools of mysticism are obvious. That is not to say one can mix and match faiths. Perennialists, at least of the Traditionalist kind, are rigid upholders of Orthodoxy and do not think mixing and matching of practices of the distinct traditions.

Anyway however you want to criticise them I really suggest you familiarise yourself with their work first because common sense should tell you simple mention of an obvious fact like differing exoteric traditions is something they are likely to have dealt with.

Wessexman’s thoughts prompt a myriad possible discussions — for which I don’t have time, I’m afraid, though I’m grateful for his elaborating on his ideas and showing that they are what I thought they were.

My comments following the essay are directed primarily to addressing the Personality of God, or God as the fullness of Person. Wessexman’s comments respond only to a sidenote of that matter, to which I’ll offer just these brief observations:

The problem he’s concerned with is the relation of the knowledge of natural reason to that of faith. As a historical problem, he’s concerned with what Cardinal Newman called the “dispensation of the pagans,” that is, the clear fact that the rational systems and religious beliefs of the pagan world served as a leven for the revelation and acceptance of Christianity, and that, further, those systems clearly contained a lot of truth beyond that element which served as a leven or preparation for the acceptance of Christian revelation.

The easiest and most important way of understanding this is simply to note that natural reason teaches us a great deal that is distinct from and, in one respect, prior to what faith can teach us. And so this Thomist distinction is very adequate to explain why non-Christians can know so much without having accepted Revelation.

Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple was one of several non-Catholic theologians in the last century who sought to explain this in more Platonic terms (terms that themselves derive from the Catholic Traditionalist theologians of the Romantic period, e.g. Maistre). For Temple, man had received two types of revelation — general and special. “General” revelation indicates the self-revelation of God that gives to all men in all civilizations some intimation of his Truth, while “Special” revelation is that particular and consummate revelation that is Christ. Note, for Temple as for Barth, Christ Himself is Revelation — so even as this notion may seem to water down the singularity of Christianity, it actually preserves it.

The reason Temple introduced these terms of general and special revelation and preferable to the knowledges of natural reason and faith is because he, like so many (including some neo-Thomists), failed to appreciate that natural reason, the human person, and all things are put in motion, are brought into being, only as Creation. That is, in the free, loving, and reasonable (intelligible) act of God. As such, neither this world’s being nor the movements of human reason are self-grounding, but always stand upon the quaking abyss of God’s gift, into which we can only stare by means of the gift of faith. Nature is in this sense already graced, reason is preceded by faith just as it is also completed by it. As soon as one understands that everything that is Nature is also Creation (they are synonyms, insofar as to be created means to have received a nature and existence in contingent unity), one sees that it would be impossible for natural reason to be oriented in any direction other than to its final cause, which is also its first cause, which everyone calls God.

But the rich grace of creation does nothing to reduce the distinctive truth of Revelation in faith. Indeed, that Revelation shows us that, however adequate natural reason is as a preamble to faith, only the supernatural gifts of God — faith, hope, and love — can be taken as the true, narrow path to Him. As Jon observes, there is a fissure between the paths of natural reason and the straight road of the infused theological virtues, the crossing of which necessitates the atonement in and of Christ and the regeneration of the human person, who therefore lives in Christ as part of his Mystical Body.

Christianity is defined around the necessary crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, as an atonement for our sin and proof that death is conquered. If there are other valid paths to God/salvation, then Christ’s death was either a) unnecessary or b) universally applicable without requiring belief. Either choice destroys the fundamental basis for the existence of Christianity. None of the religions you name have any doctrine of atonement; they cannot be reconciled with Christianity.

As for Dawkins and Hitchens, they will scoff whether you embrace other religions or not, and indeed if you claim any religion will do then they will just scoff all the more because anyone who reads their scriptures will clearly see incompatible claims of truth.

What they can’t scoff at is a life lived well, based on faith and enabled by grace…

Here’s an essay by Schuon on the Perennial Philosophy if you are interested.

http://worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=The_Perennial_Philosophy-by_Frithjof_Schuon.pdf

He expresses conceptions very close to your point in your article, imho:

“The decisive error of materialism and agnosticism is the failure to see that the daily experiences of our lives are immeasurably below the stature of our human intelligence. If the materialists were right, this intelligence would be an inexplicable luxury; without the Absolute, the capacity to conceive it would have no cause. The truth of the Absolute coincides with the very substance of our spirit; the various religions actualize objectively what is contained in our deepest subjectivity. Revelation is in the macrocosm what intellection is in the microcosm;”

I’m unsure that is correct. In my readings on the subject I see a split with some important figures suggesting a religio perennis, perhaps not to the degree I subscribe to but to an important degree. Exclusivism is more the realm of the exoteric, for the average believer who would be confused by anything else. That is not to say there should be any mixing of faiths but that one can appreciate the wisdom, and indeed validity of the other orthodox traditions. Otherwise one is left unable to answer the modernist, skeptical canard about why Christianity rather than Islam or Judaism is Hinduism should be accepted, also, aside from the rich philosophical and spiritual offerings these orthodox traditions have contain(a boon in such a time of spiritual degeneration.), one is also able to find answers to question of how the formless could be expressed in one limited human form bound by place and culture and also why God would send his main revelation so late in human history to only one section of humanity. The answers are he or it did or are neither of these; there are many forms for different peoples and cultures and even these are not exhaustive even though they’re essential for almost all and that of course the Lord has offered revelation to all since the beginning of human history — revelation being the collective mirror and support of the individual, Platonic Intellect.

Grace is essential but in their way all the other orthodox traditions express this or could be said to. Of course someone who practices Taoism is no Christian, nor would they claim to be ,though they may find inspiration in Christian writings the orthodox will not incorporate Christian practices into their faith just as I draw inspiration from Sufism and Vedanta and Platonism(what the modernists refer to as “Neoplatonism”.) but would not incorporate Islamic, Hindu or Hellenistic practices into my Christian practice. But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily non-Christian to not except these as valid paths for those brought up in them(though of course it is not an important part of being a Christian.).

Otherwise not only are you robbed on their wisdom and support when we need it the most but your brought back face to face with that sneering image of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens asking you why we should accept Christianity and not Islam(not to mention your own knowledge that if you were born in Cairo or Damascus you’d probably be writing about the Koran right now when you talk of scriptures.). Otherwise you’re left without answers to Christianity’s lateness, its geographically restricted nature(particularly until very lately.) and it obvious residence within a Greco-Roman and Judaic framework rather than a perspective that is necessarily universally as understandable.

Also without such a perspective the Christian higher or more mystical thinker is left with basically being at spiritual war with all these other faiths and religio-philosophical traditions in world were all traditional spirituality is under increasing attack.

The Perennialist authors of most worth are Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings and Titus Burckhardt(a descendant of Jacob Burckhardt.). James Cutsinger the eastern Orthodox theologian and Lord Northbourne the exponent of organic farming and a member of my own Church of England are notable Christian ones, as is Rama Coomaraswamy, the son of the noted Perennialist Ananda Coomaraswamy, and a convert to your own Roman Catholic Church. E.F Schumacher and Wendell Berry(who essays I have found in several Perennialist composition as well as the introduction to a collected works of Lord Northbourne.) also have been influenced by them. Schumacher’s A Guide to the Perplexed indeed has clear Perennialist overtones even if it is clearly aimed at the spiritual and theological novice.

Here’s an essay by Schuon on the Perennial Philosophy if you are interested.

If Wessexman wishes to accuse such figures of theological modernism, he will not be alone. For my part, I see his syncretism to be riddled with error, probably heretical, certainty displaying the worst traits of what used to be called “Americanism” and “indifferentism.” I have no idea what a “perennielist” is outside of his own description, and so far as I can tell it amounts to the same theology we encounter among the European “Catholic” Right of the early twentieth century, e.g. Charles Maurras, Henri Massis, or, better, Ernest Psichari. An interesting position, and one quite understandable in terms of an attempt to shore of the Occident amid internal and external threats. But let’s not call it Christianity. The fundamental claim of Christianity is its exclusiveness, which radically relativizes what he calls “different paths” so that, while they clearly express the genius of the natural reason, they do not and cannot represent paths to God, since there is only one such path and it must be given to us by grace.

What is comforting about his comments is that I see I was not mistaken in my analysis. As a matter of intellectual debate, I am only concerned that two points be acknowledged: I) the position I outline is not modern or modernist, but rather more accurately represents the doctrine of God of the Tradition and of Scripture (see quotations below for a few references). II) on its criterion, simply following whatever “orthodox revelation” happens to belong to your own tradition is neither acceptable for the Christian nor an acceptably Christian claim. It may be a lot of things, many of them good, but it is not Christian.

Here are a few passages worth contemplating:

“God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendour. He comes as a baby – defenceless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child. He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts and his will – we learn to live with him and to practise with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love. God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him.”
–Benedict XVI, Midnight Mass Homily, 2007

“Now, for Barth . . . What interests the Bible, and therefore ourselves, in dealing with [anthropology] is the question concerning ‘the man who meets his God and stands before his God, the man who finds God and to whom God is present . . . In this ‘correspondence and similiarity’ between the creation and the Covenant only one thing can be meant: man’s situation of being-with-others, the ‘I and Thou’ which assumed a more specialised and corporeal form as ‘man and woman’, which in Gen 1.27 we see added immediately to the ‘image and likeness’ as an explication of it . . . With Barth, then, we must profoundly deplore the fact that the Patristic and scholastic anthropology strayed away from this first of all Biblical premises concerning human reality and let itself be inspired by an abstract Greek concept of essence. ‘The humanity of each and every man consists in the determination of man’s being as a being with others, or rather with the other man.’”
–Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Glory of the Lord” 1.381-382

This last passage is THE determinate passage of the new or communion theology that Benedict and Balthasar represent; it serves, I believe, as the consequent theological foundation for John Paul II’s theology of the body (as I argued here recently). Its references to Barth come from “Church Dogmatics” III/2, and so whether one accepts this claim in Barth will largely determine how one engages Benedict, John Paul II, Balthasar and the rest of their bunch. I approach it with fear and trembling, myself, but didn’t hesitate to present it as clearly as I could in the above essay.

We have also these points to deal with:

“Person signifies what is most perfect in all nature — that is, a subsistent individiaul of a rational nature.”
–St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 1, 29, 3

Since everything we say about God is analogical and only analogical, the above would suggest that Personality is particularly applicable as an analogous divine name. As with all analogies to the divine, we know that it does not mean regarding God what we normally mean by it; but this applies to Being Itself, too.

The “metaphysical tradition of the West defines the person in terms of independence, as a reality which, subsisting spiritually, constitutes a universe unto itself . . . this tradition finds in God the sovereign Personality whose existence itself consists in a pure and absolute super-existence by way of intellection and love . . . the concept of personality is related not to matter but to the deepest and highest dimension of being.”
–Jacques Maritain, “The Person and the Common Good” 40.

Elsewhere, Maritain speaks of God knowing man as subject rather than object — and the reader will recognize that I use similar language (drawn directly from John Paul II) in my essay. With John Paul II’s dissertation adviser, Garrigou-Lagrange, I think this accepts and responds to post-Cartesian ideas of subject and object, and not those of Aquinas. For Aquinas subject signifies simply the one who acts and object nothing other than the one acted toward. When we say, “Don’t treat that woman like an object,” Aquinas would tut-tut and say, “What you really mean is she should not be treated as if her substance were reducible to its existence as part of a species and genus.” And that is more accurate, for something can only be “objective” if it is moved-toward in some sense by a subject; to call something an object says nothing more about its being than that it is being moved-toward.

I have other passages, but these should do.

I don’t think it is correct to view the eastern, and particularly Buddhist, concept of the void as a nightmarish abyss. It is quite different and in fact a positive concept. The void is not negation, it is nothing but it is everything, it Nirvana and it is God.

Whether we ultimately find union with God or simply closeness and whether when we die we go to heaven or hell or are reborn somehow is open to speculation in my opinion, I feel only God could to hell eternally, if it were possible for him to sin, for man it would be perpetual or in other words indefinite only. I certainly fall on the Neoplatonic and Eastern side of the debate of union or closeness with God as our ultimate goal(this side was also championed by Meister Eckhart perhaps the greatest of Christian mystics), which is to say I feel our ultimate end is to find identity or union with God but I realise the exact outcome is uncertain and not too important.

In some ways this overdoing of personality is natural. Firstly it is a joining in with individualist and egoist tendencies in modern society but also a move away from mechanist, materalist and determinist tendences within society and popular philosophical-scientistic thought which tends to attack the foundations of individuality.

Because if it were not the individual I who gains salvation, than I don’t gain it at all. (But this is tricky, perhaps my true I would best be described as impersonal, or self-less…. I’m not sure)

I agree with you completely that we’ve (many of us) forgotten our own contingency, and this undermines genuine love of God.

So… I think it a hard question, and I don’t know what the Church says about it: what is our individuality in eternity?

My guess is that no one in heaven ever feels the need to say I, to assert themselves. But perhaps we say I in eternity as an expression of our own perfectly unique and valuable love of and obedience to God.
In this case the problem is not our temporal personality per se, but the fact that we are never entirely true to ourselves in time; and thus the abysses of the east find their western correlate in sin: which is an infinite abyss all the more terrible because we ourselves commit it.

From this ground: original sin, we can maintain the faith that God is fundamentally a/three Person(s) without subjecting Him to ourselves… because the truth about our own personality is unknown to us.
This focus on sin as formative even of our logic in some deep way, thrilled me in Augustine when I read him in school; Plato, Aristotle, virtue, etc….. this is all well and good, but if one slips on a staircase and dies from it—so much for human reason! Its a lovely argument.

Perhaps we agree almost entirely… and its a matter of emphasis.

Maybe the problem is not so much human finite persons… as it is the attempt to materialize or mechanize those persons into things: either blocks-of-matter, or weird hyper-sophisticated calculators?

I didn’t take you, Wessexman (if you don’t mind my calling you “you,” it feels bizarre on a post), to be suggesting that religion is projection, smoke and mirrors…. that snuck its way in from other concerns.

Also I should emphasize my agreement with part of your response: the god who is taken to be a father here on earth, by whom we swear, “my daddy is bigger than your daddy” is an incredibly evil…. it turns all pious love into mere impotent and absurd revenge. Christianity without transcendence (and equally without suffering) is a horror.

But even this leads me to marvel at the appropriateness of the Lord’s Prayer for leading the believer to authentic belief:

“Our Father
Who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name”

To recognize our father is in heaven and that his name itself is sacred (thus the very thought of Him) is to insulate ourselves of all our own feeble, pathetic ‘merely personal (i.e. subjective)’ desires.