smith-katz - is there a perennial philosophy

8/2/2019 Smith-Katz - Is There a Perennial Philosophy

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion.LV/3

Essay,IS THERE A PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY?

HUSTON SMITH

Steven Katz's assertion that there is no perennial philosophy1 hasattracted considerable attention, and its categorical character raises ina poin ted way two impo rtant questions. Formally, what is the p eren-nial philosophy?how is it to be defined?2 And factually, does it exist?Do we find it everywhere, as the word "perennial" claims that weshould?

Katz rules out the possibility of an ubiquitous philosophy becauseex perience is socially conditioned and societies differ. "T he singleepistemological assumption that has exercised my thinking," he tells

us, is that "there are NO pure (i.e. unm ediated) experiences. Neithermystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give anyindication, or any grounds for believing, that the y are u nm edia ted. . . .All experience is processed through, organized by, and makes itselfavailable to us in extremely complex epistemological ways" (1978:26).

This bears on the perennial philosophy in two ways. First, it rulesout the possibility of cross-culturalexperiences, because "experience iscontextual" (1978:56-57). And it renders cross-culturaltypologies sus-pec t, for these too are culture bou nd. Categories that purp ort to ser-vice multiple cultures slur differences that are impo rtant. Th eirgenerality insures that they are either vacuous or misleading inpresuming more cross-cultural similarity than in fact pertains.

As these are the objections to the perennial philosophy that Katzargues I shall devote most of my space to them, but not without firstpo inting ou t that they focus on secondary issues. Katz's criticisms a re

Huston Smith is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion, Emeritus, Syracuse University,and Adjunct Professor at the Grad ua te Theological Union in Berkeley, California 94708 .

1

"There is no philosophia perennis, Huxley and many others notwithstanding"(1978:24) Let us note right off that others, including others who do not accept the per-ennialist position, see things differently. Thus O wen Thomas has recen tly w ritten that"th e pe renn ial philosophy . . . has bee n the do min ant form of Western philosophy fromPlato to Hegel" (63). Not Western philosophy only. "The 'perennial' philosophy[enlisted] most reputable philosophers of both Europe and Asia up to about A D. 1450(Conze, 25).

2 Because "perennial" refers only to time, "primordial" (which includes space) is thebetter designator, but I shall stay with Katz's more prevalent nomenclature.


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554 Journ al of the American Academy of Religion

the ones that perennialists most often hear, but the real issue lieselsewhere.

The Central, Neglected Claim of the Perennial Philosophy

The claim of the perennial philosophy is not that mystical exper-iences are cross-culturally iden tical. Its claims do not appea l to experi-ence at all, save in the trivial sense that everything that enters ourawareness can be said to be an ex perience of some sort. N ow here inthe thirty-odd books of Frithjof Schuonone of the two pere nn ial phi-losophers Katz mentions by name (1978:67)do we find him under-taking a phenomenology of mystical states along the lines of Zaehner,Stace, and James. That he shuns this approach completely shows thatthe perennial philosophy he argues for does not turn on assessments ofmystical phenomena at all; logically it doesn't even presuppose theirexistence. Th e othe r perenn ialist K atz names, Aldous Huxley, is lessem phatic about this; he w as, after all, an amateu r ra the r than an exactphilosopher. Yet no m ore tha n Schuon does he grou nd perenn ialismin experien ce. "T he core of the Pe renn ial Philosophy," he tells us, is

"doctrines."3

The doctrines derive from metaphysical intuitions, and it is tothese that the perennial philosophy appeals. To discern the truth of ametaphysical axiom one need no t hav e an "exp erience ." The ontologi-cal discernments of pure intellection, which must be distinguishedfrom rational argumen tationratio is no t intellectushave nothing todo with mystical rapture or access to states of "pure consciousness."The legitimacy of a metaphysical truth, evident to the intellect, doesnot depend onsamadhi or gifts of "infused grace." Nowhere does theBrahma Sutra, e.g., appeal to mystical experience to support its meta-physical claims and arg um en ts. The drift is th e opposite. On tologicaldiscernments are enlisted to elucidate or validate the yogas and theexperiences they deliver.

Like mystical theophanies, metaphysical intuitions are ultimatelyineffable. No m ore than th e former can they be adequa tely rational-ized; strictly speaking, they can only be symbolizednot to objectifyBrahm an bu t to dispel ignorance is theShastras's object, Vedantins tell

us. The reasons for the ineffability in the two cases, however, are dif-ferent. Infused or mystical graces, including th esamadhis and

3 Introduction to Prabhavananda & Isherwood's translation ofThe Bhagavad-Cita, p.13. Th e doctrines Huxley refers to are the re listed as four First: the phe nom ena l worldis the man ifestation of a Divine Ground. Second: hum an beings are capable of attainin gimm ediate knowledge of that ground Third, in addition to their pheno m enal egos,human beings possess an eternal Self which is of the same or like nature with the divineGround Fourth: this identification is life's chief end or purp ose.


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Smith: Pere nnial Philosophy 555

nirvakalpa especially, bring into more or less direct view features ofhigher ontological orders. This does not happen in metaphysical dis-

cer nm en t. Th ere it is notother ontological realm s, bu t principles thatpe rva de the m all that c om e to view. In both cases, analogy is the onlyfinal recourse for reporting, but the comprehension/experience dis-t inction remains intact . To understand that 2+2=4 does not requireaccess to higher realms of either consciousness or being.

Katz steers clear of metaphysics; his argument is phenomenologi-cal througho ut. It seems safe to assume, though, that he would expec this "principle of no unmediated experience" to cover metaphysicaldiscernments as fully as it does mystical states. As the latter coverageis the one he spells out, I proceed with it while re-emphasizing thepoint of this ope ning section. Only to the ex tent tha t Katz's argum entsabout mysticism can be read as applyingpari passu to metaphysicalintuitions do they bear on the perennial philosophy at all.

Is there a Universal Mystical Experience?

By his reading of it, Katz's unqualified premise"there is NO

unmediated experience"suffices by itself to rule out the possibilitythat mystical experiences could be cross-culturally identical, but headds induction to deduction by marshalling differences that turn up inmystical reports. His premise remains important, though, for he leanson it to argue that the differences are not confined to descriptions.The experiences that generate the descriptions are themselves differ-en t. Mystics in different traditions, and to some exten t in differentpockets of the same tradition, "see" different things.

This is overwhelmingly the case, of course. The question iswhether, amidst these manifold differences, which no one disputes,there is one form of mystical experience thatis cross-culturally identi-calor better, indistinguishable, for it is impossible to determinewhether even physical stimuli, such as the color red, are experiencedidentically. I am refe rring , of cou rse, to what Stace calls th e introspec-tive type of mystical experience, which cannot be culturally peggedbec ause no culturally-identifiable particu lars turn u p within it. It isn'tculturally tinted because, as the pure white light of the void, it has no

tint.We can approach this question by way of developmental psychol-ogy's classification of the kinds of knowing tha t successively e m erge ashum an b eings learn to abstract. Th ere is a cha rm ing story of a Tibetanrefugee in Switzerland who, having been persuaded to turn over hishundred frank note to a bank on the assurance that he could have itback on demand, returned the next day to prove that his informantshad lied. Th e bank did not retu rn his no te, wh ich for test purposes h e


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556 Journal of the Am erican Academy of Religion

had marked; it gave him a different note. To the bank, a hundredfrank note was a hundred frank note. Not so to the Tibetan who had

been re are d in a bar ter economy w herein ev ery item of exchange wasunique.To the perenn ialist this tells the w hole story of the pre sen t co ntro-

versy, but it cannot be assumed that others will agree, so its moralmust be spelled ou t. To his ontological hierar chy of bein g, the pere n-nialist aligns a noetic hierarchy that extends beyond Piaget's whileresem bling it. In infancy knowing hovers close to th e physical senses,but in childhood it takes off into images. Adults go on from there toorder their images with abstract concepts. Mystics in their introver-tive moments invoke a fourth kind of knowing that rises above sensa-tions, images, and concep ts, all thr ee . If those ingre dien ts co ntinue tooperate, they do so subliminallytacitly, as Polanyi would say. Theyare not in view.

Katz may not believe that this fourth mode of knowing occurs,4

but nothin g in his arg um en t proves that it cannot. His formal p ointabout experience being mediated no more rules it out than thediversely mediated experience of delegates to the World HealthOrganization prevents them from getting past Irish potatoes andPeking duck to talk about carbohydrates, nutrition, and (quite simply)food. As for his em pirical conten tion that m ystical accounts neve rreport a culture-free experienceit is impossible of course to provesuch a universal negative, but what is to the point is that Katz's han-dling of th e data does not give him the edg e ove r Stace who , sifting thesame material (85-111), reaches the opposite conclusion; I mentionStace becau se he is the o ppo nen t Katz cites most often. Ad mittedlythings get subtle he re . For example, the longest account that K atzquotes to support his conclusion that mystics never rise above the par-ticulars of their r esp ectiv e religious conditionings reads to my eyes as ifit sup por ts the opposite conclusion. I refer to Ruysbroeck's re po rt(which Katz quotes on 1978:61) that at the apex of the mystical experi-ence "the three Persons give place to . . . . the bare Essence of theGodh ead, . . . . the Essential Unity . . . without d istinction," which con-dition is "so onefold that no distinction can enter into it."

If there were such a thing as the introvertive mystical experience,Katz says in his final argu m en t against it, it could no t affect our un der-standing becau se th e paradoxical and ineffable pro per ties tha t are reg-ularly ascribed to it "cancels [it] out of our language" and preclude

4 It seems clear that he doesn 't. "T here is no substantive evidenc e to suggest that the reis any pure consciousnessper se . . . The . . . contention that we can achieve a state ofpu re consciousness is . . errone ous" (1978:57-58). For a reasoned argum ent to the con-trary, see Merrell-Wolff.


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Smith: Per enn ial Philosophy 557

"making any . . . intelligible claim for any mystical proposition"(1978:56).5 Paradox and ineffability n eed to be uncoup led her e. Fa r

from saying nothing, a genuine paradox, such as matter being bothwave and p article, can precipita te a noetic crisis, gen erating things notjus t to think abou t but to worry about. As for ineffable, far from itssaying nothing, it too (in mystical context) makes a major claim: theclaim that, poised on the rim of the human opportunity, the humanmind can under exceptional conditionsthe condition of infusedgrace it is sometimes calledsee things too momentus to be fitted intolanguage which on the whole serves quotidian ends. The claim maynot be true, but only a crude positivism can deny that it is aclaim.

Are Typologies Trustworthy?

Katz's second charge is directed against cross-cultural typologies,which he says are "reductive and inflexible, forcing multifarious andextremely variegated forms of mystical experience into improperinte rpr eta tive categories which lose sight of the fundamentally impor-tant differences between the data studied" (1978:25). That typologiescan and often do propose improper categories is again not in dispute;the question is whether there can also be useful ones. Katz himselfseems in the end to concede that there can be, for he closes his essaywith a plea for "further fundamental epistemological research into theconditions of mystical exp erience . . . in orde r to lay bar e the [presuma-bly generic] skeleton of such experience" (66). If this is indeed theconcession I take it to be, Katz's objection to the perennial philosophyon this second count cannot be that itspins a typology, but ra ther thatthe one it spins is "too reductive and inflexible." As he doesn't deliveron these charges,6 the only way to respond is to present the perennialtypology and let the reader assess it forhimself. Does it m ake m ince-meat of the religious corpus, cross-culturally examined, or does it (asthe perennialist believes) cut where the joints are?

I shall summarize the perennialist typology, but before doing so Iwant to con tinue for a second stretch with Katz. Having respon ded tohis criticisms of the perennial philosophy as he understands it, I wish(in the upcoming middle third of this essay) to show what there is

about his project that causes it to misfire even when directed towardmystically defined perennialism.

5 By contrast, the protagonist in John Updike's latest novel,Roger's Version, attributeshis passion for theology precisely to the way it "caresses and probes every crevice of theunknowable "

6 Katz doesn't discuss the perennial philosophy's typology at all, so one must infer hiscriticisms of it from the general tenor of his argument.


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Contra Katz

Katz tell us that his "entire paper is a 'plea for the recognition ofdifferences' " (1978:25), but one difference he doesn't mention, and itproves to be th e one that is crucial for the pe ren nia l philosophy. Irefer to the difference between occasions on which (and contexts inwhich) differences are important, and other occasions and contexts inwhich similarities call for attentio n. Ev ery thing obviously bo th resem -bles and differs from every o the r thing : resem bles it in tha t both exist;differs or there would not be two things but one. This being the case,w hen should we accent one pole, w he n the oth er? Claims for similari-ties or differences spin their wheels until they get down toways anddegrees in which things differ or are alike, and those variables shiftwith the problem w e are wo rking on. Does the fact that an Ethio-pian's hung er is med iated by his African con text cause it to differ frommine to the point where it throws international famine relief intoquestion? If not, w he re are Katz's contexts and mediations re levant,and where are they not? Where, balancing his "plea for differences,"is the place of Piaget's "d ece ntra tion ," th e process of gradually becom -ing able to take a more and more universal standpoint, giving up aparticular egocentric or sociocentric way of understanding and actingand moving towards the "universal communications community"?Overlooking this question, Katz by-passes most of the interesting andimpor tant issues in his topic. The n eglect is particularly u nfortu nate inreligion, where commissions to break through provincial contexts andconditioningswhat Max Weber called "the fetters of the sib"arehalf the story.

This distinctionto repeat, the distinction between occasionswhere differences need attention and ones where the flip side of thestory becomes importantis so obvious that one wonders why Katzdoesn't mention it. Th e Judaism from which he speaks may p rovidepart of the answer, for it is especially important that that traditionreta in its iden tity and distinctiveness. Insofar as this is an inte nd ed orunintended motive, the perennialist supports Katz completely in it.

Less acceptable to the perennialist is another influence I think Isee at work. W hen I listen to Katz I do n't he ar him speaking for him-

self only, or even (if this pe rtain s; I'm n ot sure) for Judaism . I hear himspeaking for an important thrust in contemporary philosophy; indeed,the leading thru st, if Richard Rorty is right in reportin g th at tw entie thcentury philosophy "is ending by returning to something reminiscentof Hegel's sense of humanity as an essentially historical being, onewhose activities in all spheres are to be judged not by its relation tonon-human reality but by comparison and contrast with its earlierachievement and with Utopian futures" (748). "In all spheres" makes


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Smith: Pe rennial Philosophy 559

clear that by this view not even religion is to be judged by its relationto non-human realityperhaps God for a starter?Nothing outside of

socio-historical contexts may be legitimated or (are we to assume?)even meaningfully pondered.Katz acknowledges in his closing paragraph that his thinking, too,

is contex tual. H e doesn't identify its controlling contex t, bu t it seemsclear that it is the socio-historical, or cultural-linguistic, holism justno ted. As the ad equacy of his critique of the p eren nial philosophyturns in the end on the adequacy of that holism, I devote the nextshort section to it. Th e way I caption th at section is flippant, bu t I amwilling to risk indignity for t he sake of emphasis. In four short words,two of them abbreviated, it says exactly what I want the section to say.Katz is to be judged by the philosophical company he keeps, whichcompany is limited.

Katz and Co., Ltd.

By mid-century phenomenologists had persuaded philosophersthat the gestalt psychologists were right: the mind doesn't just add upthe data that comes its way; it patterns that data, altering thereby the

way the data appea rs. Introd uced into the philosophy of science, thisproduced the realization that "all facts are theory-laden" (Hanson).Thomas Kuhn picked up that insight and ran with it; hisStructure ofScientific Revolutions has been the most cited book on college cam-puses for the last twenty-five years and turned "paradigm" into ahousehold word. Already, though, He idegg er and W ittgenstein haddeepened theoretical holism into practical holism.7 Because thinkinginvariably proceeds in social contexts and against a backdrop of socialpractices, meaning derives fromroots down into and draws its lifefromthose backgrounds and contexts. This means that in consider-ing an idea we mu st take into account n ot just th e co nceptu al gestalt ofwhich it is a part; we must also consider the social "forms of life"(Wittgenstein) whose "micro-practices" (Foucault) give noetic gestaltstheir final meaning . "In a real sense, the m ediu mis . . . the content oftr ut h" (Knitter: 19). W ittgenstein insisted that "agr eem en t in judg-ments means agreement in what people do and say, not what theybe liev e" (Dreyfus: 235).

Katz's company is those who think that way.8

Now for the way7 On the difference between theoretical and practical holism, see Dreyfus.8 The way is not limited to philosophers; as the quotation from Knitter signals, it has

moved solidly into religious studies. All of the contributors to the two volumes that Katzhas edited on mysticism lean towards what George Lindbeck calls the "cultural-linguis-tic" approach which is challenging the "experiential-expressive" approach to religiousexperience, and noteables are buying into the viewHans Kung for one, who acknowl-edges that Katz's views "fully confirm" his own on this issue (173). Whereas experien-


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their th inkin g is limited. The social holism they belabor is insightful asa half-truth, but forced into the role of the whole truth it collapses

und er th e weight of its own self-reference. Pushed to logical extre me,cultural conditioning becomes, first, cultural subjectivism, and finallycultural solipsism. It rend er s unintelligible th e ways and d eg ree towhich we can and do com mu nicate, unde rstand, and yes, even experi-ence cross-culturally. Un derestim ating these ways and d egrees, itfaces two unresolvable problems. First, it cannot adequately answerthe problem of relativism. It can escape "chea p relativism " by appeal-ing to underlying agreements or pragmatic outcomes, but relativismremains relativism, and to its expensive versions holism has no answer.Second, holism is uncon vincing w hen it argues that m ean ing an d tru thare generated by society, nevernot even in the case of arithmeticapprehended by it .9 Elsewhere I have argued these limitations ofuntempered holism.10 Here I can only assert them.

The Perennial Philosophy Defined11

Le t us be clear: the p erenn ial philosophy is a philosophy, not asociology or anthropology that would jump out of the empirical bushesif only we squinted h ard enoug h. Th e perennialist arrives at the ubiq-uity of his/her outlook more deductively than inductively.12 Havingencountered a view of things s/he believes to be true, s/he concludesthat it must be true universally, for truth has ubiquity built into its

tial-expressivism sees religions as expressions or objectifications of inner, preconceptualexperiences of God, self and world, the cultural-linguistic approach insists that experi-ence is shaped by its social context from the start "In ner exper iences ar e not prior totheir linguistic 'exteriorization;' rather, the symbol system is the pre-condition of theexperiences a sort of cultural public a priori for the ve ry possibility of 'priv ate ' experi-ence" (Wood, 236). That last sentence could have been written by Steven Katz

9 According to Knpke, Wittgenstein so argued1 0 In a forthcoming essay titled "Philosophy, Theology, and the Primordial Claim."1* Naturally I assume full responsibility for the definition h er e offered. My int en t is to

present the position I find in the writings of Rene Guenon, A.K. Coomaraswamy, TitusBurckhard t, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, S.H Nasr, and the ir like. MyForgottenTruth and two books by Nasr, one that he authored, the other he edited, presentoverviews of the position.

1 2 In a later, 1985, essay, Katz seems to sense this bu t discounts the approach Th e

"hermeneutical procedure" of the perennialists, he says, is confessional, "as much byway of testimony as by way of analytic or historical scholarsh ip . . [It] substitutes apriori and non-disconfirmable intuitions for reasoned, defendable theories or generaliza-tions" (76f). W hen this is contrasted with the herm eneu tic Katz recom me nds, namely"restricting oneself to an independent and coolly distanced reading of the material," onewonders if part of Katz's objection to the perennial philosophy isn't disciplinaryanobjection to philosophyitself. The final arbiter of truth, he seems to be saying, is theobjective findings of the socio-historical sciences, or the sciences of man as they are com-ing to be called.


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Smith: Pere nnial Philosophy 561

mean ing. Not simple-mindedly. Th at "it is rainin g" is tru e in Berke-ley doesn 't make it tru e eve ryw her e. But it does make it true every-where that it is at this moment raining in Berkeley.13

Philosophy is not concerned with particulars such as what's hap-pening in Berkeley; in the end it is concerned with the whole ofthings. The topic is too vast for individual minds. They need help,which help the perennialist finds in the world's enduring religious orwisdom traditions.14 In theistic terminology these traditions stemfrom divine revelation, but if that way of speaking closes rather thanopens doors, one can think of them as wisdom reservoirs. They aretanks, or in any case deposits. Distillations of th e cum ulative wisdom

of the human race.Some will protest their being lumped together this way. Is it

immaterial that Hinduism and Buddhism teach reincarnation whereasChristianity rejected it; that Christianity and Islam affirm the soulwh ereas Buddhism n ega tes it; that Christianity exalts the T rinity w hileJudaism and Islam repudiate it; that Judaism, Christianity, and Islampropound creation whereas Taoism and Neoplatonism prefer emana-tion? It's not immaterial a t all, the perennialist rep lies; on the con-trary, it is providen tial. H ere , thoug h, the relevant point is that,impo rtan t as these differences are in respects that are abo ut to be indi-cated , they are not ultimate. Red is not green, but the difference palesbefore the fact that both are light. No two waves are iden tical, buttheir differences are inconsequential when measured against thewater that informs them all.

We are back with the point that arose earlier: people differaccording to whether they incline towards similarities or differences.Perennialists are persons who are exceptionally sensitive to the com-monalities that similarities disclose; they are drawn toward unity asmoth to flame. Sensitized by its pull, they find tokens of unity profli-gate; they see similarities ev eryw he re. It comes as som ething of a jolt,therefo re, to find that othe rs see their ey e for resem blances as an opti-cal defecta far-sightedness that cannot read fine print.

As the world houses both correspondencesand diversities, whichcom e through most strongly must dep en d on the viewer. Ente r th edivision between esoteric and exoteric personality types that invaria-

bly crops up in perenn ialist writings. The words "w ate r" and "e au "differ in both sound and appearance, which is to say outwardly andexoterically. All the wh ile, the ir m ean ing (hidden and therefo re eso-

1 3 Etienne Gilson'sMedieval Unwersalism remains a classic defense of this point.14 Where else? Certainly not science, with which modernity displaced revelation; sci-

enc e registers only a fraction of the real Shall it be, then, the autonom ous reason of theEnlightenment? What defenders does it still have among frontline philosophers?


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teric to the senses) is the same. At the elementary level of this exam-ple, everyone is an esoteric. What distinguishes the esoteric as a type

is his aptitude, honed no doubt by desire, to press the distinctionbe tw een form an d content all the way. For himall particularsthingspossessing distinguishing identitiesare ultimately symbols. They arecoverings or containers for inner essences which, being without finaldemarcations, prove in the end to be single.

With unity thus stressed, the theological story reads like this:the re is one God. It is inconce ivable th at s/he not disclose he r savingna tur e to he r children , for s/h e is ben evo lent: he nce revelation. Fro mher b enevolence it follows, too, that her revelations m ust be impartial,which is to say equ al; the deity cann ot play favorites. H er e for th e firsttime, per hap s, empiricism en ters the pictu re. Having moved this farlargely deductively, the perennialist now opens his eyes to see if evi-dence supports the hypothesis that has come to viewdoes the theorycheck out? The great historical religions have survived for millenia,which is wh at we would expect if they a re divinely pow ered . Statednegatively, God would not have permitted them to endure for suchstretches had they bee n founded on error . Nor, conversely, would he

have permitted multitudes to have been thrown into life's sea inoceans of desolationages and regions where there was no lifeline.As for the manifest diversity in the traditions, neither equality nor

the universality of tru th req uires that traditions be identical. We h avealready noted that the same thing can be said in difiFerent languages,but difiFerent things, too, can be said without violating parity or truth.It is as if the differences in reve lations "flesh o ut " God's na tur e by see-ing it from different angles. They supplement our view without com-promising the fact that each angle is, in its own right, adequate,containing (in traditional locution) "truth sufficient unto salvation."

If we try to lift out the underlying truth thatmakes the severalrevelations internally sufficient, we must speak more abstractly, shift-ing from theology to metaphysics. The re is an Absolute, which is like-wise Infinite. This Infinite both includes and tran scen ds ev ery thin gelse, which everything is (in categorical contrast) finite and relative.The way the Absolute transcends the relative is to integrate the rela-tive into itself so completely that even the Absolute/relative distinc-tion gets ann ulled : form is em ptiness, em ptiness form. (This sepa ratesperennialism from the monism it is sometimes (mis)taken for; it is,rather, a-dvaita or non-dual.) How the opposition is resolved we can-not, of course, imagine or even consistently conceive, which is one rea-son th e Abso lute is ineffable. Too vast for our logic no t just in ex ten tbut in kind, it intersects with language to about the extent that a balltouches a tableto p. At the same tim e we ar e so (unwittingly) party to


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Smith: Pe rennial Philosophy 563

the Absolute that it constitutes the only finally authentic part of ourbeing.

If all this sounds like playing with words, the charge takes us backto the distinction in spiritual personality types the perennialist findsinevitable. One man's mush is another man's meaning. Because notmany can draw spiritual nourishment fromwhich is to say findexis-tential truth inabstractions on the order of the preceding para-graph's, more concrete formulations are required, which is where thehistorical religions com e in. Not only for exoterics; esoterics, too, standin need of them.15 This is an aspect of the pe ren nia l philosophy tha t isoften overlooked by critics who see it as sitting loose to religions in th eplural, patronizing if not by-passing their concreteness and particular-ity. Katz's two volum es perform a ne ed ed service in helping to correctthe notion that "mysticism . . . is an autonomous realm of experiencewhich only uneasily fits in with more traditional and widespread reli-gious beliefs, practices, and com m unities" (1982: Introduc tion). W hatis unfortunate is that in countering that error the volumes muddy thewaters by tarring the perennial philosophy, even its mature propo-nents, with the mistake. The charge that the transcendent unity of

religions pe rceiv ed by th e perennialist fits "only uneasily" with the his-torical traditions is like charging that Chomsky's universal, deep-lyinglinguistic structures ill-accord with actual languages. The perennialistfinds the un ity of religionsin the religions in the way s/he finds beau tyin paintings and song. A m ore esoteric thinker th an Shankara c annotbe imagined, but only theoretically can we separate his metaphysicaldiscernments from the hymns to Shiva that he composed and thatpowered hisjnana. On this point the perennialist agrees with thepractica l holist, Katz emphatica lly includ ed . Holism presses its casetoo far whe n it claims that tru this generated by pra ctices, bu t it is righ tin insisting that practice is essential to truth's effective assimilation.

So the unitary truth to which the perennial philosophy points doesnot depend on the world's religions, but from our side we are notlikely to come upon it, much less keep it in place, save through them.Does that single truth constitute the essence of the enduring religions?Esoterics and exoterics will answ er that question differently. Exotericswill be quick to point out tha t th e pe ren nia l philosophy is the m inority

position everywhere, even in mystical India, to say nothing of theform-loving West. Esoterics adm it this statistical point, but insist thatprofundity is not dete rm ined by head cou nt. W orkm en can under-stand nature in ways that are fully adequate for practical purposeswithout knowing the Einsteinian (or even Newtonian) laws by which itworks.

1 5 "Exoterism is the necessary basis of esoterism" (Frithjof Schuon, in Nasr 1986 121).


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The standard consequential charges against the perennial philoso-phy are that it devalues matter, history, the human self (in both its

individual and com m una l poles), and G od's personal aspect. Th e eso-teric disclaims these charges; after all, the dictum that "samsara is nir-vana " pays the phen om ena l world no small com plimen t. Th e esotericsees nothing in his/her philosophy to prevent appreciation of the reali-ties in question as much as his/her exoteric brothers and sisters, whileat the same time recognizing that there are things that exceed thosequalified and provisional realities. One does not need to be ignorant ofthings be tte r th an choco late to enjoy chocolate as m uc h as a four-year-old.

The Perennial Typology

I beg an by pointing out that in aiming his critique of the pe rennia lphilosophy at mystical identities, Katz sets out on the wrong foot.W hat is pe ren nia l (which is to say "no m atte r w he re or wh en") for th atphilosophy is, first, God (or the Godhead/Absolute if one prefers), andsecond, the generic human capacity to ascertain truths aboutHim/Her / I t .

Of these tru ths, or discernm ents as I early spoke of the m , the mostim portant is God 's ultimacy as com pare d w ith the w orld's lackthereof.The Real and the (comparatively) unreal, the Absolute and the rela-tive, Infinite and finite, Noumena and phenomena, appearance andRealityeverywhere we find this distinction emphatically drawn.

As all traditions consider the capitalized terms in the pairs to beultimately ineffable, this seems to rule out the possibility of cross-cul-tural differences in charac terizing the m . To nam e nam es; is it possi-ble, in the face of their unanimous countermand to all culturally-mediated, conceptual, reified representations, to saddle the Kabbalah's'en-sof, Eckhart 's Godhead, Nirguna Brahman, Nirvana, and the Taothat cannot be spoken, with predicates that distinguish them fromtheir counterparts?

Strictly speaking, this negative, apophatic,neti-neti aspect of theAbsolutemetaphysically counterpart of the unmediated mysticalexperience that Katz goes afteris the only point where perennialists

see the traditions con verg ing indistinguishably. Therea fter revelationfractionates like light through a prism, and what the perennial typol-ogy spreads before us is corresponden ces. W heth er on e is m oreimpressed by the similarities that underlie these correspondences(which at eventual levels of abstraction phase into archetypal identi-ties) or by the different ways the arc hetyp es a re clothed in the varioustraditions, depends again on the esoteric/exoteric difference that wasearlier introduced.


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Smith: Perennial Philosophy 565

In any case, the correspondences factor out into a hierarchicalontology such as Arthur Lovejoy tells us "the greater number of sub-

tler speculative minds and great religious teachers . . . through theMiddle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century were to acceptwithout question" (26, 59). Everywhere thoughtful people havesensed the presence of another, more fundamental world underlyingour familiar, quotidian one. And each of these halves-of-being, imma-nent and transcendent, subdivides in turn, producing an embracingtypology of four ontological levels. The phenomenal world dividesinto its visible and invisible sides, the former constituting nature andthe lat ter the spirit world of folk religion. As for the nou m en al w orld,

it has regions the mind can grapple with theologicallythe God ofAbraham, Isaac and Jacob, Allah of the Ninety-nine Names,SagunaBrahman, the Buddha'sSambhoga-kaya, and the Tao that can be spo-kenand abysmal depths, alluded to above, that baffle the mind'sapproach.

REFERENCES

Conze, Edward1967

Dreyfus, Hubert1985

Gilson, Etienne1937

James, William1902

Katz, Steven T.1978

1982, ed.

1985

Knitter, Paul F.1985

Buddhist Thought in India. Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press.

"Holism and Hermeneutics," inHermeneutics and Praxis.Ed. by Robert Hollinger. Notre Da me: University of No-tre Dame Press.

Medieval Universalism. New York: Sheed and Ward.

The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York:Longmans, Green and Company.

"Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism," inMysticismand Philosophical Analysis. Ed. by Steven T. Katz. NewYork: Oxford University Press.Mysticism and Religious Traditions. New York: OxfordUniversity Press."Recent Work on Mysticism,"History of Religions 25:76-86.

No Other Name? Mayknoll, NY: Orbis Books.


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Kripke, Saul1983 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.

Kung, Hans1986 Christianity and the World Religions. New York:

Doubleday and Co.

Lindbeck, George A.1984 The Nature of Doctrine. Philadelphia: The Westminster

Press.

Lovejoy, Arthur O.1936, 1964 The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard Universi-ty Press.

Merrell-Wolff, Franklin1973 The Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object. New

York: Julian Press.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein1981 Knowledge and the Sacred. New York: Crossroad.

1986, ed. The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon. Amity, NY:Amity House.

Prabhavananda, Swami, and Christopher Isherwood (trs.)1944 The Bhagavad-Gita. New York: New American Library.

Rorty, Richard1986 "Fro m Logic to Langu age to Play,"Proceedings of the

American Philosophical Association59:747-753.

Smith, Huston1976 Forgotten Truth. New York: Harper and Row.

Stace, W.T.1986 Mysticism and Philosophy. Los Angeles: Jeremy P.

Tarcher, Inc.

Thomas, Owen C.1986 "Christianity and the Pe renn ial Philosophy,"Theology

Today 42:259-266.

Wood, Charles M.1985 Review of Lindbe ck inReligious Studies Review11:235-

240.

Zaehner, R.C.1961 Mysticism- Sacred and Profane. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.


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