Is anyone else here influenced by Perennialism?
Yep.
If so, which thinkers are your main influences?
René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon principally, Marco Pallis and Martin Lings — the former personally (I am Catholic) — and I was luck enough to catch two talks by Martin Lings at the Temenos Academy in London.
Jean Borella and Philip Sherrard.
"Integral Tradition" does not have a human origin and may be considered as principles revealed from Heaven and binding man to his divine origin, or to what Schuon called a "transcendent unity".
But we must acknowledge there is no 'revelation' outside of the great Religions ... so the Religio Perennis is not a religion in its own right, but a secondary and subsequent determination.
Perennialists claim that the historically separated traditions share not only the same divine origin but are based on the same metaphysical principles, sometimes called philosophia perennis.
But this cannot be proved. Guénon regarded Oriental Metaphysics as the
only metaphysics ... again, this is a matter much contended.
The exoteric point of view is characterized by its "sentimental", rather than purely intellectual, nature and remains fairly limited.
We can see now, with the hindsight of time, that Guénon was rather in awe of the East, and assumed no sentimentalism in Asiatic Traditions (he never actually travelled to India), and an over-sentimentalism in the West, which I think had a distorting effect on certain aspects of the Western Traditions. Notably Christianity.
Based on the doctrine of creation and the subsequent duality between God and creation,
That is an error — there is no 'subsequent duality' between God and creation in the Abrahamic Traditions.
exoterism does not offer means to transcend the limitations of the human state.
Again an error. Exoterism offers an access, and indeed the only access, to its complementary and coupled esoterism. So whilst the statement is right on one level, the error of assuming one can access the esoteric without the exoteric is much greater.
Guénon, Schuon and all the Perennialists insist that adherence to a Tradition, on both its esoteric and exoteric forms, are prerequisite of any kind of advancement.
Esoterism has, at least de jure, a total autonomy with respect to religion for its innermost substance is the Primordial Tradition itself.
Here is the error: There is no scripture of the Primordial Tradition, there is no Tradition that calls itself the Primordial Tradition — there are no rites, no rituals ... the Primordial Tradition can only be arrived at if one accepts two or more Traditions as authentic Revelations ... therefore the Primordial Tradition is a synthesis and an abstract construct ... the best, in my book, by far, but still not at the level of religion itself.
Take away all the data affirmed in the Primordial Tradition that comes from Religious Tradition ... and you're left with nothing.
Based on pure metaphysics - by which Guénon means a supra-rational knowledge of the Divine, a gnosis, and not a rationalist system or theological dogma - its goal is the realization of the superior states of being and finally the union between the individual self and the Principle. Guénon calls this union “the Supreme Identity”.
Two points:
There is no such thing as 'pure metaphysics' because any metaphysic is the product of its time and place. There might be better or lesser ... but all is a matter of degree.
To suppose that Guénon did not affirm a morality or the rationality of religion is a nonsense. There is no religion without morality, there is just self-deception.
The Union between man and the "Supreme Identity" is the stated goal of Christianity, its even stated in Christian exoteric texts ... Guénon's failure to see this is part due to his poor education at the hands of Christians, and part due to the influence of his Hindu instructors and his acceptance of their metaphysics as being 'universal'. Guénon believed, for example, that Buddhism was a 'hindu heresy' until Marco Pallis and Martin Lings went to visit him in Cairo to discuss this very point.
it is clear that, very early on, he gave up the idea of a spiritual resurrection of the West on a purely Christian basis.
This is tragically true ... and continues today. The general acceptance by the media that science is 'right' and religion is 'wrong' makes any chance for the Western even harder than for Guénon ... but then he saw 'the signs of the times' and knew what was in store.
To his many correspondents he clearly designated Sufism as a more accessible form of traditional initiation for Westerners eager to find what does not exist any more in the West: an initiatory path of knowledge (Jnana or Gnosis), comparable to Advaita.
It is one blessing at least, that he did not see just how much Western materialism and consumerism would infect and destabilise the Orient, leading to the emergence of a Moslem fundamentalism that has all but stamped out any Moslem intellectualism, or at least driven it underground. The situation is now worse there than it is here.
Conversely, writers such as Borella and Sherrard have investigated Guénon's corpus and brought to light some 'errors' of his and Schuon's perspective.
Of course, in the modern world, founded on post-Enlightenment relativism, the Perennial Tradition is a non-starter ... the only voice in the West that insists on the possibility of Absolute Truth, and the authenticity of metaphysics as a science, is ... the Roman Catholic Church.
Thomas
