The Perennial Philosophy

Extract

Mr Aldous Huxley once wrote an essay on vulgarity in literature. But literature reflects human life; and implicitly he has written many books on vulgarity in human life, on the squalor of humanity. The figures of the fifth Earl of Gonister and his companions at the end of After Many a Summer, undying and unliving, intolerable in their sordid brutishness, represent something that recurs again and again in different forms in his works. ‘Vivre?’ he quoted in Vulgarity in Literature, ‘nos valets le feront pour nous’. That disgust with life, and in particular with the corporeal, still seems to lie at the root of his view of reality; and to colour his approach to Reality.

Some critics of The Perennial Philosophy have waxed indignant at the idea of describing as philosophy a book in which Plato and Aristotle are barely mentioned; others have taken the opposite line, and vindicated the author by viewing western philosophy as pseudophilosophy because of its exclusive reliance on discursive reasoning: if the way to knowledge of Reality is humility, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, how can we describe as philosophers, as ‘lovers of wisdom’, any but those who take this way? The truth surely lies midway between these two extremes. As some of the great Christian mystics have shown in their own lives, there are three wisdoms: the natural investigations of reason, the study of theology, the direct mystical awareness of God; and they can each be valid and valuable in their own spheres, and each help and fortify the others.