Orthodox Reflections

In an essay posted 2 April 2024, Father Peter Heers presented some thoughts on the future of religion in the world vis-à-vis perennialism.  For those unfamiliar with this religious system, Fr Peter gives a brief outline of it:

Perennialist doctrine teaches that each religion has a formal, institutional aspect, which is the respective religion’s exoteric aspect, where they differ most profoundly; and each religion has an esoteric aspect, which exists in the spiritual methods of the religions, where they seem to draw closer together, and may even reach a point of identity.

He then goes on to explain its main tenets:

The perennialist view of religion turns on the axiomatic notion of multiple and diverse Revelations, “which ‘crystallize’ and ‘actualize’ in different degrees according to the case, a nucleus of certitudes which…abides forever in the divine Omniscience” . 1 But, this begs the question: what is the compelling reason that God wills multiple revelations of Himself which are manifestly divergent and apparently opposed? For Schuon, the reason is that humanity’s divisions require it. Humanity “is divided into several distinct branches, each with its own peculiar traits, psychological and otherwise, which determine its receptivities to truth and shape its apprehension of reality.”2 To these diverse branches, then, God addressed diverse revelations which were shaped by the peculiarities of each grouping of humanity:

“…what determines the differences among forms of Truth is the difference among human receptacles. For thousands of years already humanity has been divided into several fundamentally different branches, which constitute so many complete humanities, more or less closed in on themselves, the existence of spiritual receptacles so different and so original demands differentiated refractions of the one Truth.” 3

Therefore, the Perennialists hold that God has assigned each of the “great world religions” to a specific sector or race of humanity, and “each is fully true in the sense that it provides its adherents with everything they need for reaching the highest or most complete human state.”4 Islam for the Arabs; Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism for the peoples of the Far East, Christianity for the peoples of the West; Judaism for a selection of the Semitic peoples, and so on.

Later on, he also shows what this religious system will bring forth in the world:

Just as the last generation of men will cry out for peace and security precisely due to their lacking it (and then the sword will fall), men who are now crying out for unity (indeed universal unity) — precisely because they lack it — will find it in perennialism, which gives them this unity almost effortlessly (without the Cross and crucifixion of the mind). Like communism, which could not satisfy the longing of men, due to its negative, repressive orientation, modernism’s syncretistic ecumenism does not satisfy men’s longing for a deeper, mystical unity of each man and mankind as a whole. Mankind will demand a robust, traditional and universally acceptable explanation (appealing to Orientals) of how religion does not divide but unites mankind. Perennialism is poised to be the theoretical justification of many Christians (even “orthodox”) for the essential, if transcendent and esoteric, unity of religions under the Antichrist.

Fr Peter’s prediction of the embrace of perennialism is being confirmed in multiple ways.  He noted one in his essay, the statement of the GOA’s Archbishop Elpidophoros:  ‘When you elevate one religion above all others, it is as if you decide there is only one path leading to the top of the mountain. But the truth is you simply cannot see the myriads of paths that lead to the same destination, because you are surrounded by boulders of prejudice that obscure your view.’

More recently, we have the statement of the Roman Catholic Pope Francis about all religions leading to the same ‘God’:  ‘“If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us?” he asked,” according to Crux Now. “There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].”’

And even more curiously, there is now a parallel development in the natural sciences promoting a form of perennialism/pluralism.  It centers around a new form of pantheism, that each world in its totality is essentially a living being with intelligence and will (Adam Frank, writing for Noēma):

Understanding that life had the power to change an entire planet’s atmosphere was Lovelock’s lasting contribution to Astro biological science. But more than just an experimental method, Lovelock’s insight into the power of biospheres was also the basis for his invention of “Gaia theory.”

Originally called “Self-regulating Earth System Theory,” Gaia theory argues that life on Earth co-opted the planet for its own ends. Specifically, and as we will see, throughout the planet’s history, the biosphere has exerted strong feedbacks on the non-living parts of the planet. These feedbacks maintain the world in a habitable state. Human bodies keep their temperatures at an average of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit regardless of outside conditions. Lovelock was arguing that planets with biospheres achieve a similar kind of homeostasis: They self-regulate.

These living planets, god-like, give themselves a telos, an end goal – a healthy environmental equilibrium (Greta Thunberg would no doubt approve), which is described with a suitably pseudo-mythological term, ‘autopoiesis’:

This kind of self-organization was important enough to be given its own name by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela: “autopoiesis.” To be autopoietic is to be self-creating and self-maintaining. It is the essential strange loop that makes life a complex adaptive system and makes complex systems so different from everything science has attempted to understand before.

Autopoiesis and self-organization are why it’s natural to describe complex adaptive systems in terms of teleology. They clearly have goals. The goals might be rudimentary, as in the process of microbial chemotaxis. This is where single-celled organisms recognize and move up gradients of nutrients. In this case, the goal is just to endure, to keep on living. But the teleologies of complex adaptive systems can also be highly structured as in a society that seeks to increase access to healthcare for its citizens. The key point is that life, through the lens of complex adaptive systems, is never blindly bumping into its environment. Instead, such systems can be usefully described as agents who embody some degree of knowing about their environments and their own internal states.

 . . . A biosphere that achieves self-organization and autopoiesis has become mature. Through collective webs of life, mature biospheres actively maintain rather than degrade the conditions needed for their own existence. Information flowing through and being used by these living networks means we can think of a mature biosphere as a collective that holds knowledge of its own state and responds to changes in that state and the environment. Mature biospheres “know” something and use that knowing to maintain their own planetary-scale viability across geologic time.

 . . . What is essentially new and different with mature techno signatures (which is what makes them so exciting for Astro biological science) is that teleology is explicit in their emergence. A species becomes planetary when it first constructs a technosphere, even an immature one. But by recognizing the consequences of their own power in building such a planet-spanning technological system, any species that goes on to evolve their technosphere to maturity has built intention and goal into the new form their coupled planetary systems will take. By explicitly embodying teleology and meaning in this way, a mature techno signature represents the full completion of the Gaian potential, a planet awakened to itself.

 . . . A mature technosphere is the ultimate goal of the planetary. It would be a re-emergence of planetary intelligence as it followed the organizational design of the mature biosphere which preceded it. But how would that kind of technosphere organize its material, energetic and informational structures? The essential innovation is that those structures would make it impossible to degrade the technosphere’s capacity for self-maintenance. Better yet, it would make such degradation unthinkable.

And then we arrive at the mirror of perennialism in this new worldview of The Planetary, ‘epistemic pluralism’.  Notice the similarity to religious perennialism – each culture has its own narrative/cosmology (something like its founding myths or book of holy writings):

Rooting a new world system in the cosmology of the planetary also takes us into entirely new territory in the stories we tell about what we know and who knows it. Singular “Theories of Everything” were a demand of the older materialistic, mechanistic cosmology. The planetary does not require such totalizing narratives to be taken from a single perspective. There is an epistemic pluralism inherent in the planetary because it recognizes that phenomena can always be seen from multiple standpoints.

This view is built directly into Complexity Science, which relies on many paradigms of research focus and method. Each of these can tell different kinds of stories about the same question. As the complexity theorist David Krakauer writes, “complexity science should help us understand why a plurality of paradigms is not only of utility but is inevitable.”

There is, therefore, no one culture or cultural history that can establish hegemony over others in the planetary. This is also how it can escape what philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour identified as the source of previous ecological movements’ political ineffectiveness. By embracing the multiple perspectives and multiple scales on which biospheres and technospheres function, the local is never subsumed into the global. There is always a place for people to stand, stand by and stand for. There is home and land with its specifics of life and culture to attach to. The planetary is never disembodied.

In this system, there is the esoteric unity (the unseen life-force pulsing through the biosphere and technosphere) and the exoteric diversity (the many cultures of the world that exist because of the life-force and how they view, understand, and describe it).  Thus, we have ourselves an eerie analog to the religious perennialism Fr Peter presented above.Movie goers frequently absorb perennialist messaging subconsciously from franchises such as Avatar or even Star Wars.  

It would seem, then, that there is good reason for Orthodox Christians to be especially on their guard against perennialism in all its forms.  The devil seems especially keen to promote it and to use at this moment it to destroy folks’ souls.  That being so, let us cleave all the more closely to the Orthodox Church, and be all the more earnest in telling men and women and children about her, the one place on earth where true unity in diversity can be found, known, experienced – and in rejecting the Antichrist’s false imitations.  From Fr Peter, once more:

This idea of God distributing revelations of Himself tailor-made for subsections of humanity, so crucial to the entire perennialist outlook, comes into contradiction to the plane witness of salvation history, beginning with the Day of Pentecost, at which the curse of Babel was overturn and the unity of all the races of men was actualized in Christ. In Christ the “dividing wall” was overcome and “so many humanities” were united, sharing as they do the one human nature which Christ put on and now sits at the right hand of the Father. As Fr. George Florovsky writes:

The Church is completeness itself; it is the continuation and the fulfilment of the theanthropic union. The Church is transfigured and regenerated mankind. The meaning of this regeneration and transfiguration is that in the Church mankind becomes one unity, “in one body.” The life of the Church is unity and union. The body is “knit together” and “increaseth” in unity of Spirit, in unity of love. The realm of the Church is unity. And of course this unity is no outward one, but is inner, intimate, organic. It is the unity of the living body, the unity of the organism. The Church is a unity not only in the sense that it is one and unique; it is a unity, first of all, because its very being consists in reuniting separated and divided mankind. It is this unity which is the “sobornost” or catholicity of the Church. In the Church humanity passes over into another plane, begins a new manner of existence. 5

–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland.  His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.