Seven Ways of Looking at Religion: The Major Narratives by Benjamin Schewel

Author:Benjamin Schewel [Schewel, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300218473
Google: jaAzDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300218478
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:39:06.162000+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Perennial Narrative

THE PERENNIAL NARRATIVE CLAIMS that all religions exhibit common characteristics. For some, the word “perennial” immediately calls to mind the school of thought known as philosophia perennis or perennial philosophy, which argues that all great religious thinkers have uncovered a single system of thought. Beginning with the Christian engagement with Neoplatonic thought, perennial philosophy expanded during the modern period to include a broader range of sources through the efforts of philosophers, theosophical occultists, neo-Vedantists, advocates of the Traditionalist School, and scholars of comparative religion. Yet the domain of the perennial narrative exceeds that of perennial philosophy per se. Figures like John Hick and Rudolf Otto, for example, use the perennial narrative framework to argue that all the world’s religions conceptualize the same spiritual reality differently. Likewise, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and countless dharmic thinkers argue that human subjectivity displays a cyclical pattern of religious existence, while Ibn Khaldūn and Arnold Toynbee see a perennial pattern in the rise and fall of religious civilizations.1

In striving to understand the distinctive features of the perennial narrative, it is important to appreciate its resonances with several other narrative frameworks considered in this work. Thus, for example, a perennial narrative that describes humanity as locked in a cycle of spiritual decline and renewal would likely lend itself to an interpretation of the current period of history as one in which we have fallen away from the eternal truth and now require some kind of spiritual rebirth, bringing us close to Alasdair MacIntyre’s and Martin Heidegger’s renewal narratives. Alternatively, a perennial narrative claiming that, after a period of blindness, modern science is beginning to rediscover the eternal spiritual truths that were known by earlier generations correlates with Alfred North Whitehead’s postnaturalist narrative. And a perennial narrative that views human history as the gradual expression of certain spiritual ideals resonates with the development narrative that we will see Karl Jaspers discuss in the subsequent chapter. Thus, while the perennial narrative framework does retain a distinct overall tone—it concentrates on the phenomena of perpetuity and recurrence within religious history, and not on those of renewal or development, or the postnaturalistic transformation of modern science—we should not view it as a perspective endorsed only by esotericists and New Age enthusiasts.

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