A Tale of Two Cities: A Holiness Mystic and an Activist Pentecostal Critique of the Academy (original) (raw)

Hidden and Rejected Knowledge: Frithjof Schuon, Perennialism and the Philosophia Perennis

In 1540 the Augustinian monk, Agostino Steuco published a treatise with the title De Perenni Philosophia which possibly for the first time gave a fixed systematic meaning to an already well developed tradition which had arisen in response to a ‘diabolical dilemma’ within Christianity, namely the presence of ‘pagan’ thought within a culture grounded in revelation. The desire to discover the essential unity of theology and philosophy has always remained strong and is perhaps best represented in the 20th century by Frithjof Schuon who has been called one of the greatest expositors of the philosophia perennis. Unfortunately his work has been neglected within academia, particularly within the emergent discipline of western esotericism whose early pioneers attempted to define themselves in contrast to perennialism and through the rejection of metaphysics. This neglect, I will argue, is a consequence of a fundamental tension which lies at the heart of the divergence between those committed to the scientific method, and those who see scientific enquiry as merely one amongst many means to the acquisition of knowledge, which is that the latter do not intend to discover anything new but to merely restate what is already known. This position can be clearly traced through an analysis of the philosophia perennis, and I believe, establishes Schuon’s thought within a greater historical framework.

Advance Access publication January 11, 2006 ARTICLE Theology in Modernity’s Wake

2016

When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gen-der, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion. —Stanley Fish (2005) AS A CONSTRUCTIVE FEMINIST THEOLOGIAN whose work focuses on “the triumvirate ” and draws on “high theory ” including that of Jacques Derrida, this comment from Stanley Fish in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye. I position my comments against that backdrop. We are said to have arrived at the end of moder-nity, a turn of the cosmic clock supposedly marked by such milestones as the death of the subject, the demise of metanarratives, and the loss of con-fidence in reason. Jacques Derrida, among other continental thinkers, is often touted as a harbinger of “postmodernity, ” one mark of which is (ironically, perhaps, given the supposed demise of metanarratives) pur-portedly the return of the religious. ...

First Philosophy in a Post-Christian World

Trudy kafedry bogosloviia Sankt-Peterburgskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii, 2019

The theological turn represents a late stage in Post-Christian European philosophy that sees a revival of Patristics as a means of restoring content to contemporary thought and ways of life. Both post-modernism and these figures oppose the principles of Enlightenment rationality and regard its claim to ’objective knowledge’ as specious. Just as postmodernists see every claim to transcendental reason as concealing dynamics of power and value, the theological turn sees ‘secular’, ‘objective’ knowledge as concealing false gods – aesthetics, axiologies, ontologies – lying under supposedly neutral transcendental claims. Here we will consider how members of a particularly active part of this movement – a group of philosophers and theologians of many Christian denominations that call themselves ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ – iden- tify the problem of secular, non-revelational knowledge. Their solution to it sets them apart from other participants in the ‘theological turn’ and, we will show, Eastern Orthodoxy. The final portion of this essay takes this cri- tique to argue what valid knowledge and a healthy approach to science mean from the perspective of the great Cappadocian theologians and concludes that science, maintaining its origins and end in God, guided by the ascetic disciplines of nepsis and theoria, is valid and free. The critique of Radical Orthodoxy demonstrates that theologians and scientists should not take for granted that they are possessors of this freedom in an age where physicalism has returned a pagan world of randomness and necessity.