PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS AND THE SENSUS CATHOLICUS
Rama P. Coomaraswamy, MD
“The wise man will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients, and will be
occupied in the prophets...”
Ecclesiastes
39: 1-5
It is generally assumed that
there is no room within Christianity for accepting the concept of Sanatana
Dharma, or what in the west has been called philosophia perennis or priscorium.
This Sophia perennis, to use a phrase preferred by Wolfgang Smith holds
that certain metaphysical truths, and hence access to a knowledge of the
divine, have always been available throughout history and are to be found
within the framework of every valid religious tradition.
First of all it should be
clear that such a concept in no way contradicts the principle Extra eclesia
nulla salus - that outside the Church there is no salvation. If one understands
this principle in the way the Church has always understood it, one accepts the
fact that there are individuals who, as Saint Pius X put it, belong to the soul
of the Church. Such individuals are “invincibly ignorant” of the manifest
Church, and certainly before the coming of Christ, the ark of salvation had to
take other forms.
It is also necessary to
consider history, not as a progressive advance from primitive times to the
present “enlightened” era but more realistically as a continuous degeneration
from a former golden age. Adam’s fall from paradise is a paradigm for
understanding the present situation. God did not abandon His creation and Adam
found regeneration, and is indeed considered by the Church to be a saint. In
ancient days, saving revelation, in accordance with man’s more “direct”
apprehension of truth, was appropriately more “simple. With each succeeding
“fall,” God provided more stringent requirements for man to follow if he sought
to reverse the process of degeneration, until the time of Moses when the rules
required encompassed every aspect of life. This is well reflected in the
Sacrifice of Abel, followed by that of Abraham, and finally by that established
through the medium of Moses. Yet throughout all this we have the Sacrifice of Melchisedech,
renewed once again in Christ.
Such an attitude is not a carte
blanche for every religion that comes down the pike. If salvation is
possible outside of the formal structure of the Church, as must have been the
case at least before the coming of Christ, one must remember that one cannot be
saved by error. It is Truth alone that saves. And so it follows that salvation
comes to us by the Divine Logos which Logos exists and existed from the
beginning of time, for “in the beginning was the Word.” [1]
The early Church fathers were
faced with the plethora of old religious forms which were degenerate in the
extreme. They followed one of two courses. They either declared that
Christianity had the fullness of the Truth and that therefore there was no need
to look elsewhere, or they held that all truth, no matter where it was found,
belonged to the integrity of the Faith, and was therefore to be accepted,
absorbed, and embraced. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, quoting St. Ambrose, “all
truth, no matter where it is found, has the Holy Spirit for its author.” In a
similar manner, St. Jerome all but adopted the Buddha’s life story and
Christianized it as we have in the hagiographical account of.St Josephat.
Catholic Saints have
recognized this reality throughout the centuries. St. Justus referred to Heraclitus as “a Christian
before Christ,” and Eckhart spoke of an ancient sage in the following terms:
“One of our most ancient philosophers who found the truth long, long before
God’s birth ere ever there was a Christian faith at all as it is now.” St.
Thomas of Villenova taught the same doctrine: “Our religion is from the
beginning of the world. A great Christian was Abraham; a great Christian was
Moses; so also David and all the patriarchs. They adored the same God, believed
the same mysteries and expected the same resurrection and judgment. They had
the same precepts, manners, affections, desires, thoughts, and modes of life;
so that if you saw Abraham, and Moses, and David with Peter and Andrew and
Augustine and Jerome, you would observe, in all essential things, a perfect
identity.”[2] One could multiply such quotations but such serves no
purpose as long as the principles are understood.
Against this we seemingly
have Augustine’s retraction which he wrote at the end of his life in an attempt
to correct any misunderstanding that his works might lead to. This Retraction
runs as follows: “The very thing that is now called the Christian religion was
not wanting among the ancients from the beginning of the human race, until
Christ came in the flesh, after which the true religion, which had already
existed, began to be called ‘Christian.’[3]
A closer examination of this
retraction however requires an understanding of its reference. The earlier
statement occurs in a passage of De Vera Religione (X.19) wherein
Augustine explains that “the soul, crushed by the sins which envelope it, would
be unable to rise towards the divine realities unless there was found within
the human sphere something which would allow man to rise from the earthly life,
and to renew in himself the image of God. For this reason God, in his infinite
mercy, has established a temporal means by which men may be recalled to their
original perfection, and by which God comes to the help of each particular
individual and of the human race.” St. Augustine then adds: “That is in our
times the Christian religion, to know and to follow which is the most secure
and certain salvation.”
In passing it should be noted
that Augustine speaks of the “human race,” and not just of the Jewish religion
with which of course Christianity has a very close connections. Again, St
Justin stated: “God is the Word of whom the whole human race are partakers, and
those who lived according to Reason are Christians even though accounted
atheists.” He included in these, not only Heraclitus, but also Socrates and
Abraham.
It was this last sentence
that Augustine wished to clarify, explaining that in his retraction he had made
use of the term “Christian religion” but had failed to express the reality
which lies behind the name. To quote him again, “It is said according to this
name, not in accord with the thing itself, of which is the name.” . To make
this even clearer Augustine adds: “When, in fact, following the resurrection
and ascension into heaven, the Apostles began to preach and many persons came to
believe, it was among the people of Antioch - so it is written - that the
disciples were first called Christians. This is the reason why I said, ‘That is
in our times the Christian religion’; not because in earlier times it did not
exist, but because in later times this name was accepted.”
And so it is that it is
possible for a Catholic to hold to the position usually described as “perennial
or universal philosophy.” The only requirement is that he hold to it as a
Catholic who accepts all the teachings of the Church as encompassed in the
traditional Magisterium, and this for the simple reason that if one steps
outside the Magisterium and entertains one’s own personal opinion as being
“true,” one contradicts all that the sanatana dharma holds sacred.[4]
All this has little to do
with the false ecumenism that seems to pervade the atmosphere in our days, an
ecumenism that would accept not only Protestantism, but every new age deviation
imaginable on - as Vatican II puts it - “on an equal footing.” This ecumenical
outreach often extends itself to Eastern religions where those responsible have
little true knowledge and understanding. For example, many will speak of the
Trinity in Hinduism as being represented by the exclamation of sat chit
ananda - which is perhaps best translated as being, knowledge and bliss -
names of God equivalent in Islam to qudrah, hikmah and rahmah.. The Hindu Trinity of Powers consists of the
solar Father above, a fiery Son on earth (whence he ascends to heaven), and the
Gale of their common spiration. St. Frances of Sales warned against those who
speak of other religions without adequate knowledge, and indeed, even for those
familiar with their own theological terminology (which is rare among current
scholars), would have difficulty in understanding ways of expression foreign to
their intellectual world.[5]
And so it is that we as
faithful Christians can, and indeed must accept the idea of a sophia
perennis. Wisdom has always been there, it is Christ, the Word made flesh
who opens the door and the Church which gives us access to it.
II
An important consequence
follows from the above principles. If there is indeed truths to be found in
other religions, these truths may serve to clarify some of the obscurities we
encounter within our own. In the words of Thomas Aquinas, they can become
“extrinsic and probable proofs” of the truths of Christianity. With this in
mind, I offer in what follows a study by Ananda Coomaraswamy on a passage in
Isaiah: “there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower
shall rise up out of his root. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him:
the spirit of wisdom and of understanding...”
THE TREE OF JESSE AND
ORIENTAL PARALLELS[6]
The chapter on this subject
in Arthur Watson’s admirable and long awaited monograph on the Early
Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (Oxford, 1934) is of particular interest. Let
me say in the first place that although the formula appears rather suddenly in
Christian art in the eleventh century, I have no wish to demonstrate or even to
argue for an Indian or otherwise specifically Oriental origin at that time, my
view being rather that we have a single example of the many close parallels
between mediaeval Christian and Oriental thought and symbolism which are best
understood by an ultimate derivation of both from a common source (of which our
earliest knowledge is, perhaps, Sumerian); diversities of formulation
representing as it were the dialects of one spiritual tradition common to
humanity[7]. From this point of views there is no difficulty in
assimilating Isaiah XI, 1-3 to the Vedic texts cited in my Tree of Jesse and
Indian Parallels or Sources” (Art Bulletin, Vol. XI)[8] without suggesting any derivation of one text from
the other. In just the same way Exodus XIV corresponds to Rg. Veda III, 33 and
VII, 18 (in both cases the chosen people cross the Waters in chariots, the
waters lending themselves to easy passage, while the enemy attempting to follow
is destroyed by the returning torrent); and Genesis, 1, 2 especially as
understood by some mediaeval writers, e.g. Ulrich Emngelberti “the Spirit of
God moves over the Waters warming (fovens) and forming all things,[9] with Aitareya Aranyaka, II, 4, 3 “He glowed
upon the Waters and from the Waters that were set aglow a form was born,” and
ib. II, 2, 1, “He who glows is the Spiritus.”
Parallels of this sort could be indefinitely multiplied and cannot be
accidental.
Certain of the problems can
be very profitably envisaged from this point of view. We hold for example that
the Vedic Tree proceeding from the navel of Varuna (deity preeminently of the
waters), the Mahabharata conception of the Birth of Brahma (and corresponding
iconography, the lotus rising from the navel of Narayana, who rests in and upon
the Waters), and the Bazaklik representation (in which the lotus-Tree rises
directly from the Waters)[10] are all true parallels of the Tree of Jesse, which
presents an analogous range of variations and if none of the latter (unless
possibly Watson’s Pl. II, which in any case exhibits “the tree as having a
deeper root than Jesse himself”) shows the Waters, the same applies to the
Burmese representation (Watson’s Pl.. XXXIX) and some others where there is no
express indication of the underlying Waters. Needless to say that the Waters
stand for potentiality as distinguished from act, and it makes little
difference whether the roots of the Tree are represented as outspread in the
Waters themselves, or in a Ground, whether anthropomorphic or otherwise, that
rests upon or in the Waters; in either case, both Ground and Waters are to be
understood. The variety in formulation in this respect appears already in the Rg.Veda;
in I, 182, 7 “the Tree stands in the midst of the Flood” (this corresponds to
the Haoma-tree that is in the midst of Vourukasha, where the kar-fish
swims, in Zoroastrian tradition, Bundahis XVIII, Yusna XLII, 4,
etc.); in I, 24, 7 “its Ground is above,” its oriflames or branches tending
downwards, upari budhna here, and urdhva mula in Katha Up.,
VI, 1 corresponding to Boccacio’s “Genealogical Tree of the Gods” in celum
versa, radice cited by Watson, p. 45, and to the Zohar passage at the
beginning of the section Beha Alotheka, “Now the Tree of Life extends from
above downwards, and it is the Sun which illuminates all.” Again in the Gupta
representation at Deogarth the stem of the lotus that supports Brahma is not
directly connected with the navel of Narayana,. But rises behind him, and this
often happens in the representations of the Tree of Jesse. Still, the
connection of the root with the navel is, even correct formulation, and this
will be evident, if we reflect that the “stem” after all represents the
fruition of the “seed” of Jesse, as is especially evident when the Tree becomes
a veritable genealogy, and that the navel according to all ancient traditions both
Western and Eastern is the progenitive center and a center in every sense of
the word, and as such the starting point of manifestation.
The common significance of
the aOcci3ental and Oriental trees becomes most evident when we recall that the
rose and the lotus are equivalent symbols, and observe that the Christian virga,
often hermeneutically assimilated to “virgo,” is identified with the
Virgin as being the ground of the divine manifestation, just as in Oriental art
the lotus is the earth or ground of any such manifestation. When in Western art
there are doves on the branches (as in the Dijon MS. Illustration cited by
Kingsley Porter, Art Bulletin, VII, p. 10, Note 2, cf. the mosaic cross
in the fault of the apse of S. Clemente in Rome, where the doves are set in the
shaft and arms of the cross which rises from a flower provided with
proliferating branches like those of the Jesse Tree) this corresponds exactly
to Rg. Veda, I, 164, 21 “There the Fairwings (angels) chant their share of
aeviternity,” Brhadaranyaka Up., IV, 3,2 where “The Swan, the Golden
Person, by the Spirit wards His lower nest,” and Dante, Paradiso, XVIII,
110, “power that is form unto the nests.”
Enough has been said, I
think, to prove that the fundamental ideologies underlying the Eastern and
Western representations are the same; and where borrowing is improbable, and
independent origin unlikely because of the complexity of the symbol itself, the
theory of an ultimately common source can hardly be avoided. Mr., Watson
remarks that “The difficulty in establishing a relationship between Oriental
trees and the Tree of Jesse is that, although we may find striking parallels,
it is difficult or impossible to demonstrate connecting links” (p. 65). The
same difficulty presents itself if we try to connect Isaiah XI, i-3 with the
late mediaeval iconography by documentary links. As to this, we can only say
with Andrae (? Berlin 1933, p. 66) that in fact “a formal symbol can remain
alive not only for millennia, but...it can spring into life again after an
interruption of thousands of years”; and add that, while a symbol as such can
survive mechanically in traditional arts for an indefinite period, the
transmission of sybols together with that of their metaphysical significance
belongs for the most part to oral and initiatory teachings which by their very
nature leave no documentary traces; and it is just because of this that symbols
and their interpretation so often seem to emerge or reemerge simultaneously at
some given moment or in some given place as if from nowhere. In the present
case it is not impossible that the transmission of a doctrine of the Tree of
Jesse had taken place in Kabbalistic circles; the Zohar (e.g. Vo. V, pp.
203,221; in the Simon and Sperling version) is often most informative as to the
Tree of Life or Tres of Life and Death, and that the former is above the latter
may be compared with the Bazaklik representation, in which the lotus grounds of
the mundane and heavenly levels of being are distinguished by position in the
same sense.
The present note is not a
review of Watson’s monograph and cannot pretend to do justice to it as a whole.
Nevertheless, in connection with the Chapter entitled “References in Literature
to Relevant Imagery,” it seems worth while to cite from St. Bernard, De
Adventu Domini, II, 4 “From these passages I think it now manifest what is
the stem proceeding from the root of Jesse, and what is the flower on which
reposeth the Holy Spirit. For the Virgin Mother of God is the stem, her Son the
flower... O Virgin! Stem of the highest, to what a summit thou liftest on high
thy holiness! Even to Him that sitteth on the throne, even to the Lord in His
majesty.... O true tree... O true tree of life, which alone was worthy to bear
the fruit of salvation!” As St. Bernard died A.D. 1153, and the passages cited
being taken from a sermon suggest that the theme cannot have been one
altogether unfamiliar when the sermon was preached, the text is undoubtedly
pertinent to the problem of the iconography; and one may suspect that a
thorough search of the patristic literature would yield more material of the
same sort. An although of later date, reference may be made to Ecklhart’s
sermon No. LXI in the Evans version, in which he says “Our philosophers teach
that the sun draws the flowers out of the roots through the stem, timelessly
wellnigh and too subtly for any eye to follow... Jesse means a fire and a
burning; it signifies the ground of divine love and also the ground of the
soul. Out of this ground the rod grows, i.e. in the purest and highest; it
shoots up out of this virgin soil at the breaking forth of the Son. Upon the
rod opens a flower, the flower of the Holy Ghost.” That “Jesse means a fire”
evidently rests upon some hermeneutic etymology, and one would like to know its
source; in any case, there results an assimilation to the Burning Bush, which
is a form of the Tree of Life, and for which there are also Oriental parallels.
I may be noted that in the Vysehred MS (Watson, p. 83) the rubus igneus
of Moses virgula Aaron, porta clausa of Ezekiel, and virgula Jessa
are shown on two contiguous pages, and as Watson comments “It is clear that
these four subjects have been put together on account of a community of
significance.”
ã
R Coomaraswamy, 2001
[1] If it is argued that Christ’s descent into
“hell” allowed for their salvation, this is only to say that all salvation
comes through the Word, which is indeed Christ. As St. Clement of Alexandria
taught, Christ himself is Wisdom, and that it was his working that showed
itself in the [Old Testament] prophets., and that the same wisdom was taught to
the Apostles while He was present in the flesh. Jean Borella puts it well:
Christianity being the religion ofChrist, is by that very fact the religion of
Gnosis (Wisdom) Incarnate, since the Word is the Gnosis of the Father. Now this
Gnosis Incarnate is also the preeminent spiritual way: “I am the Way, the Truth
and the Life.”Jean Borella, The Gnosis with a True Name in The Secret of the
Christian Way. SUNY, 2001T
[2] De. Nat. Virg. Mar. III
[3] This material is taken from an article by
Stephen Cross entitled St. Augustine and the perennial Philosophy published in
Avaloka, Vol VI, Nos 1&2, 1992 (ISBN0890-5541)
[4] The question of the “infallible” nature of
the Magisterium has currently been called into question. However, as Leo XIII
stated, for the Magisterium to contradict itself is to declare that Christ has
taught error,. Clearly however, one can point to many statements with seemingly
Magisterial authority currently being promulgated that contradicts prior
Magisterial teachings. I discuss this in some detail in an article on my web
page Coomaraswamy-catholic-writings.com.
[5] These failings are by no means limited to
Christianity. Moslems frequently accuse Christianity of being polytheistic
because of their belief in the Trinity, and Hinduism is frequently described as
such which is in fact absurd.
[6] Originally published in Parnassus, Vol. VI,
No. 8, January, 1935.pp. 18-19.(Slightly edited)
[7] As an example of this AKC offers the
following in a footnote. Natya Sastra, II, 5 (Indian 4th Century)
“All the activities of the angels, whether at home in their own places or
abroad in the breaths of life, are intellectually emanated; those of men are put
forth by conscious effort; therefore it is that the works to be done by men are
defined in detail,” with (1) Plotinus, Enneads, IVC, 3, 18 “Souls in the
Supreme operate without reasoning... all their acts must fall into place by
sheer force of their nature,” (2) Gregory, Moral. II, “Angels do not go abroad
in such a manner as to lose the delights of inward contemplation,” (3) St.
Thomas, Sum Theol.,m I. Q. 112 a. 1. Ad 3 “We give ourselves to action through
the sensitive faculties, the action of angel, on the contrary regulates his
exterior actions by the intellectual operation alone, “ (4) Eckhart I, 5, “Man
requires many instruments for his external works; much preparation is needed
ere he can bring them forth as he has imagined them... More exalted are the
angels, who need less means for their works and have fewer images.”
[8] In the Mahabharata (ii, 272, 44 and xii,
207, 13) “As soon as that Eternal Being [Narayana] concentrated thought upon a
New Creation of the Universe a lotus flower immediately came into existence
from His navel and the four-faced Brahma came forth from that navel-lotus.”
Narayana is the supreme deity of the later Vedic period and is effectively
identical with Brahma. Bearing this in mind, we can recognize the tradition
already in the Rg. Veda (x, 82, 5): “Prior to the sky, prior to this
earth, prior to the living gods, what is that germ which the waters held first
and in which all the gods existed? The waters held that same germ in which all
the gods exist/or find themselves; on the navel of the Unborn stood that in
which all beings stood.” Further, in the Athara Veda (x, 7, 38) we have
a description of Brahma as “a great Yaksa” in the midst of creation, lying upon
the sea in penance, therein are set whatever gods there are, like the branches
of a tre round about a trunk.” The conception of a tree of life rooted in
Brahma recurs also in the Katha Upanishad (vi,1): “This eternal fig
tree! That [root] is indeed the Pure. That is Brahma.” It occurs again in a
somewhat different way in the Bhagavad Gita (xv, 1-3). That our tree of
life, in which all beings are set, should be rooted in a naval, whether of
Brahma, Narayana, or Jesse is significant.
[9] De Pulchro, part of the Summa de Bono, see
Gramann in Sitz. Bayer, Akad. Wiss. Phil. Kl., 1926 Abb. 5, p. 82. Ulrich
Engelbert of Strassbrg died A.D. 1277
[10] It is worth nothing that the two dragons kn
otted about the “waist” of the fasces, vajra, or “thunderbolt” which in the
Bazaklik representation divides the upper from the lower range (and corresponds
to the Vedic skamba and Gnostic sthauros that at once divides and connects
Heaven and Earth) are reminiscent of the paired dragons or nagas that guard the
Tree of Life in a well-known Indus Valley seal, often reproduced, e.g. in my
History of Indian and Indonesian Art, Fig. 6, cf Fig 243 in Grunwedel’s
Altbuddhistische Kultstatten in Chinesich-Turkistan. Parallels in Greek mythology
will readily suggest themselves.