Lings Martin - The underlying religion: an introduction to the perennial philosophy

The editors wish to thank the following authors, editors, and publishers for their consent to publish the articles in this anthology.

Afterword: The Revival of Interest in Tradition: Whitall N. Perry, in The Unanimous Tradition: Essays on the Essential Unity of All Reli-gions, edited by Ranjit Fernando, Colombo: Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1991, pp. 3-16.

Whitall N. Perry

Since the concept revival is contingent upon the notion of loss through one way or another of something antecedentin this case Traditionit is necessary if speaking about revival, first to understand in what, exactly, this loss consists.

Religion in the current usage of the term cannot be taken as the equivalent of Tradition, for the ritual practice of Religion is a specific act done in a specific place at a specific time to the exclusion of other acts, places, and times, whereas Tradition by protraction encompasses all acts and places and times, leaving nothing outside of itself; moreover, a great deal of what passes for Religion can still be found in the world, whilst Tradition in its integral and living sense hardly at all survives. Hence it may sound paradoxical to state, as we now do, that Tradition has its origin in Religion. Reduced to a formula: Religion is Revelation from God to man, with Tradition being its application and full extension in every domain.

All Revelation, furthermore, proclaims its authenticity or orthodoxy through participation in the ternary Unity-Infinity-Perfection, these being inseparable attributes of the Absolute. Unity, in that the unique message every great religion promulgates in common with every other is the Reality of God and the illusoriness of the world, with a Way by which man can leave the unreal for the Real. Infinity, in that a plenitude of originality characterizes each revelation to the exclusion of every other: a person in a Buddhist world, for example, could never mistake it for an Islamic one, and vice versa, whereas a heterodox religion betrays its nature through aping the original source or sources from which it has deviated; it has no fresh, spontaneous avataric perfume of its own. As for Perfection, each true religion manifests this through the supranatural beauty of its forms.

Earliest humanityin accordance with all scripture, and counter to what the evolutionists would have us believeparticipated unitively in a Primordial Religion, which was a transparent state of beatitude where human intellection spontaneously duplicated Divine Revelation, or in Biblical parlance, where man spoke with God.

As he lost his unific vision and our cycle of humanity accordingly unfolded, there came the racial divisions, with corresponding revelations adapted to needs of the different periods and sectors of mankind. Those known to us comprise notably Hyperborean shamanism with its Taoist, Bn, and Shinto branches; the shamanism of Siberia and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere; the animistic faiths of Africa and Southeastern Asia; the Indo-Iranian and Indo-European cultures manifesting chiefly in Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Orphism, and the Celto-Germanic religionswith elements from other Near-Eastern groups, mainly Egyptian Hermeticism; and then the Semitic monotheisms or Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

It can happen that traditional forms remain, where their religious context has expired, and the opposite is equally true. Thus, for example, Orphic currents have come down through Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism into the Christian and Arab spheres. Again, Germanic forms have left their traces in European ornamentation, mythologies, superstitionsfrom superstare, meaning something that stands over when the understanding of it has been lostand fairy tales.