Scott Russell Sanders

Aldous Huxley, best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World, wrote some fifty other books, none more challenging and rewarding than The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology of mystical writings accompanied by his extensive commentary. Published i

Aldous Huxley, best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World, wrote some fifty other books, none more challenging and rewarding than The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology of mystical writings accompanied by his extensive commentary. Published in 1945, at the end of World War II, the book may be read as an antidote to the ideologies that led to the most widespread slaughter in human history. Those ideologies provoked violence by dividing people into allies and enemies based on race, class, religion, politics, nationality, and other factors. According to the perennial philosophy, such divisions are superficial or illusory, no excuse for genocide or war, because humans all arise from the same source, and so does everything else in existence. In the Introduction, Huxley sums up this unifying vision as “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being” (vii).

To make that abstract description more tangible, imagine the ultimate reality as a vast ocean in which waves constantly arise, move along the surface for a spell, and then dissolve. We are all waves in that ocean, and so is every other creature, every planet, every star. Each seemingly separate thing in the universe is a temporary form, a manifestation of a single, all-encompassing power. In the world’s cultures, this power goes by a thousand and one names, such as “God,” “Allah,” “Brahman,” “Tao,” “Dharma,” “Spirit,” “Creator,” and “Nature,” but these names are only pointers, not to be mistaken for the source of being itself. The mystics and seekers and saints whose words Huxley gathered into this book testify that “the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being” can be experienced, glimpsed, directly known, but it cannot be captured in words. Nor can it be weighed or measured as the material world can be. It does not register on meters, does not show up in microscopes or telescopes.

Because the perennial philosophy cannot be tested by the methods of science, it is easily dismissed by those who embrace a scientific worldview. Huxley realized this, of course, but he also knew that scientific discoveries had been harnessed to create the weaponry and technology wreaking havoc during World War II. Science itself provided no ethic, no compelling morality, to say why the atom should not be split, why cities should not be obliterated, why bullets and bombs and poison gas should not be used to murder millions of people. In order to explain why they are appalled by war and genocide, scientists must appeal to values not subject to measurement or proof by the methods of science. There is no meter to gauge the value of a life or a city. There is no laboratory test to determine whether human captives should be subjected to medical experiments. To decide such moral questions, one must look elsewhere, as Huxley did by studying the world’s spiritual traditions. What he found, and recorded in The Perennial Philosophy, was a worldwide and ages old wisdom that could offer guidance for peaceful coexistence in a world armed to the teeth with the legacy of scientific discoveries.

In the eighty years since the end of World War II, weapons have become ever more lethal. Today, the United States alone possesses some 5,000 nuclear warheads, far more than enough to wipe out complex life on Earth. Meanwhile, electronic media have spread the virus of human prejudice and hatred around the globe, provoking conflict at every scale, from households to cities to nations. Technology, coupled with a swelling human population, has enabled us to pollute the land and waters and air, destabilize the atmosphere, and drive countless other species to extinction. Against this unfolding catastrophe, books seem like feeble defenses, but the wisdom that is to be found in their pages, as in The Perennial Philosophy may inspire the courage and moral vision necessary for mending the broken world.

Through a series of books published over four decades, New Testament scholar Marcus Borg (1942-2015) has helped readers reimagine Christianity for a scientific and multicultural age. He was suffering from a progressive lung disease as he wrote Convic

Through a series of books published over four decades, New Testament scholar Marcus Borg (1942-2015) has helped readers reimagine Christianity for a scientific and multicultural age. He was suffering from a progressive lung disease as he wrote Convictions, so he may well have considered it a last testament, a summing-up of his insights into the ancient Jewish prophet known as Jesus. Borg describes the historical Jesus not as a deity but as a human being uniquely open to God. The God revealed by this “spirit person” is compassionate, forgiving, and loving, in contrast to the image Borg had formed from his Lutheran upbringing of a judgmental, distant Patriarch. To follow Jesus is to emulate those qualities, to be compassionate, make peace, seek justice, serve the needy.

Espousing such values in the profoundly unjust, violent Roman Empire marked Jesus as a revolutionary, Borg argues. By envisioning a world ruled by a loving God rather than a cruel Emperor, and by championing the needs of the poor while condemning the excesses of the rich, Jesus threatened both the political and religious regimes. This led to his public execution, displayed on a cross, as a warning to others who might threaten the social order. Did he rise from the dead? Borg declares himself to be agnostic about the possibility of life after death, for Jesus or for anyone. Thus he challenges those whose prime motive for declaring themselves Christians is the hope of spending eternity in paradise. Borg derives from his study of Jesus a moral vision for this life, not for a life that might or might not come later.

Much as I admire Borg’s moral vision, I consider his range of sources to be too narrow, too focused on one religious tradition, too firmly anchored in ancient events. In Jesus’s day, humans knew of only a single planet, this beautiful Earth, which they understood to be at the center of Creation, orbited by sun and moon, surrounded by a dome of glowing pinprick stars. Thus, early Christians could imagine that our species and our earthly home were the focus of God’s concern. We now realize there are billions of galaxies, trillions of stars and planets. We know that the cosmos evolved for billions of years before life appeared on Earth, and life evolved on this planet for several billion more years before humans emerged. As latecomers to this cosmic show, we are clearly not the point of it all. Nor are we the focus of concern for whatever power created and sustains the cosmos.

As our understanding of the universe has expanded, so our religions need to expand their search for truth if they are to offer us guidance today. They cannot rely exclusively on stories hundreds or thousands of years old, stories featuring humans as the only actors and Earth as the only stage. I believe Marcus Borg pointed a way to this larger perspective, one that encompasses the entire universe, including our current understanding of how it evolved and how it works. In one of his earlier books, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, he described experiences he recognized as bouts of “nature mysticism,” “moments of transformed perception in which the earth is seen as ‘filled with the glory of God,’ shining with a radiant presence” (p. 14). Whether or not we attribute the glory to God, it’s there to behold in nature at all scales, from quarks to quasars, from a monarch butterfly nectaring on milkweed in the backyard to a nebula hosting a nursery of stars millions of light-years away. Nature is the newest as well as the oldest scripture. Among recent and contemporary American writers who ground a moral vision in nature, here are a few of my favorites: Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, John Hay, Barry Lopez, Thomas Merton, Kathleen Dean Moore, Mary Oliver, Chet Raymo, Pattiann Rogers, and Terry Tempest Williams.

This was the first of several books by New Testament scholar Marcus Borg (1942-2015) I’ve read, all of them cogent and illuminating. They have inspired me to reimagine the Christianity I absorbed as a boy from reading the Bible and attending services

This was the first of several books by New Testament scholar Marcus Borg (1942-2015) I’ve read, all of them cogent and illuminating. They have inspired me to reimagine the Christianity I absorbed as a boy from reading the Bible and attending services in Methodist churches, and they have helped me to reconcile my religious intuitions with my embrace of a scientific worldview. Borg himself, after drifting away from the Lutheran religion of his youth into atheism in early adulthood, credits bouts of “nature mysticism” in his mid-thirties as the experiences that “fundamentally changed [his] understanding of God, Jesus, religion, and Christianity. The experiences were marked by what the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel called ‘radical amazement,’ moments of transformed perception in which the earth is seen as ‘filled with the glory of God,’ shining with a radiant presence" (p. 14). In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Borg strips away the supernatural legends, including the virgin birth and resurrection; he describes Jesus as a remarkable human being, a prophet, a seer, a “spirit person” who revealed through his life and teaching aspects of the nature of God.

The God revealed by Jesus, according to Borg, is not an alien being observing the universe from outside, but the Ground of Being itself, the source and sustainer of all things, the enveloping and permeating mystery in which we live and breathe. Jesus did not preach in order to make claims about himself, nor to be worshipped, but to call his followers to seek their own direct relationship with the transcendent Spirit. In doing so, his followers will discover that the defining feature of the Spirit is compassion, and therefore we likewise should be compassionate, in our personal lives and in the way we organize our communities, caring for the poor, the outcasts, the sick, the strangers, making peace where there is strife, using nature with gratitude and respect. This moral vision was at odds with the authoritarian rule of the Roman Empire, as the crowds who followed Jesus well understood, and this defiance led to his execution. Common criminals were jailed or dispatched in private, but those who threatened the imperial system were crucified in public as a warning to other dissidents. You may draw your own parallels with the conduct of authoritarian regimes in our contemporary world.

So to be a Christian, according to Borg, is not to believe certain statements about Jesus, but to seek the intimate relation with the Ground of Being that Jesus knew. The reward for such a life is not a ticket to paradise after death, but enlightenment, an awareness that we are living in heaven right here and now. All mystics, in all religious traditions, have taught the same.

I read this luminous book for the first time in January 1981. Since then, I have reread it about once every five years or so. What keeps drawing me back? I suppose it is Thomas Kelly's unpretentious mysticism, which he expresses in plain language bef

I read this luminous book for the first time in January 1981. Since then, I have reread it about once every five years or so. What keeps drawing me back? I suppose it is Thomas Kelly's unpretentious mysticism, which he expresses in plain language befitting a Quaker. In five brief essays, he recounts experiences that Quakers refer to as "openings," intuitions of the Ground of Being, which he calls by turns the Inner Light, the Christ within, the divine Center, the Inward Principle, or, most conventionally, God. By whatever name, or no name, the transcendent dimension that Kelly bears witness to is the source of all created things, providing "an eternal relationship which is shared in by every stick and stone and bird and beast and saint and sinner of the universe." These mystical openings are the key to his faith: "The possibility of this experience of Divine Presence, as a repeatedly realized and present fact, and its transforming and transfiguring effect upon all life--this is the central message of Friends. Once discover this glorious secret, this new dimension of life, and we no longer live merely in time but we live also in the Eternal."

I have other, more idiosyncratic reasons for returning to A Testament of Devotion. I know from Douglas Steere's biographical introduction that Thomas Kelly set out to study not religion but chemistry, which happens to be my wife's field of research; he sought to reconcile his spiritual insights with a scientific understanding of the universe, a goal I share; he developed a deep interest in Asian philosophies and in the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, interests that I also share; he liked carpentry, as I do; and he taught for a spell at Earlham College, a fine school here in my home state of Indiana.