Intimations of the Word
Is There a Universal Grammar of Religion?
by Henry Rosemont, Jr. & Huston Smith
Open Court Publishing Co., 2008
(110 pages, $19.95, paperback)
reviewed by Addison H. Hart
In his Retractions (I.13.3), St. Augustine wrote: “That which today is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and has never ceased to exist from the origin of the human race, until the time when Christ himself came, and men began to call ‘Christian’ the true religion which already existed beforehand.”
This daring statement was not really quite so daring when Augustine wrote it as perhaps it might appear to some Christians today. After all, his was an intellectual position vis-à-vis other philosophies and religions with which many—though not all—of the Fathers of the Church would have agreed without qualms. It was commonplace both to adhere to the definitive realization of truth in the gospel of Jesus Christ and, at the same time, to maintain that the formerly “hidden” truth had been glimpsed, however dimly or clearly, in the spiritual aspirations and traditions of mankind.
Obviously, for Augustine and other Fathers of similar opinion, what was primarily in mind regarding this dimmer and more general realization of truth was the Greek and Roman philosophical heritage, but most likely it included some limited knowledge of Persian, Egyptian, and Indian traditions as well.
The point is that Augustine and other great Christian intellects would have had no difficulty with the notion of a “perennial philosophy” or a “perennial wisdom” or even a “perennial religion” (the latter two designations being advanced decades ago by Frithjof Schuon). Or, to use the terminology of the interesting book here reviewed, Augustine could well have affirmed the idea of a “universal grammar of religion.”
Friends & Influences
This slim volume, based on a series of exchanges between the eminent scholar of world religions, Huston Smith, and the philosopher Henry Rosemont, Jr. (himself an atheist—in the most respectable sense of that term—and an authority on Confucianism), is also indebted to the linguistic studies of Noam Chomsky. All three—Smith, Rosemont, and Chomsky—were in fact formerly colleagues at M.I.T., and so there is in these pages both a warm exchange between two old friends, and the “invisible presence,” so to speak, of a third party, whose insights permeate the discussion throughout.
If one reads closely, it’s also possible to detect quite frequently in the background the spectre of William James, that seminal influence on all subsequent religious studies (especially in the positions taken by Rosemont, but also in Smith’s), as well as such “perennial philosophy” thinkers as Aldous Huxley and the aforementioned Frithjof Schuon (all three names show up explicitly in the text).
Put simply, Noam Chomsky proposed that human beings learn their native languages and dialects to a great extent independently of their intelligence or motivation and without formal instruction. This fact, gained by intensive research in linguistics, indicates that
structure dependence and other principles of Universal Grammar must be innate in the human mind, and unlike the principles and rules of physics, chess, or geology, which must be formally taught—these principles are uniform throughout the species, not for English speakers alone, yet they can be ascertained just from the study of English (or any other natural language).
Addison H. Hart is retired from active ministry as parish priest and university chaplain. He is the author of Knowing Darkness: On Skepticism, Melancholy, Friendship, and God and The Yoke of Jesus: A School for the Soul in Solitude (both from Eerdmans). His forthcoming book is a study of the Sermon on the Mount. He lives and writes in Norheimsund, Norway.
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