Fr. M. C. D'Arcy replies to Aldous Huxley

Published in 1957 The Meeting of Love and Knowledge, Perennial Philosophy by Fr. Martin Cyril D’Arcy (1888 -1976) is a response to Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley published in 1945. Essentially it recognises the magnificent contribution to the quest for wisdom that is inherent in all the great traditions but it resists what it sees as the assimilation of them that might be summed up as ‘many paths, one goal’. Particularly it distinguishes Christianity as being dedicated to a personal relationship with God via the Son. This D’Arcy claims is not a feature of Hinduism and Buddhism:

Huxley tells us that all the great religions advocate self-denial and charity and it is certainly true that in them the silver must be cleaned of its tarnish, the light freed from its smoky shade. But this is not enough. Personality must be stripped from us so that we emerge in our true godhead. Self-denial, therefore, is to be understood literally, and not in the Christian sense of subduing our lower nature to the purposes of the higher and then subduing our will to the will of God. Cui servire regnare est. In other words, there is this difference between the Christian and the Hindu or Buddhist conception of self-denial, that the former aims to keep the person, the latter to dissolve it.

I wrote before about the denial of ‘the personal touch’ in relation to Islam.
God and Allah
Perhaps this is a trope of Christian theological clerical formation that is founded on a limited acquaintance with the everyday practice of the religions in question. It tends to lean on a very narrow band of theory which blinds one to the self-evident. How could you miss Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana Padma Sambhava, Milarepa, Ramakrishna etc.? Devotional literature predominates in all the great traditions.