A definition of the perennial philosophy and its relationship to Psychosynthesis, according to Roberto Assagioli.
By Kenneth Sørensen, MA Psychosynthesis
Editorial note: Research and drafting assistance provided by Claude (Anthropic). All sources, citations, interpretations, and the final text are the author’s own responsibility.
Abstract.
The perennial philosophy is the tradition — traceable in unbroken form from Renaissance Christian Platonism through Leibniz to Aldous Huxley and the twentieth-century transpersonal movement — that holds the world’s contemplative traditions to converge on a shared metaphysical recognition. This article argues that Roberto Assagioli’s metaphysical outlook is most accurately located within that tradition. Drawing on his published books, archival papers, and recorded conversations, it shows how each of the four classical principles of perennialism — the Ground, its dual transcendence and immanence, emanation through a Great Chain of Being, and the path of unitive return — receives explicit formulation in Assagioli’s writings. It also examines the tension between his stated principle of scientific neutrality and his actual personal commitments, arguing that the discrepancy is best resolved by distinguishing Psychosynthesis as a phenomenological method from the perennialist worldview within which Assagioli himself worked.
1. What the Perennial Philosophy Claims
The perennial philosophy — in Latin philosophia perennis, the ever-flowing or enduring philosophy — is the conviction that the world’s contemplative traditions converge on a shared metaphysical recognition: a transcendent and immanent Ground, a graded structure of reality, and a return of the soul to its source. The term was coined by the Italian humanist and Vatican librarian Agostino Steuco in his 1540 treatise De perenni philosophia libri X. Steuco was working in the line of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Florentine Platonists who had argued for a prisca theologia — an ancient theology common to the wisest pagans, the Hebrew prophets, and the Christian revelation. Steuco’s contribution was to give this conviction a name and a programme: there is, he wrote, “one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples.”[1] The term was taken up by Leibniz in the seventeenth century, then lay dormant for two hundred years, then was revived in the twentieth century by Aldous Huxley, whose 1945 anthology The Perennial Philosophy presented the doctrine in the form most familiar today.
Two clarifications matter. First, perennialism is not the claim that all religions are equivalent, or that doctrinal differences can be dissolved by goodwill. As Arthur Versluis puts it: “Perennial philosophy does not mean that all religions are one. Rather, it means that there is an underlying basic shared human metaphysical reality.”[2] The traditions remain distinct in their formulations, rituals, and historical institutions; what they share is a recognition encountered most clearly in their contemplative cores. Second, perennialism is metaphysical before it is comparative. The claim is that reality has a certain structure, and that this structure has been recognised — partially, variably, but recognisably — across cultures and centuries.
Aldous Huxley summarised the working hypothesis as a set of propositions: that there is a Ground or Godhead which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation; that this Ground is at once transcendent and immanent; that human beings can know, love, and ultimately become identified with the Ground; that this realisation is the final end of human existence; and that there is a Way or Dharma to be followed if it is to be reached.
Ken Wilber adds a further structural claim that Huxley left implicit: that reality unfolds through levels of consciousness or planes of being — what Arthur Lovejoy famously called the Great Chain of Being.[3] The Ground does not produce the world by a single creative act; it manifests through graded degrees of differentiation, descending from pure spirit through subtler levels into matter. The return of consciousness to its source is therefore an ascent through the same levels in reverse — what the Neoplatonists called epistrophe, the turning of the soul toward the One.
Across both the Steucan and the Huxleyan formulations, four principles recur as the spine of the tradition:
- There is a transcendent and unmanifested Ground or Spirit behind all manifestation.
- This Ground is both transcendent and immanent — beyond the world and present within it.
- The Spirit manifests the universe through a process of emanation, producing a graded series of inner worlds — the Great Chain of Being — culminating in the physical realm.
- There is a return path by which the soul is unified with its divine source.
These four principles are the working test against which Assagioli’s metaphysical writings can be examined. The argument of this article is that all four are present in his work — not as occasional gestures but as the structural backbone of his understanding of human nature, evolution, and the goal of Psychosynthesis.
2. Assagioli’s Universalist Self-Description
Before turning to the four principles, it is worth letting Assagioli describe his own orientation. In a 1974 conversation with Michael Murphy and Stuart Miller of the Esalen Institute — recorded shortly before his death and now available in the Interview with Roberto Assagioli — Assagioli reflected on the trajectory of his thought:[4]
My attitude since the beginning has been, in a sense, universal, not binding myself to any presentation — if you want to call it philosophical relativism — that there is one universal truth, and that all human presentations are only partial and conditioned by many individual, cultural, historical reasons; but the core is the same in all, and the variations are of less importance.
The reflection is doubly significant. As an autobiography, it traces this orientation back to 1906, when Assagioli was a medical student in Florence, contributing to the journal Leonardo — the very name of which signaled the universalist program of its editors. As philosophy, it states the perennialist thesis exactly: one universal truth, many partial presentations, each conditioned by individual and cultural circumstance, the core nevertheless invariant.
Assagioli emphasized that this universalism was not eclecticism. He noted in the same conversation that broadminded people from many traditions had recognised Psychosynthesis as harmonious with their own: a Jesuit father had pointed out the affinities with St. John of the Cross, a Protestant priest with mainstream Christianity, Hindus with Vedanta. “So,” he concluded, “that proves my claim that Psychosynthesis is neutral theologically, religiously, and philosophically.”[5] The neutrality is real — but, as we shall see, the universalism behind the neutrality is itself a substantive metaphysical position, and that position is the perennial philosophy.
3. The Four Principles in Assagioli’s Writings
Principle One: The Transcendent and Unmanifested Ground
The first principle of perennialism is the affirmation of an absolute Ground beyond all manifestation. Assagioli states this directly in his article on Spirituality in the Twentieth Century:[6]
Spirit in itself is the supreme “Reality” in its transcendent, that is, absolute aspect; devoid of all limitation and concrete determination. Spirit, therefore, transcends every limitation of time and space, every constraint of matter. Spirit is in essence eternal, infinite, free, and universal. This supreme, absolute Reality cannot be known intellectually, since it transcends the human mind; but it can be postulated rationally, grasped intuitively, and to some extent mystically experienced.
The passage is a textbook formulation of the apophatic principle: the absolute is devoid of all limitation and concrete determination, inaccessible to discursive intellect, available only through rational postulation, intuitive grasp, and mystical experience. Assagioli puts the same point in even sharper form in The Act of Will, where he aligns himself explicitly with Meister Eckhart and the schools of Northern Buddhism:[7]
Of the unmanifest, or transcendent Reality in an absolute sense nothing can be said. It can be indicated or hinted at only through negations: not this, not that, nothing, the “Void.” This aspect of Reality has been emphasized by some schools of Northern Buddhism and in the West by Meister Eckhart.
The Vedantic formula neti neti — not this, not this — is the same gesture in another idiom. Assagioli’s affirmation that the absolute can be approached only by negation places him squarely in the via negativa lineage that runs from Plotinus through Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Eckhart into modern apophatic theology. This is the first principle of the perennial philosophy stated without qualification.
Principle Two: Both Transcendent and Immanent
The second principle is that the Ground is both transcendent and immanent — beyond creation and present within it. This is the precise philosophical position called panentheism, and Assagioli affirmed it explicitly in a long archival essay translated by Jan Kuniholm and now available as Roberto Assagioli about Panentheism:[8]
Thus God is transcendent and immanent at one and the same time: He is transcendent because He exists prior to manifestation and is not exhausted in it; He is immanent because nothing exists outside Him and He is present in every movement of life and in every glimmer of consciousness.
Assagioli’s case for this view is not merely doctrinal. He argues that the dualistic conception of absolute transcendence — God in heaven, creation below, an unbridgeable gulf between — produces “a distant and inaccessible God, with whom there is no possibility of vital, intimate and direct relationship,” and that the opposite extreme, absolute immanence, leaves “no place for God” since its so-called spirit “becomes self-consciousness only in man.”[9] Panentheism is the synthesis of the two: it preserves the genuine transcendence of the divine while affirming its real presence in nature, in the soul, and in every flicker of conscious life. Assagioli traces the same recognition through the Bhagavad Gita, Plotinus, Paul, the early Egyptian gospel-fragments, Eckhart, Tagore, and Radhakrishnan — a survey that itself enacts the perennialist method.
This is the explicit context in which Assagioli’s most often-cited panentheist formulation appears. In a passage from Meditation for the New Age, reproduced on the page entitled What is Reality?, he writes:[10]
The balance and synthesis between transcendence and immanence, as two aspects of the One Reality, have been recognized and proclaimed by a number of great intuitives — Philosophers, mystics and poets — throughout the ages. This conception — which, in contrast to pantheism, has been called a panentheism (that is, “all in God”) — is the basic teaching of the Bhagavad Gita.
On the immanence side, Assagioli is equally direct. In Transpersonal Development, his discussion of illumination is unambiguous: “The highest form of inner seeing is illumination, which can be called the revelation of the Divinity immanent in all things — the Presence of God in manifestation, in nature, in every existing being.”[11] Both poles of the panentheist structure are present without compromise. Assagioli’s philosophical background is rooted in what I have called an evolutionary panentheistic monism.
Principle Three: Emanation and the Great Chain of Being
The third principle is the structural claim that the Ground manifests through a graded series of levels — the Great Chain of Being. Assagioli’s most extended formulation appears in Transpersonal Development, in a passage on love that is in fact a complete cosmological statement:[12]
First of all we have the original unity, free from any form of differentiation, i.e. the Absolute, Transcendent, Unmanifested. It is from this that we have obtained the manifestation or differentiation we might regard as the projection, emanation or self-expression of the Supreme. The great cosmic process has various stages. The first is that of duality: the One becomes two. The first fundamental difference has been introduced: spirit and matter, the subjective and the objective aspect, energy and resistance, activity and passivity, a positive pole and a negative pole, a male aspect and a female aspect.
The architecture is unmistakable: the unmanifested Absolute, the first polarity (spirit and matter, the One becoming two), and then “successive stages of differentiation at the heart of creation … the expression of ever more concrete and material planes or levels of life and ever more limited states of consciousness.”[13] This is emanation in the technical Neoplatonic sense — manifestation by descent through ordered degrees, each level producing the next without exhausting its source.
Assagioli explicitly identifies emanation as the operative principle. In a passage on beauty in the same book: “It is the great principle of involution or emanation. From a basic, original absolute Reality a series of levels of life, intellect, feeling and material life have developed, through gradual differentiation, to the point of inorganic matter. Thus every quality or attribute of the external world, of matter itself, and of the countless different creatures, is but a pale, obscure reflection of a quality or attribute of the spiritual Reality, the Divine Being.”[14] The Platonic provenance is overt — every external quality is a reflection of a higher spiritual Reality — and the doctrine of emanation is named in its standard technical form. The relationship between this graded structure and Assagioli’s understanding of cosmic history is treated more fully in the related article on Assagioli and Evolutionary Panentheism.
Principle Four: The Return Path of Unitive Realisation
The fourth principle of perennialism is the soul’s return to its source through a path of progressive realisation. Assagioli’s Self-Realization and Psychological Disturbances is one of his most explicit treatments of the unitive dimension:[15]
The inner experience of the spiritual Self, and its intimate association with and penetration of the personal self, gives to those who have it a sense of greatness and internal expansion, the conviction of participating in some way in the divine nature.
Assagioli proceeds to assemble citations from across the traditions: the Psalmic “Ye are gods,” Augustine on the soul becoming what it loves, the Vedantic Tat Tvam Asi (Thou art That), the central declaration of the Upanishadic tradition. The strategy is the perennialist one: identify a recurring contemplative recognition and let the multiplicity of formulations vouch for the underlying experience.
The same orientation appears with full force in The Act of Will, where Assagioli devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between the personal will, the transpersonal will, and the Universal Will:[16]
Man can have the intuitive realization of his essential identity with the supreme Reality. In the East, it has been expressed as the identity between the Atman and the Brahman. In the West some mystics have boldly proclaimed the identity between man and God. Others have emphasized that Life is One, that there is only One Life.
This is the unitive principle of perennialism stated in its strongest form: the human person is not merely related to the divine but, in his or her essential nature, identical with it. The path of Psychosynthesis — disidentification, the awakening of the personal self, the contact with the superconscious, the encounter with the Transpersonal Self, the alignment with the Universal Will — is, on Assagioli’s account, the psychological articulation of this perennial path of return. A compilation of his statements on this theme is gathered on the page on Union.
4. The Theosophical Channel
Assagioli’s perennialism did not arrive in his thought by accident. He was, from a young age, deeply involved with Theosophy and with the Bailey-Theosophical movement that grew out of it. Theosophy is itself a perennialist tradition; its founders explicitly described their teaching as the recovery of an Ageless Wisdom running through Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and Christian-mystical sources. Assagioli’s library, correspondence, and published work all attest to a thorough familiarity with this literature.
The Theosophical channel matters because it explains the specific shape Assagioli’s perennialism takes. He is not the philosophical perennialist of Frithjof Schuon and the Traditionalist school, who insist on the sufficiency of orthodox revealed tradition. He is closer to the evolutionary perennialism of Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, and the broader esoteric current that holds the Great Chain to be not only a static structure but a dynamic one — a structure through which consciousness descends in involution and re-ascends in evolution, with the appearance of self-conscious humanity as a turning-point in the cosmic process. This is treated in detail in the companion article on Assagioli and Evolutionary Panentheism.
5. Neutrality and Personal Belief: Resolving the Discrepancy
The strongest objection to the thesis of this article is one that Assagioli himself raised. In the introduction to Psychosynthesis (1965), he insisted that his discipline is “neutral towards the various religious forms and the various philosophical doctrines, excepting only those which are materialistic.” Psychosynthesis, he wrote, “does not aim nor attempt to give a metaphysical or a theological explanation of the great Mystery — it leads to the door, but stops there.”[17]
If this neutrality is taken at face value, the perennialist reading might seem to violate Assagioli’s own self-understanding. The discrepancy is real, and it is the topic of the longer companion article Psychosynthesis Leads to the Door of the Great Mystery. The resolution proposed there is the right one and is worth restating here.[18]
Assagioli distinguished, in his paper Psychosynthesis, Religion, Philosophy, between two aspects of religion. The first is existential religion — the direct experience of spiritual realities, the experience reported by mystics, founders, and contemplatives across traditions. The second is the formulations and institutions through which that experience is theologically articulated and socially transmitted. Psychosynthesis, Assagioli wrote, “fully recognizes the reality and validity of spiritual experience”; its neutrality refers “only to the second phase of religion: that of formulations and institutions.”[19]
Once this distinction is grasped, the apparent contradiction dissolves. Psychosynthesis as a scientific and phenomenological method remains neutral with respect to the doctrines and rites of any particular religion. It can be practised by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, secular humanists, and the religiously unaffiliated, and Assagioli regarded this universal availability as one of its most important features. But the metaphysical background against which Assagioli himself worked — his personal philosophy of life, the worldview that informs his choice of imagery, sources, and ultimate aims — is consistently and recognisably perennialist.
This distinction matters in two directions. For the practitioner who does not share Assagioli’s metaphysics, it means that the techniques, the model of the personality, and the experiential exercises remain available regardless of one’s theological commitments. There is no dogma in Psychosynthesis, as Assagioli insisted in his Letter of Freedom: “There is no orthodoxy in Psychosynthesis and no one, beginning with myself, should claim to be its real or true representative.”[20] For the scholar of Assagioli, however, the distinction means that one cannot understand his choice of categories — Self, Universal Will, Supreme Synthesis, the levels of consciousness, the descent and return of the soul — without recognising the perennial philosophy as the framework that gave them their shape.
6. Conclusion: A Perennialist in Method and in Mind
The case advanced here is not that Assagioli was a card-carrying member of any school called perennialism. He never used the term in his published writings, and he was scrupulous about not committing Psychosynthesis as a discipline to any specific metaphysical creed. What can be said with confidence is that the four classical principles of perennialism — the transcendent Ground, the dual transcendence-immanence of that Ground, the emanative structure of reality, and the path of unitive return — are present in his work as the deep grammar from which his explicit teaching derives.
The 1974 self-description to Murphy and Miller — “there is one universal truth, and that all human presentations are only partial and conditioned … but the core is the same in all” — is not a casual aside. It is the philosophical position from which Assagioli’s life-work proceeded. The perennial philosophy is the name that tradition has given to that position. Recognising it as such allows the reader of Assagioli to read him with the historical, philosophical, and contemplative depth he himself brought to his sources, and to see Psychosynthesis not as an isolated mid-twentieth-century innovation but as a contemporary articulation of an ancient and continuing recognition.
[1]Agostino Steuco, De perenni philosophia libri X (Lyon: Sebastianus Gryphius, 1540). The phrase philosophia perennis appears only twice in the work itself; the formulation “one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples” is the standard summary statement of Steuco’s thesis. See also Charles B. Schmitt, “Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 4 (1966): 505–532, the foundational modern study of Steuco’s reception. Steuco was building on the prisca theologia tradition of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; Leibniz adopted the term in the seventeenth century, after which it lay dormant until its mid-twentieth-century revival.
[2]Arthur Versluis, Perennial Philosophy (New Cultures Press, 2015), 2.
[3]Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), chap. 2, presents the perennial philosophy as a structured set of doctrines including the levels of being. The classical historical study of the doctrine of graded reality is Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). For a treatment of how the Great Chain functions in Assagioli, see Great Chain of Being.
[4]Michael Murphy and Stuart Miller, “Interview with Roberto Assagioli,” 1974, Esalen Institute. Available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/interview-with-roberto-assagioli-2/.
[5]Murphy and Miller, “Interview with Roberto Assagioli.”
[6]Roberto Assagioli, “Spirituality in the Twentieth Century,” Archivio Assagioli, Firenze, © Istituto di Psicosintesi. Available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/spirituality-in-the-twentieth-century/.
[7]Roberto Assagioli, The Act of Will (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 129.
[8]Roberto Assagioli, “The Manifestation of the Divine in Nature and in the Soul” [La Manifestazione del Divino nella Natura e nell’Anima], Doc. #23611, trans. and ed. Jan Kuniholm, Archivio Assagioli, Firenze, © Istituto di Psicosintesi. This is Assagioli’s most direct and sustained statement of the panentheist position.
[9]Assagioli, “Manifestation of the Divine.”
[10]Roberto Assagioli, “Meditation for the New Age,” Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, n.d. The passage is reproduced in What is Reality?, available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/what-is-reality/.
[11]Roberto Assagioli, Transpersonal Development (London: Aquarian/Thorsons, 1991; reprinted Huddersfield: Smiling Wisdom, 2007), as cited at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/glossary/immanence/.
[12]Assagioli, Transpersonal Development (2007 ed.), 250.
[13]Assagioli, Transpersonal Development (2007 ed.), 251.
[14]Assagioli, Transpersonal Development (2007 ed.), 241.
[15]Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques (New York: Hobbs, Dorman, 1965; London: Turnstone Press, 1975), 44, from the chapter “Self-Realization and Psychological Disturbances.” Available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/self-realization-and-psychological-disturbances/.
[16]Assagioli, The Act of Will, 125.
[17]Assagioli, Psychosynthesis (1965), 6.
[18]Kenneth Sørensen, “Psychosynthesis Leads to the Door of the Great Mystery,” kennethsorensen.dk, 8 February 2024. Available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/psychosynthesis-leads-to-the-door-of-the-great-mystery/. The longer treatment of this question, including Assagioli’s later move beyond strict neutrality in The Act of Will, is presented there.
[19]Roberto Assagioli, “Psychosynthesis, Religion, Philosophy” [Psicosintesi — Religione — Filosofia], trans. Gordon Symons, Archivio Assagioli, Firenze. Available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/glossary/neutrality-of-psychosynthesis/.
[20]Roberto Assagioli, “Letter of Freedom,” 1967. Available at https://kennethsorensen.dk/en/letter-of-freedom/.
Bibliography
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