This recent book from Robert Bolton is an uncompromising response to an issue that confronts all shades of religious belief, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, because even for followers of non-dualistic Vedanta, the possibility of believing in a false God becomes greater, not less, as religion becomes more metaphysical. This is a challenge to the usual belief that religion must necessarily be more pure the more inward it is; and the reasons for this are presented with clarity. What is consciousness? What is experience? The answers to these questions are not nearly as obvious as common sense supposes, and this issue is also shown to be laden with consequences for religions that are based above all on experience. Ideas are presented that are a light in the dark for those concerned with the metaphysical dimension of religion, but who wish to find it in an open universe where they do not have to identify with just one form of theory, dictated too often by sectarian ambition. The author, a practicing Catholic, endorses traditional wisdom and its metaphysics while arguing against the ideas of some perennialists who wish to recast it all as a system of monism. The roots of present-day religious conflicts are to be found here, because demands for an absolute unity are in practice tied to sense-bound and political ideas of unity of a kind that must be obvious to almost anyone. When misunderstood in this way, the demand for unity always turns into a demand for violence because of the inevitable clash between reality and crude conceptions of unity. As in his other books, Bolton helps the reader to a deeper understanding of the complex relations between God, the world, and the self, without facile reductions that eliminate realities we ought rather to be trying to understand.
Praise
Christian Platonism has a long and distinguished history, but few orthodox Catholics have tried to make a serious contribution to this tradition in recent times. Robert Bolton’s extraordinary books are just such a contribution. This is a work of great creativity as well as metaphysical intelligence.—Stratford Caldecott, Chesterton Review, Centre for Faith & Culture, Oxford
“This incisive work offers a bold challenge to the reductionism that plagues the intellectual landscape of the West today. Bolton helps the reader to appreciate the rich diversity among the spiritual traditions of humanity with a view to discerning their underlying unity.”—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC, practicing psychotherapist, author ofThe Quest For Who We Are: Modern Psychology and the Sacred
About the Author
Robert Bolton was educated in the sciences and developed a strong interest in traditional metaphysics, obtaining from Exeter University the degrees of M.Phil and Ph.D. He is the author of The Order of the Ages: The Hidden Laws of World History, The Logic of Spiritual Values, Self and Spirit, The One and the Many: A Defense of Theistic Religion, Foundations of Free Will, and Person, Soul, and Identity: Philosophy and the Real Self. All these books are written from the point of view of traditional wisdom, and not tradition for its own sake—for in a world where wisdom is disregarded in favor of power, this point of view keeps all of its relevance. Bolton also contributed regularly to the journal Sacred Web, in which unfolded epistolary exchanges with traditionalist author Charles Upton that may be found in the latter’s book, Knowings in the Arts of Metaphysics, Cosmology, and the Spiritual Path. Bolton was a member of the Church of England until the 1960s, when, having observed how willingly that Church was accepting the changes demanded by modern secularism, he converted to the Catholic Church, and to the reality of sacred tradition, which gave him the confidence to write the kind of philosophy he believed the modern world sorely needed. Well-known author Stratford Caldecott credits his first steps toward conversion to Catholicism to Robert Bolton.
