Notes toward a pragmatic "Perennial Philosophy" (part 3): A modest proposal

In 426 or 427, St. Augustine of Hippo set to work on a task he had been contemplating for some time: to write a book of Retractions before he died (which he would do in 430). It was intended to clarify certain passages and statements in his massive output of writings. “For a long time,” he begins in the Prologue, “I have been thinking about and planning to do something which I, with God's assistance, am now undertaking because I do not think it should be postponed: with a kind of judicial severity, I am reviewing my works – books, letters, and sermons – and, as it were, with the pen of a censor, I am indicating what dissatisfies me.” [1] One of his clarifications — that of a sentence found in his book, On the True Religion (De vera religione liber unus) — has become popular with modern proponents of the Perennial Philosophy. In Book 1, chapter 12, paragraph 3 of the Retractions, Augustine writes the following: