Religion in Late Modernity [1 ed.] 9780791488256, 9780791454237

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RELIGIOUS STUDIES / PHILOSOPHY

“This is an impressive re-imagining of the history of religion, politics, ideas, world views, and an investigation of the impact of modernity, ‘postmodernity,’ and late modernity on world praxis. The global ‘reach’ of this work and Neville’s engagement of contemporary and historical situations is profound. A rich but complex gift to the scholarly world.” — Robert M. Garvin, University at Albany, State University of New York ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University and Dean of the School of Theology. His most recent books include Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the LateModern World and the three edited volumes of The Comparative Religious Ideas Project: The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth, all published by SUNY Press. State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu

RELIGION IN LATE MODERNITY

Religion in Late Modernity runs against the grain of common suppositions of contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Against the common supposition that basic religious terms have no real reference but are mere functions of human need, the book presents a pragmatic theory of religious symbolism in terms of which the cognitive engagement of the Ultimate is of a piece with the cognitive engagement of nature and persons. Throughout this discussion, Neville develops a late-modern conception of God that is defensible in a global theological public. Against the common supposition that religion is on the retreat in late modernity except in fundamentalist forms, the author argues that religion in our time is a stimulus to religiously oriented scholarship, a civilizing force among world societies, a foundation for obligation in politics, a source for healthy social experimentation, and the most important mover of soul. Against the common supposition that religious thinking or theology is confessional and inevitably biased in favor of the thinker’s community, Neville argues for the public character of theology, the need for history and phenomenology of religion in philosophy of religion, and the possibility of objectivity through the contextualization of philosophy, contrary to the fashionable claims of neo-pragmatism. This vigorous analysis and program for religious thinking is straightforwardly pro-late-modern and anti-postmodern, a rousing gallop along the high road around modernism.

Neville

RELIGION IN LATE MODERNITY

Religion in Late

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Religion in Late Modernity R Robert Cummings Neville

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

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Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, eletrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neville, Robert C. Religion in late modernity / Robert Cummings Neville. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0–7914–5423–1 (alk. paper)—isbn 0–7914–5424–x (pbk.:alk. paper) 1. Religion—Philosophy. 2. Philosophical theology.

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Neville: Religion in Late Modernity

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For my brother James Harvey Neville 1945–1999

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Contents Preface

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Introduction

1 PA RT O N E

Late-Modern Topics Chapter 1. The Contingencies of Nature Nature Defined 9 Cosmological Contingency: Determinateness and Time’s Flow 13 Ontological Contingency: Creation and Eternity 19 Symbols of Ontological Asymmetry 24

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Chapter 2. Human Nature Defining Human Nature 29 To Be under Obligation 31 The Human Condition 36 Orientation and Poise 39

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Chapter 3. Religious Symbols Symbolic Meaning and Religion 45 The Reference of Religious Symbols 52 The Interpretation of Religious Symbols 57 The Truth of Religious Symbols 61

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Chapter 4. The Symbols of Divine Action The Concept of God 67 What Can We Know about God? 72 When Can We Say God Is a Personal Agent? 77 When Should We Not Say God Is a Personal Agent? 84

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Chapter 5. Eternity and the Transformation of Soul Eternity as a Contemporary Problem 88 Plotinus and Eternity 91 The Transformation of Soul to Engage Eternity 95 The Engagement of Eternity 97 Eternity Engaged through the Temporal 100 Eternity in Time: Real and Illusory 102 Eternity and Immortality 105

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Late-Modern Religion Chapter 6. Religion and Scholarship Recent History of the Study of Religions 110 Participation and Distance in a Typology of the Study of Religions 115 Models of Spirituality among Historically Conscious Scholars 126

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Chapter 7. Religion and Society World Society, World Culture, World Community 132 The Causal Effectiveness of Religions 138 Global Modernization and Religious Traditions 144 Maitreyan Strategies 150

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Chapter 8. Religion and Politics: Spheres of Tolerance Religious Wars and the Alleged Privacy of Religion 158 Obligation and Civil Religion 162 Ultimacy and Religions’ Essential Features 164 Political Tolerance of Religions 166 Religion and Public Theology 169

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Chapter 9. Religion and the American Experiment The American Religious Scene 172 The Experiment: An Hypothesis 176 What Makes Religions Religious 179

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Chapter 10. Religion and Vital Engagement Engagement and Competence 184 Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Oversoul 188

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The Soul Transformed 192 Emerson, Nietzsche, and Jesus: A Challenge to Modernism 196 PA RT T H R E E

Religion and Philosophy in Late Modernity Chapter 11. The Public Character of Theology and Religious Studies

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Chapter 12. Religions, Philosophies, and Philosophy of Religion The Impact of Scholarship on Philosophy of Religion 217 A Definition of Philosophy of Religion 221 The Problematic of Translation and Comparison 225 Comparison, Philosophy, and Theology 229

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Chapter 13. A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of the History of Philosophy Paleopragmatism 233 Signs: The Phenomenology, Comparison, and Lineages of Philosophies 235 Phenomenology of Philosophy 235 Comparative Philosophy 236 Philosophical Influences 237 Philosophies as Referents: Structures, Insights, Orientation 239 Philosophic Conceptual Structures as Icons 239 Philosophies as Indices 240 Philosophies as Conventional Orientations of Life: Symbolic Reference 241 Philosophies as Interpretive Engagements: Truth, Usability, Fallibilism 242 Philosophies as True or False in Their Contexts 243 Historical Philosophies as Contemporary Resources 244 Historical Philosophies as Correctives 246

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Notes References Index

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Preface Religion in Late Modernity is a contrarian title in two ways. The fashion now is to speak of “religions,” not “religion,” because the latter suggests a kind of universal nature or essence of religion. That very suggestion would bias inquiry because it would select what counts to be compared with what, and all standard definitions of religion have been shown to be reductionistic or culturally biased. True enough, and I would be the last person to define the essence of religion in any but heuristic and hypothetical ways justified by fruitfulness in forwarding inquiry. Nevertheless, the “Great Religions” of Axial Age formation, the shamanistic traditional religions predating the “Great” ones, the myriad new religions, syncretistic religious movements, quasi religions such as political movements carried on for something like religious motives, and secular antireligions all share fundamental problems that define their current existence and practice. All have to cope with the conceptions of the cosmos and the ecological, social, and personal contexts for human life that have been developed by the sciences. All have to cope with the interactions with each other forced upon them by social mobility, intimate communications through the Internet, and political, cultural, and economic encounters. All have to cope with the selfconscious Enlightenment critique of religious symbols of all sorts, in all these religious, quasi-religious, and antireligious movements. This critique shows that they cannot be taken at face value, that they are not as descriptive as the Enlightenment understanding of religion would like them to be, that their meaning is at least practical, and that nevertheless they can be true or false. Finally, the social and political place of religions in late-modern culture is problematic, not a new problem, but a pressing one shared by all the contenders. The result of this is that there is something like a “religious situation,” as Tillich (1932) once called it, and “religion” is how the religions face the religious situation. The chapters here will give much nuance to this claim, distinguishing different kinds of religious responses. The second contrarian element in the title is that most people would say that we are in the postmodern age, not the late-modern. The enthusiasm for postmodernism is razzmatazz, however. Modernism, with all its foundationalism, essentialism, love of boundaries and definition, master narratives, and other

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traits we’ve learned to hate, has been a particular, limited movement, even if dominant among the North Atlantic elites. Whether in architecture, literature, totalitarian politics, or philosophy, modernist movements have always had alternatives. Postmodernism as the rejection of modernism does not necessarily reject those alternatives. Indeed, postmodernism itself, to the extent it has any specific meaning, is tied rather narrowly to modernism, and is sometimes irrelevant to other movements. I say (Neville 1992) that we still live in a late-modern world, developing the ideals of inquiry, humanism, and community initiated in the European Renaissance, and that modernism/postmodernism is but one strand within a much larger and mixed story. Indeed, all the world’s cultures are involved in the late-modern world, though only a few have been much affected by modernism/postmodernism. The religious situation of our time, for those who participate in the late-modern world, includes much more than the modernism/postmodernism cultural strand, and is heavily determined by religious traditions quite alien to that. Although some pockets of societies across the globe are not much affected by late-modern cultures of any sort, these are few and small in the age of the Internet; this book is not about them. If I were a cautious person, I might call this book The Religious Situation in Late Modernity. That would suggest a book whose main focus is analysis. I propose and defend, however, some ways in which religion ought to respond to the religious situation, some conceptions of nature, human nature, interreligious tolerance, and so forth. These suggestions have particular sources and resonate more with some religions than others. But I hope they are true and valid, or that to the extent they are wrong the understanding of how they are wrong will lead to the truth. So the topic of this book really is religion in late modernity. As explained in the introduction and illustrated throughout, the approach to the topic of this book is part of a larger system. “System” has two meanings here. One is the development of a few key ideas that are interconnected and serve as a vague interpretive grid according to which everything supposedly can be interpreted. The first chapter of Whitehead’s Process and Reality ([1929] 1978) is the classic statement in the twentieth century of this sense of system. Its criteria are that the “categoreal scheme,” as he calls the ideas, be consistent, coherent, adequate, and applicable. The present book has such key ideas in both metaphysics and epistemology, expressed mainly in chapters 1–5. The second and perhaps more useful sense of “system” is to look at the same topic from as many different angles and perspectives as possible. Paul Weiss once described this sense of system as the only good protection against dogmatism. In this sense, the general topic here is the religion of late modernity, and the angles of its interpretation in what follows are its conceptions: of nature, human nature,

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its symbolic representation, how it symbolizes the ultimate, how it is studied, its social embodiment, its political significance, its experiential vitality in America, its academic versus theological study, its approach through philosophy of religion, and its relation to the history of philosophy. The chapters of this book argue a particular position on late-modern religion from each of these angles. Of course there are many other perspectives on the topic than those developed here, and the key systematic ideas are used for interpretation and not developed and defended here at length. But this book does present a systematic study of late-modern religion in both senses. Because it is related to many parts of my systematic thought that are developed elsewhere, I have succumbed to the temptation to footnote myself too much. Readers should feel free to ignore those citations and cluck over the hubris of the author except in those instances where they are not persuaded by the texts here. The chapters themselves originated as occasional papers and addresses, although all governed by the overarching systematic concerns. Each has been somewhat rewritten to focus this book, but each also bears the marks of its origin. In most instances the bad jokes and references to the context of presentation have been eliminated, although the specialized genres of the last three chapters are obvious. The use of the first person has been confined to the footnotes. Some chapters combine material from more than one presentation. Some have been radically rewritten. Some internal cross-references to other chapters have been added when a topic broached in one chapter is treated from another angle in a different chapter. When a chapter uses an idea that has been introduced earlier, the idea is reintroduced only in a summary fashion that would have been unacceptable in the initial stand-alone presentation; readers who begin with later chapters might thus find it helpful to follow up the reference to earlier ones. No attempt has been made to provide transitions from one chapter to the next. Each chapter is like a new start, and they are unified only by the logic of the scheme of topics discussed in the introduction. Chapter 1 began as a lecture in a symposium to honor Erazim Kohak at Boston University in the fall of 1995, and that version was published in Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension: In Celebration of Erazin Kohak, edited by Fredrick Tauber and Robert S. Cohen (1998), used with kind permission from Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 2 was first presented early in 1996 at the Institute of Philosophy and Religion at Boston University thanks to Professor Leroy Rouner, its director, and was published under the title “Is There an Essence of Human Nature?” in Rouner’s Is There a Human Nature? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). A revised and expanded version was presented as the Suarez Lecture at Fordham University in the spring of 1996, and I thank Professor Judith Jones for that occasion. I am thankful for the

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discussion at Fordham University. Chapter 3 began as a presentation in 1996 at a LAUD conference entitled “Lover, Shepherd, Father” in Germany; the presentation was called “A Pragmatic Semiotic Theory of Religious Symbolism” and was published in revised form under that title in Metaphor and God-Talk, edited by Lieven Boeve and Kurt Fayaerts (Peter Lang, 1998). Chapter 4 started as an address to the conference, “The Interplay between Philosophy, Science and Religion: The European Heritage” at Leuven, Belgium, in the fall of 1998, under the title, “God in Nature: Symbolic Reference and Reframing the Question of Divine Action.” Chapter 5 contains material from two separate essays. One was prepared for a conference on Neo-Platonism and will be published in its proceedings under the title, “Neo-Platonism in Contemporary Christian Spirituality;” that paper was also delivered to the theology faculty at Marburg University. The other source is “The Temporal Illusion of Eternity: A Pragmatic Theory of Spiritual Insight” in Weisheit und Wissenschaft, edited by Tilman Borsche and Johann Kreuzer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995). Chapter 6 began as an article called “The Emergence of Historical Consciousness” in Spirituality and the Secular Quest, edited by Peter H. Van Ness (New York: Crossroad, 1996), volume 22 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, edited by Ewert Cousins. Portions of chapter 7 are derived from “World Community and Religion,” published in Ilyu munmyong gwa Won Bulgyo sasang, 1565–1592 (Korea: Won’grangch’ulp’ansa, 1991) and published in digest form in The Journal of Ecumenical Studies 29 (3–4):368–382 (1992). Material in the first half of chapter 8 is derived from “Political Tolerance in an Age of Renewed Religious Warfare,” in Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance, edited by Mahdi Amin Razavi and David Ambuel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Early drafts of chapters 9 and 10 were presented as seminar papers to the University Professors Program at Boston University. Chapter 11 started as the presidential address to the American Academy of Religion in San Franciso in 1992 and a draft was published under the title “Religious Studies and Theological Studies” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61 (2):185–200 (1993). Chapter 12 derives from an essay of the same name commissioned by Eugene Long for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38:165–181 (1995). Chapter 13 began as a presentation at the 1995 Highlands Conference honoring Richard Rorty, and a draft was published as “A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of History of Philosophy,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty, edited by Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 43–60. I thank the editors and publishers of the various journals and books for per-

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mission to publish material derived from what they published, although often little resemblance can be observed. Acknowledging the sources of these chapters is impossible if one asks for their inspiration and intellectual background. Those sources have supported and shaped what is now a long life of reflection on these topics. I’m shocked to realize that on almost none of the topics here am I writing for the first time, and I’m pleased to say that in every case I’ve learned something new reported here. My lifelong debt to the caring instruction of John E. Smith resurfaces here in many places. John B. Cobb, Jr., is a recurring dialogue partner, implicit or explicit. Jay Schulkin and the late David Hall have been constant dialogue partners on most of the topics treated here. The members of the Highlands Institute of American Religious and Philosophical Thought have been helpful respondants to several of the essays. J. Harley Chapman and Nancy Frankenberry have influenced much of the rhetorical shape of this book. I thank the faculty and students of the Boston University School of Theology for sharpening my consciousness of how Christianity is a religion. The most specific, honest, and imaginative critic of the ideas here, who attended several of the initial presentations, is Wesley Wildman. Thanks to all, who can take credit where I’m right and bow out gracefully where I’m silly. Thanks are also enthusiastically extended to Ray Bouchard, my secretary, and Mark Mann, my graduate assistant, for their help in preparing this manuscript. My most enthusiastic thanks are for Marilyn Semerad who has been producing my publications for almost two decades: such patience deserves a crown Somewhere!

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eligion in late modernity is both vexed and stimulated by the following problematic issues:

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• Nature, in both scientific and ethical senses; • Human identity relative to nature and society; • The capacity of religious symbols to refer to real religious objects; • The conceptions of ultimate religious objects such as God or the Dao; • How people can participate in both the temporal world and eternal reality; • How religion itself can be understood objectively and yet from the inside; • The challenges of modernization; • The competition between religious and secular thought; • Religious pluralism; • Belief versus feeling; • The objectivity of religious assertions; • The limits of European Enlightenment thought about religion; • How both to understand tradition faithfully and to appropriate it usefully. These are roughly the topics of the chapters of this book, respectively. They are hardly unique to late modernity, but they have late-modern forms and together shape much of the complexity of religion in the late-modern situation. This book is organized into three sections. Part 1, “Late-Modern Topics,” treats five philosophical topics that are part of our religious problematic: nature, human nature, religious symbolism, personification of the ultimate, and the transformation of soul required to engage the ultimate in its eternal or transtemporal dimension. This section introduces the main philosophical ideas to be employed subsequently. Part 2, “Late-Modern Religion,” is about religion itself in five dimensions: the religious dimension of its study, its social embodiment, its political context, its cultural vitality in a pluralistic age, and its transformative

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capacity. Part 3, “Religion and Philosophy in Late Modernity,” focuses on the study of religion, dealing with truth, the discipline of philosophy of religion, and how to conceive of the history of philosophy, especially as philosophy means the intellectual dimensions of religions. The chapters in part 3 display more of the contexts of their original presentations than do the others, as recounted in the preface. The question of nature is particularly vexing because by and large the European tradition of philosophy has accepted Kant’s transcendental philosophic claim that only science can study nature itself and that philosophy and other theoretical modes of thought need to confine themselves to studying the character and limits of scientific knowledge. Since the eighteenth century, philosophy of nature has become philosophy of science. This has been disastrous for religion. First, it makes nature and God (or the Ultimate, Dao, Brahman, or whatever Religious Object) two separate, unconnectable, and incommensurable topics. Notions such as divine creation or the nonduality of Brahman seem only superstitious from the scientific standpoint because the languages of their customary expression are not those of science. Second, it makes human beings in their religious dimensions incommensurate with the scientific understanding of nature. When human beings are understood within the reductive languages of the sciences, the religious dimension is screened out or distorted. The problematic character of both of these points fuels the current “religion and science” debates. Third, the conception of nature as amenable only to scientific understanding is an obstacle to the intercultural and interreligious dialogue so central to our late-modern situation because most religions whose core texts and motifs have not been shriven by modern science have important views of nature that cannot be registered in the scientific conversation. Chapter 1 addresses the conception of nature directly and offers a metaphysical theory making connection with a theory of God as ultimate creator; it also opens the conversation to conceptions of human identity, the topic of chapter 2, and the encounters of world religions, the topics of chapters 6–9. The late-modern take on human identity is that we must be wary of essences, for any attempt to define the essence of human nature is bound to reflect the biases of our own class and social position. So bound, we are deceived (if not deliberately deceptive) about people very different from ourselves. To the extent that our attempt to define is persuasive we bamboozle the others into accepting our characterization of them. The deconstructionists’ moral from this point is to avoid characterizations of human nature or personal identity. Yet hard-won values such as human rights demand some normative conceptions of human nature. Chapter 2 presses the thesis that lying under obligation, being obligated by norms, is close to an essence of human nature when individuals are

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contextualized in nature and history. This chapter proposes the thesis that the human self is best understood as a harmony of orientations to all the humanly significant dimensions of reality. Our identities consist in what we are oriented toward, how we are oriented, and most importantly, how we pull together and balance those orientations. All enjoyments, sufferings, thoughts, and actions take place within the orientations we have to their relevant contexts, and sometimes they alter those orientations in turn. The problems of selfhood are those of attaining orientations to what is relevant, achieving good and appropriate orientations, and integrating them so as to be oriented with some harmony toward reality in its complexity. We need orientation to cosmic forces and seasonal rhythms, to social processes and historical movements, to family dynamics and personal maturation, to the workings and changes of our bodies, and to the contingencies of work, play, friendship, and indeed all the human interactions involved in determining character. The normative aspects of selfhood have less to do with unifying, solidifying, or rooting oneself than with attaining and maintaining poise with respect to the changing ten thousand things toward which we should comport ourselves. Perhaps the most vexing problem for late-modern religion is the suspicion that our religious reference is illusory. This is quite different from the problems of whether our religious references are mistaken or inadequate—thinkers of all traditions have believed the former about the references of other traditions, and all have acknowledged one way or another that ultimate references are never quite right, that something needs to be denied in every assertion. These ancient critical negations suppose that religious reference is indeed to reality, whether rightly articulated or not. The late-modern problem is rather that human thinking simply does not refer to ultimate or religious reality except in reductionistic senses of religiousness, and that it is deluded when it believes it does so. Kant again is the one who best articulated the Enlightenment sensibility about the finite empirical bounds of knowing. Schopenhauer, Marx, and Freud argued that religious reference is mere projection of some sort, and hence illusory. The supposition that religious reference is illusory does not come from empirical findings about religion, but from theories of knowledge that disallow the possibility of real reference. The argument of chapter 3 is that there is an alternative theory of knowledge, derived from Peirce’s semiotic theory, that does indeed allow the possibility of real reference. This is not to say that any given reference is right or adequate, which would be a separate set of arguments. But even the possibility of wrongly referring is an advance toward taking late-modern religion seriously over the jaded supposition that religious reference as such is an illusion. Even should that argument be successful, however, and the possibility of real religious reference acknowledged, what do we do with the vast array of religious

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symbols that presuppose a world completely rejected by the late-modern imagination? Nearly all religions arising within the Axial Age have a spectrum of symbols ranging from a very personal deity to transcendent principle, even beyond to the negation of distinction and entity. Whereas Buddhism and Confucianism, for instance, draw their main symbologies from the latter end of the spectrum, which is vague enough not to be in conflict with the late-modern scientific view of the cosmos, Christianity and the other West Asian religions have personalized symbols at the heart of their affirmations and practices. Chapter 4 explores the senses, if any, in which God can be personified, say, as an agent who intervenes in the world. Religion in late modernity needs to have broken the naivete of religious symbols referring literally, or even descriptively in some senses, in order to find symbols that actually engage people with religious realities truly, context by context. If broken symbols do engage, that is a return to what Ricoeur (1974) calls the “second naivete.” The danger with the late-modern treatment of religious reference as symbolic is that for many it flattens out the religious engagements so that the ultimacy of religious commitments and the astounding world-shaking character of religious discoveries lose their force. Chapter 5 attempts a countermove by defending a strong view of eternity, its defining force for human life, and its transformative powers. Whereas early modernity and European Enlightenment thinking have stressed time to the exclusion of eternity, in fact the late-modern imagination is ready to recover the cognitive meaning and spiritual significance of eternity, with it boundary-shattering consequences for merely temporal identity. The topic of how to understand religion has been vexed by the apparent contradiction between objective inquiry modelled on the sciences and interior participation in religious life of the sort required for yogic understanding in South Asian religions or faith-seeking-understanding in some forms of Christianity. Distance versus participation is a tension required for late-modern approaches to understanding religion, with the result that very many scholars and thinkers, if not all to at least a minimal degree, find a spiritual life in their inquiry itself. Chapter 6 spells this out. The social expressions of religions are controversial not only in the Western European traditions within which religions largely have been privatized. In South Asia religions are often blamed for public apathy regarding the need to make obvious social changes. In East Asia and in the Muslim world they have been identified with government and culture in ways that seem problematic in the late-modern multicultural world. And yet all the world’s great religious traditions are challenged to cope with the issues of global interactions in late modernity. Chapter 7 explores this perspective on religion in theoretical ways, focusing on the challenges of modernization, and chapter 8 deals with matters of

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political tolerance of diverse religions that can’t remain private. It also discusses important contributions of late-modern religion to societies and cultures, teasing out some connections of religious with secular thought. The many religious cultures of the world are in confusing interaction now. Samuel Huntington (1996) calls this a “clash of civilizations.” I think rather that it is an entanglement of religious traditions, confusing and fusing both roots and destinies. Is it possible for different religions to coexist peacefully, each maintaining a strong hold on public life, and each affirming its own truth and importance? These are the questions explored in chapter 9 through a brief study of the American situation, where the religions came together almost as in an experiment. These questions press the further issue of what makes religions, defined as cultures, traditions, and societies, religious in such a normative sense as to assert their validity. The question of validity raises the issue of the relation between religious knowledge and transformative experience or feeling. Does late-modern religion take its identity by finding a cognitive place alongside science, or from New Age feelings of cosmic particiption? Chapter 10 takes the perspective of connecting both sides through developing the theory of interpretive engagement introduced in chapter 3. It studies the extraordinary contributions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose work was so influential throughout American intellectual religious history. Whereas chapter 6 treated disciplined understanding of religion as itself part of religious practice, a related problem vexes the academic study of religion, the question of public truth in the relation between theology (or whatever normative religious thought might be called in a religious tradition) and religious studies which models itself on the sciences. Is there a common public to which both theology and scientific or historical religious studies must appeal in making their cases for truth? Chapter 11 argues that there is and specifies that public in some detail, arguing that vulnerability to correction is a requirement for claims to truth. That chapter was the presidential address to the American Academy of Religion and thus is a frankly political argument, which is what this topic deserves. Chapter 12 looks closely at one form of objective Enlightenment study of religion, namely philosophy of religion. Taking off from the recent editorial history of the International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, it argues that this discipline has almost incorrigibly insisted upon an eighteenth century angle of vision on religion, which sees little more than Christianity and through only epistemological perspectives. Ignoring the vast amount of information about other religions now accessible in English it is embarrassingly parochial, and innocent of so many other philosophical approaches to religion, many learned

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from other religio-philosophical traditions, that it is out of the loop for understanding religion in late modernity. The chapter provides an improved alternative definition of philosophy of religion, though whether anyone responds under the name of that discipline remains to be seen. The real problem in philosophy of religion is not religion but philosophy. The final chapter, then, poses a challenge and alternative to Richard Rorty’s (1979) now widely approved view that philosophy, including its reflection on religion, is merely a conversation whose history can be reconstructed in grand narratives according to the needs of one’s rhetorical project. Rorty’s dismissal of the “myth of the given” should not lead to the dismissal of stubborn facts in philosophic history, nor legitimate disrespect for philosophic positions that do not play roles in some grand narrative. Yet Rorty is right that thinking is always from an historical context and that what can be recognized in antecedent history is only what the context allows. Chapter 13 develops a theory of the history of philosophy that accepts this perspectivalism but builds upon Peirce’s semiotic theory parallel to the theory of religious symbols in chapter 3. It might seem as if this last chapter is more about philosophy than religion. In one sense, of course, that’s right. But a curious retrieval of philosophy for reflective religious purposes has happened in late modernity. Just as Christianity was called a “philosophy” in the ancient world, alongside Platonism, stoicism, and so forth, or rather the ancient philosophies were what we would call “religious schools,” late-modern religion needs philosophy at its heart and late-modern philosophy needs to find its soul in religion if it is to be able to ask the great questions of being, meaning, and value. Most particularly, late-modern religion needs philosophy to break its symbols so that the symbols can engage people with the realities of late-modern life. And late-modern philosophy needs religion if it is to engage its ideas with reality rather than to reflect on the ideas alone.

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CHAPTER 1

The Contingencies of Nature

Nature Defined

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he thesis of this chapter, fundamental to and presupposed in nearly all the others, is that civilized experience includes a primordial apprehension of the contingency of nature.1 The expressions of this apprehension of contingency have taken many forms, from the mythic to the philosophical and theological. The expressions have different motifs in different cultures, and there is no preferred cultural starting point. The point here is to explore the truth about this apprehension of contingency, however, and so the argument is advanced for a preferable contemporary way of ontological contingency, framed in the discourse of Western intellectual traditions as informed by the East and South Asian. In particular, two dimensions to the contingency of nature will be distinguished, namely the contingency of natural things within nature, and the contingency of nature as such, and it will be argued that the apprehension of both is one of the founding definitions of human culture. The first can be called cosmological contingency, characteristic of cosmological processes, and the second ontological contingency, the contingency of being as such, from ontos, one of the Greek words for “being.”2 These two senses of contingency are closely related. From a cross-cultural perspective, the notions of both nature and its apprehension are problematic, and some of the discussion to follow treats these problems. Underlying the discussion is a philosophic supposition that will not be defended here but only illustrated, namely, the hypothesis that reality has characters that are variously discerned by the signs and symbols we have to interpret them.3 Reality is not created by our signs, as some allege, but engaged by them. Our signs direct our engagements more or less accurately as they interpret reality in important and relevant respects, and insofar as they register and correlate

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the important and relevant distinctions and features. This is true as well for the signs and symbols of contingency. We need to inquire whether they interpret reality rightly, not whether there is a reality to which they refer. The inquiry in principle might conclude that the signs and symbols of contingency are misleading because everything about nature is necessary, or that they are hopelessly confused and incoherent. But to the contrary, we can make sense of the primordial expressions of apprehended contingency and will find that they engage us perspicuously with important elements of reality. The following discussion combines historical observations with fairly technical abstract philosophic argumentation. The latter might not be to the taste of some readers, who are invited to skim ahead quickly. The distinctions introduced here are fundamental to nearly all the subsequent chapters, and usually are summarized when they come up there. But as it becomes clear just how fundamental these distinctions are, and their very wide applicability, it might be important to return to this discussion for the detail. “Nature” in the modern sense is a notion that has developed swiftly through the evolution of modern science. There is nothing quite like the Western history of the idea of nature in the other great civilizations of South and East Asia.4 Notwithstanding the diversity of civilizations, we can consider an abstract definition of what is natural that does indeed have counterparts in all: Let us hypothesize that a natural thing is anything that is conditioned or caused by something else and that itself can be a condition.

This definition resonates with the Latin roots of the word “nature,” which have to do with being born or arising from something else. The definition is abstract enough to allow for many senses of conditioning or causation, not only those arising within Western cultures but in other cultures as well. Defining natural things skirts the problem of defining nature as a whole or nature as such. Whether nature is indeed a whole, a totality, a system, is extremely problematic and is not supposed to be so in all cultures or even consistently in Western scientific culture.5 A reasonably innocent conception of nature as such, however, can be constructed from the definition of natural things, namely, that nature is the collection of natural things related as conditioning and conditioned things, such that any two things are connected, however indirectly, by a route of conditions.

This little definition leaves open such questions as the tightness of conditioning relations, the uniformity or arbitrariness of orders, whether there is a principle

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summing up all nature, and whether nature is a whole or totality in contrast to something outside nature. It allows that there might be pockets of order separated by only the vaguest and most trivial connections. This vague definition of nature holds distant promise for explicating the two dimensions of nature’s contingency, because the mutual conditioning of natural things is the realm of cosmological contingency, and the question of why there are any natural things at all, why there is any cosmos with one thing causing another, addresses the ontological dimension of contingency. That distant promise must be approached step by step, and the first step is to ask whether there are any boundaries to nature. That question sounds peculiar because we assume that any boundaries are natural boundaries and what lies on the other side must be more nature.6 The question of boundaries made much sense in the ancient world, however, when there was deep concern to distinguish nature from the supernatural on the one hand and the unnatural on the other.7 The supernatural was conceived by the mythopoeic imagination as impacting otherwise ordinary events of nature and human society but also as being expressive of powers and kinds of action that had no imaginable limits. When the supernatural was personified in gods, the gods were imagined on the surface as superintense people or animals but were imagined on the inside as not bound by the kinds of things that limit human or animal behavior. Marduk, for instance, could be depicted graphically as a matricidal warrior but one whose action creates the entire space for life and action in the natural senses. The unnatural, on the other hand, was conceived as not the intensification of the natural but the evisceration of it, the realm of the dead, of the shades, of those things impacting ordinary life through witchcraft and demonry. Because both the supernatural and the unnatural condition ordinary affairs, they seem to fit within the preliminary definition of the natural. Does nature have closure, however, against the supernatural and the unnatural? Is there a characteristic or trait that distinguishes all things in nature from the unnatural or supernatural? This is like closure in the mathematical sense in which it is said, for instance, that the set of even numbers is infinite but has closure over against all the odd numbers. In mythopoeic thought, the natural, the supernatural, and the unnatural had permeable borders, with intrusions and overflows. When the Israelites left Egypt their magicians, Moses and Aaron, proved more able than the Egyptians at calling down the supernatural, and Israel’s God triumphed over the other gods in Egypt and Canaan. As the Israelites’ religion developed toward monotheism, however, God became more distant from affairs and real kings took over the management of the realm from the judges who acted as God’s surrogates.8 By the time of Saul and David, witchcraft for contacting the dead was dangerous and forbidden, though practised.9

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By the time of the prophets of the exilic period, in the sixth century B.C.E., the world was sharply distinguished from the creator by being wholly dependent and created.10 Any fudging of createdness as the definition of closure is idolatry, they thought, leading to witchcraft and magic, which were condemned.11 In that same century, the pre-Socratic philosophers and the playwrights broke the hold of mythopoeic thought in Greece. Gautama the Buddha and Mahavira did the same in India. So did Confucius and Laozi in China. This was the pivot of the “Axial Age,” as Jaspers (1954) called it, and one of the main features of Axial Age religions was the placing of closure on the natural world over against the supernatural and unnatural. Instead of the mythopoeic commerce and mingling among the three realms, the natural world became the human home and relations to the others, particularly to the supernatural, were transformed into issues of transcendence. Without a clearer and popularly accepted definition of what createdness consists in, however, it was difficult for those traditions to maintain sharply the separation of the natural and supernatural. Nature in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim popular cultures, as well as popular East Asian and South Asian cultures, continued to be filled with gods, angels, and devils. Religion and magic were continually tempted to treat the divine as manipulable. Because the supernatural or divine had come to be defined in such sharp contrast with the natural world, and yet people had no clear definition of the closure of nature, the popular reality became thick with intermediaries to the supernatural: angels, postumously effective saints and ancestors, djinns, incarnations of the divine, avatars, bodhisattvas, shamanistic totems, Daoist gods and immortals. With the rise of mathematical science in the West, however, those intermediaries were relegated to superstition by people shaped by the new culture. This was because it became possible to give a new definition of the closure of nature, namely, that it consists in whatever is measurable.12 Put crudely, if something could not be found and measured, at least in principle, it was conceived to be a fiction. And if it could be found and measured, at least in principle, it was fitted into the system of nature, sparking a vast expansion of nature’s image. The mind-blowing expansion of nature’s bounds occurred early in modernity with the naturalization of the starry heavens and the explanation of previously occult biological processes by microscopically revealed mechanisms. Cosmic big bangs and dancing quarks express the continuing naturalization of the supernatural into our own time. Spurred by the cultural ideal of quantifiable measurability, the unnatural in modern culture was conceived not as evisceration, diminishment, or deviance but as absolute nothingness. The supernatural was conceived not as the realm

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of especially powerful beings but as the Infinite or the Immense, “immense” meaning literally “unmeasurable.” Subsequent developments of Western modernity have damped the initial enthusiasm for universal quantifiable measurability. Too many important things, such as mind and value, are not measurable in that sense. But that definition of closure itself can be generalized to include the mental and valuational things that have resisted objective quantification. We can say that nature consists of all things that are determinate.13 Determinateness is the universal trait of nature and the natural world. If something cannot be measured in a quantifiable way, that must be because it has some determinate character that makes it so unmeasurable. To be determinate is to have an identity different from, and therefore relative to, other identities. Determinateness is what makes things related to each other and also different, and so measurable relative to one another in that larger sense.

Cosmological Contingency: Determinateness and Time’s Flow The hypothesis now has been developed to be that nature consists of all the things that are determinate, and that determinateness is to be understood in part in terms of things being conditioned by and conditioning each other. This section shall begin to explicate and defend this hypothesis and finally return at the end to consider how it makes sense of the pervasive senses of cosmological and ontological contingency expressed in many cultures. Determinateness needs first to be explicated on an abstract metaphysical level. To be determinate is to be determined with respect to something else, to be this rather than that. A determinate thing thus needs to have features serving two kinds of function. On the one hand it needs conditional features coming from the other things that condition it and with respect to which it is determinate. These features express the senses in which a thing is caused, or environed, or shaped by other things, according to any conception of conditioning whatsoever. On the other hand it needs essential features that integrate the influences of other things into the determinate identity of the thing itself. The essential features give the thing its position, or substantiality. Without them there could not be any conditional features because there would be nothing to condition; there would be only the other things as potential conditions. Yet the essential features do not constitute anything determinate or substantial by themselves: their nature is to bring the conditional features to determinateness as a thing in relation to the conditioning things. The essential features need

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the conditional features just as much as the conditional features need the essential ones. Their harmony is the determinate thing, and without their harmony, neither is determinate over against the other. Atomistic philosophies attempt to get along with only essential features, suppressing the conditional ones. They assume that a thing can have an internal determinate nature and enter into relations with other things in wholly external ways like atoms in the void. Atomisms have great difficulty accounting for why any relations are important to the internal natures of things. They have to assume that things are unaffected internally by their environment, and this usually collapses to the assumption that atomic things are internally homogeneous and, in the end, not different from one another in character. But if things are wholly homogeneous internally, and not determinate with respect to one another, they are indistinguishable from nothing and have no internal determinateness at all. Things thus can be defined not internally but only in terms of their external relations, such as position, direction, velocity, and mass for moving other things. The problem for atomisms then becomes that of giving an account of external relations where things function as mere markers on an extensional field. Either the field is a special thing, internally determinate with places and geometries of movement, contradicting the atomistic hypothesis, or it is a fiction. If it is a fiction, atomism loses all determinateness, both internal and external. Atomism ought to recognize that external conditions must be harmonized internally to make things determinate with regard to one another in whatever field they might be together, which is to say that things have conditional features. Idealisms by contrast suppress essential features in favor of conditional features, defining determinateness in terms of relations. Determinate things are treated as terms of relations, and their internal natures are analyzed as relations with subordinate terms. But idealisms fail to account for the difference between a possible relation that in fact relates no real things, and an actual relation among real things. An actual thing cannot be a mere term in a relation without some essential features to determine it over against the functional character of being a term in the relation. The functional character by itself is only a possibility. Without standing of its own, a thing is reduced to its relations and hence cannot actually function as a term over against other terms. Moreover, the relations themselves are determinate only as terms in higher relations, which themselves suppose higher relations to the point of an absolute relation, which is itself indeterminate and hence incapable of relating any subordinate relations. As F. H. Bradley (1897) argued, the idealism of relations supposes a mystical absolute with no determinateness whatsoever. If idealism is to “save the appearance” of really different related things in the world, it needs to appeal to something essential in things.

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This brief survey of the superiority of the hypothesis of conditional and essential features to atomism and idealism is schematic and not exhaustive, but it can be made more plausible by the use to which it is put in the following discussion. The hypothesis is that to be determinate is to be a harmony of conditional and essential features, and thus in connection with other determinate things. A thing must be determinate in some respects to have any identity whatsoever. Otherwise it is the same as nothing. But a thing need not be determinate in all respects.14 The next step in the argument is to make that metaphysical hypothesis cosmologically specific with regard to the flow of time. Cosmological contingency has to do with the conditioning of things within time. The hypothesis about temporality is that time has three determinately different modes, past, present, and future, and that all three must be acknowledged in interconnection in order to account for the causal passage of time. As determinate, the modes of time have essential and conditional features.15 The essential features of the past give it actual fixity and complete determinateness. The past is what it is and does not change in actual structure or value except insofar as more things become past with the passage of time. The essential features of the future have to do with formal possibility. Relative to the processes ongoing in the present, certain outcomes are possible and others not, and these are formally connected, providing a field for all things in process. The essential features of the present have to do with the spontaneity and decisiveness involved in actualizing possibilities. The present is when actual states of affairs emerge from mere possibilities. The essential features of the three modes of time cannot be expressed without reference to the conditional features, and in fact this exposition just now cheated. The conditional features the past receives from the future are the determinate forms that get actualized and the values these structures bear. The conditional features the past receives from the present are the accretions of new actual states of affairs; the actuality itself is the product of present actualization. The conditional features the future receives from the past are the actual structures and lines of causal force that give definiteness to pure form. Without the actual diversity of things to integrate, the future as pure form would not be determinate. The future consists of formed patterns because of the determinate character of the past. The conditional features the future receives from the dateby-date movement of the present are the continual kaleidoscopic shifting of those patterns as different actual decisions are made. With each present set of actualizations, the future’s formal structure changes. The conditional features the present receives from the past are the actual things that function in the present as potentials for integration in emerging actualities. This is causation in

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the most ordinary sense: the past provides the actual stuff for new actualization, and that stuff has structures that must be taken into account in any new emergence. In certain respects the past might not allow alternatives for subsequent actualizations, and in these respects, deterministic laws prevail; in other respects, the past might allow of several alternatives for emerging things. The conditional features the present receives from the future are the formal possibilities for integrating actual structures that are potentials for new actualization. The present is peculiarly creative in that its essential features integrate both given actual conditions and formal possibilities for combination into new determinate actualities. As soon as the present actualizes something, that actual something is past and thus fixed. Each of the temporal modes has exercised a powerful and often exclusive effect on the imagination of temporality itself. Modern deterministic physics, for instance, imagines all time as if it were modeled on the fixed past, with determinate structures stretched out on a time line. On this image, the place of the present is arbitrary, and one can imagine the direction of time to be reversed. As Bergson complained, this is a spatialization of time. Existentialists, on the other hand, take their image of time from the present, emphasizing decisiveness and the intentionality of consciousness. Process philosophy also emphasizes the present alone as real, with the past significant only as entering into present actualization and the future as real only as anticipation; process philosophy rightly expresses the creativity in the present, pointing out that the action of actualization is not from the past, which cannot change, but an essential constituent of the present as the emerging of actuality. The future is the paradigm of time itself for those who see it only as a changing pattern of forms, one thing after another. Perhaps this is the dominant popular image of time in our day when things seem not to add up, only to pass, and when we look to the future for things to be different far more than we look to the past for the values that have been actualized or to the present for the sites of our responsibilities. But none of these images of time adequately represents the experienced flow of time in which possibilities are selected from among alternatives, locating present action and building an actual world where decisions count. The real flow of time involves the interaction of all three modes of time. At any one present date, things are decided that change the future and add to the past. Thus together with the change that consists in present actualization there is the change that consists in the unfolding of past actuality and that of the shifting of formal future possibilities. The togetherness of these three kinds of change is not temporal togetherness. Temporal things are in time, structured by the temporal dimensions. They have a future, move from date to date of present actualization, and lay behind them an actual past. Temporal things do not exist

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only in the present, anticipating a future that does not exist yet and remembering a past that no longer exists. Of course the future and the past do not exist in the present save through anticipation and memory. But they exist in their own temporal modes as possibilities and actual fact. The future possibilities cannot be unreal because their existence is only as possibilities anyway; they are what they are irrespective of whether they are actualized, although their patterns depend on what has been actualized. The past cannot change any more, and hence cannot cease to exist. The flow of time in temporal things consists of the dynamism in which the date of the present advances so as to move possibilities to either definite actualization or exclusion, building up a history of achieved character and structure. The human feeling of time flowing in the present includes the apprehension that the future has its formal patterns or limitations regardless of whether we rightly anticipate them, and also the apprehension that the past has an actuality that measures our memory rather than the other way around. The present alone is an abstract part of the larger temporal reality that includes the actuality of what has happened and the formal limitations of what yet might. The picture of nature emerging with this hypothesis is far more complicated than might be conveyed by the introductory remark that nature consists of things being conditioned by and conditioning one another. The introductory language might suggest only that things are conditioned by the past lines of causation that lead up to them, or by their environment. Now we can note that at every date of their temporal existence things are conditioned by future possibilities, by past actual things providing their potentials for actualization, and by the random and directed decisions taking place in that date as present. But because no temporal thing exists at only one date, but rather through a temporal stretch of dates, each thing is conditioned by the shifts in its possibilities through time, by the ever changing cumulative character of its past, and by the diverse acts of creativity in each of its dates when those dates are in the mode of present time. The complicated dynamism of temporality means that every one of its dates when it is present has a somewhat open future, a past providing its potentials, and a decisiveness of actualization. Moreover, every one of its dates has a myriad of open forms structuring it as future possibility relative to each prior date, and also a fixed structure as part of an actual past that grows with the movement of the present. A dynamic temporal thing is never fully existent at a given temporal moment, although of course that is all the thing is at that moment. What is left out of a given moment, say of present existence, are the thing’s future as that will have been actualized later and the past when those past moments were future or present. Any given moment is an abstraction from the whole of the temporal thing’s reality.

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Precisely because of the dynamism of time’s flow, constantly adding to the past, shifting the future, and making decision after decision, a temporal thing is fully real only in eternity. Eternity is not a happy notion in modernity and it needs explication here. Eternity is not static because there is no time when the three temporal modes are not changing. Rather, the eternity in which time flows is fully dynamic in at least the ways mentioned here, and things are in eternity precisely because they are temporal. This is because the relations among the temporal modes are eternal, not temporal. The past is not before or after the present or future, but together they define temporal relations for temporal things.16 The mutual conditioning of natural things is at least as complicated as described here, and surely far more complicated. Yet another step must be taken to acknowledge diverse kinds of temporal things. Temporal things have been mentioned here as if they were all of one sort, and probably most people have had in mind individuals or Aristotelian substances. But in fact there are many crucial determinate distinctions between kinds of things. Human discrimination usually focuses on items picked out of backgrounds.17 Sometimes these can be more or less autonomous organisms in an environment. Other things are so intertwined that the language of ecosystems is best for their description. Some things do indeed maintain a fairly continous character through significant changes in environment. Other things such as human beings build a tight identity over time by extraordinarily sensitive adaptations to a variety of things, many at a great distance. There are aggregates of things such as sandpiles whose members’ internal relations with one another are relatively insignificant; there are organic environments in which any change anywhere resonates with changes in everything else. Human societies exhibit vast mixtures of organic individuals living lifetimes, natural environments slowly changing, social institutions that exist in the human enactment of meaningful behaviors, and languages that provide meaning and change with use. Whereas any thing in any of these senses involves all of the kinds of conditioning of past, present, and future temporality, at every date of its existence, each kind of thing has different kinds of temporal conditioning relative to itself and to those things that are its conditions and which it in turn conditions. A temporal thing is in eternity in the sense that its whole identity includes each of its dates in all its future states toward which it might be responsible, each of its dates in its proper present of decisiveness, and each of its dates as given determinate actuality. This cosmology is abstract in the extreme, or vague, to use the technical term that means the concepts need to be specified by more particular theories before they apply directly to concrete things. In this regard, the cosmology is superfriendly to all the sciences, each of which offers particular conceptions of

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definition and conditioning or causation. Moreover, the sciences do not have to be reconciled with one another in order each to be understood as specifications of the vague cosmology. Whereas the language or categories of behavioral psychology, for instance, is incommensurate with that of particle physics, both can be represented as specifications of the temporal and eternal conditioning of harmonies. Perhaps it would be possible even to compare those sciences when both are translated into the language of the cosmology, although the difficulties of translation should not be underestimated. Best of all, the cosmology is vague with respect to, and therefore tolerant of, critical changes in the accepted hypotheses of the various sciences. Paradigm shifts are to be expected in empirical science, and representing the shifts as alternate specifications of the cosmology is one way of tracking them. The cosmology is not committed to the truth or falsity of any scientific hypothesis, only to its own capacity to be specified by any hypothesis. What is true for the relations among the acknowledged sciences holds for relations among the sciences and other human endeavors that involve articulations and interpretations of reality, including the humanities, arts, and practical affairs such as work, family life, and politics. It is fair to say that any interpretation of anything interprets that thing in certain respects and not others. Interpretations might be true or false, and the respects in which they claim something about their objects might be important or trivial, relevant or obfuscatory. But all interpretations pick out something affirmed to be determinate about their objects, and hence relate to the objects as harmonies of conditional and essential features.

Ontological Contingency: Creation and Eternity The previous section has sketched the hypothesis about cosmological contingency. A natural thing is contingent upon its entire shifting array of temporal conditions, inclusive of all of its dates in their eternal togetherness. What about ontological contingency? Two approaches to this question will be made here, one from the cosmology of temporal relations and the other from the metaphysics of conditional and essential features sketched earlier. With regard to the cosmology of temporal relations, eternity was the name given to the context in which the temporal modes are together because, unlike things in time, they are not together temporally. Eternity is also the context in which temporal things have their full identity, in which each of their dates has forms that are future, present, and also past, eternally connected so that they are together temporally yet lived dynamically with a moving succession of

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presents. What can this eternity be? It is the ultimate condition for the existence of temporal things and their temporal conditionings. What can provide that condition? Eternity cannot be a static form because that cannot be the context for either existential actualization or the solidity of actual fact. Eternity cannot be a fully determinate whole, as absolute idealists might suggest, because that cannot be the context for the dynamics of shifting future possibilities nor existential actualizations. Eternity cannot be a temporal, present God, merely remembering the past and anticipating the future, however perfectly, because that cannot be the context including the reality of the past to which memory ought to be true and the future that is so sensitive to change. Rather, the most plausible hypothesis is that eternity is the act that creates everything determinate, everything variously determinate in all of their dates as past, present, and future, and as mutually conditioning one another in whatever ways they do. The determinate things have their ontological existence as the interrelated termini of the creative act. They are created to be together in the ways they cosmologically are, with the regularities and decisive spontaneities of their temporal unfolding, in one act. The act is not in time but creates time with temporal dynamism by creating the temporal things in their shifting natural conditioning relations. The act is not anything determinate apart from creating, and its determinate nature is only that of the determinate world. The act does not proceed from any determinate potentials, because all determinate things are created. So it can be said, in the language of Western theology, to be the act of creation ex nihilo. In the West, this has been identified with God, although not all Western conceptions of God would accept the characterization of creation ex nihilo. South and East Asian variants will be discussed shortly. The argument is not coercive because it merely eliminates some obvious candidates for eternity and then says that we can think of only one more possibility, the act of creation of all temporal reality. Furthermore, the vast complexity of natural temporal conditions described makes it hard to get the argument in mind. But in the discussion of temporality, the very distinctness and connection of the temporal modes and hence of the ways different temporal structures provide conditions for temporal things was described in terms of essential and conditional features. Because of the essential features the temporal modes cannot be reduced to one another; because of the conditional features each is defined in part by its relations to the others; the determinateness of past, present, and future comes from each being the harmony of its essential and conditional features. From this, the argument for creation ex nihilo as the context for ontological contingency can now be restated in terms of the metaphysics of essential and conditional features.

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The conditional features constitute a complicated set of cosmological, indeed temporal and spatial, togethernesses. But the essential features of each thing are not contained in the other things to which it is related by conditional features. Rather, the essential features are what give it its own existence, allowing it its own being so as to be able to enter into conditioning relations with other things. The other things each have their own essential features by the same token. The mutual togetherness of the conditions does not include the togetherness of the essential features of the several harmonies together. Yet the things could not have their mutually conditioning conditional features if those features were not harmonized with the essential features in each case. Therefore, there is a deeper, ontological, context in which things are together with their essential as well as their conditional featues. This deeper ontological context of mutual relevance is what allows things to condition one another. What can be the ontological context that allows harmonies of essential and conditional features to be together without swallowing each within the others? What is the context that allows the harmonies to be, which they could not if they were not separate in essential features and mutually implicated in their conditional ones? The ontological context of mutual relevance could not be a common property such as being, because then all the other properties constituting things, all their essential and conditional features, would be outside of or in addition to the context that is supposed to contain them. Nor could the ontological context be some kind of determinate container such as the Absolute, because then there would have to be a yet deeper ontological context to relate determinate harmonies to the determinate container. The context itself cannot be determinate without an infinite bad regress. Yet if it is merely indeterminate, it does not contextualize anything. The hypothesis that solves this problem is that the context is the creative act that is nothing without acting and which results in the world of determinate harmonies. The determinate harmonies with their essential features are together as created together, and their conditional features specify their temporal and other relations with one another. The sense in which things are in an ontological context of mutual relevance, which they must be in order to be determinate through conditioning one another and having essential features, is the sense in which they are created together. Togetherness in the creative act is eternal because it makes possible the temporal relations described above. In their temporal relations, things are together as earlier, later, and as contemporaries, and this is possible only because they are also together eternally as creatures. Such is ontological contingency. The great abstractness of this hypothesis is a philosophical virtue even if a rhetorical sticking point. For the thesis that all determinate being is contingent

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upon an act of ontological creation is compatible with any determinate world whatsoever that science and the other forms of cognition might discover. The universe might begin temporally with a big bang, or it might be continuous through endless years as was believed in the steady state theory until recently. Human beings might be the highest form of intelligence, or there might be far superior beings. The running of the world might be practically deterministic, or it might involve both chance and responsible freedom. Whatever is determinate, including determinate indeterminacies such as openness to the future, can be created ex nihilo, and it is up to whatever forms of inquiry recommend themselves to ascertain what the determinate world is. This hypothesis opens inquiry to radically empirical questioning, at the same time that it provides at least the abstract beginnings of a reconstruction of the world’s religions’ apprehensions of ontological contingency. The ontological hypothesis of creation ex nihilo is hardly tolerable to the late-modern sensibility because of its blatant theological connotations. Late moderns seem to just know that whatever explains the contingency of the world, it cannot be the God of old-fashioned religion. Here is the nub of the tension between traditional religions and late modernity. Lest the idea of ontological creation ex nihilo be too quickly assimilated with what is popularly thought to be the theology of the West Asian religions, it is important to mark the peculiarity of that idea. The oddest element of the creation ex nihilo hypothesis about ontological contingency is that it describes, points to, and names an act. The hypothesis claims that the way to understand how there can be a world of nature with many different but connected things is by identifying an act that makes them be as determinate things. This is different from our customary intellectual strategy, namely, to understand things by identifying the principles or structures from which they derive. More concretely, our customary strategy is to explain things by reference to a being, or set of beings, that has a determinate nature, such that the world to be explained follows from that nature. This strategy is illustrated in common understandings of God according to which the world’s goodness, rationality, or purpose derive from those properties in the divine nature. The sciences no less than theology employ the strategy of explanation by principle and by appeal to the nature of foundational beings when they cite the nonobvious implications of mathematical structures, for instance, or the natures of elementary particles. But these strategies, whatever their merit in orienting us to certain commonsense matters or for explaining the regularities science discovers, do not address ontological matters at all. Stephen Hawking (1988, 174) remarked, “The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe

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for the model to describe.” The question is more radical than he knew, because we can also ask why there should be mathematical determinateness so that models are conceivable.18 Put bluntly, curiosity about why there is a world can be answered only by reference to an act or acts that make there be a world, with whatever character it has. An appeal to first principles or to the nature of basic beings is unhelpful if the question is why or how there are principles and beings at all. Even within ordinary experience we appeal to acts of making more than the European Enlightenment story about reason leads us to believe. In moral situations, we want to know who is responsible for the way things are and whose responsibility it is to act in the matter. When we ask why people do what they do, we presuppose an understanding of the principles and possibilites of action, including the possible motives; but the moral force of the question is why the people adopt the motive they do when they could have acted out of other motives, why they choose to have the moral character that comes from their choice of action, why they make one thing happen rather than another when the decision is up to them. Scanning any ordinary situation and taking up an orientation to it, we look to all the myriad choice points that need to be observed to follow what is going on, intentional choice points of human actors and random choice points of chance collisions among causal processes. In ordinary experience we do not limit our considerations to principles of possibilities or to the natures of established actuality but look also to the pulse of existential decisions or actualizations. Understanding by reference to decision points is the analogue for noting ontological creation, the result of which is the entire realm of determinate things, in all temporal modes, sub specie aeternitatis. Critics will point out that the idea of an ontological creative act is wholly discontinuous with all senses of causation, conditioning, or creation within temporal existence. Yes and no. Yes, all finite acts of creation are conditioned by actual antecedents that must be taken into account and also by formal possibilities, and ontological creation produces both of those kinds of conditions rather than being conditioned by them. No, in every present moment of finite actualization some new reality is produced that was not contained in the antecedent actual conditions. If that were not so, there would be no difference between the situation of the actual conditions without the new actualization and the situation in which the new actualization has added something to what before was actual. Formal possibilities conceived next to old actualities cannot provide any new actuality. The actuality in the actualization is all the old actuality plus something that makes the actualization an addition. Human beings experience this in every single intentional act for which responsibility can be taken. The ontological creative act is like every act of finite actualization except

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that everything in its outcome is new and nothing is a potential deriving from a previous actualization. There are countless finite analogues to the ontological creative act, and we can say precisely what is not analogous—antecedent determinations that condition the creative act. Ontological creativity as expressed within time is involved in every present moment of spontaneity, in any respect in which something new is added to the inherited actual conditions. Moreover, every one of those past conditions, when it enjoyed its own present, had ontological creativity in its novelty; each past actuality had its own past when it was present, but then its past too involved ontological creativity insofar as something novel happened when it, earlier, had been present. So in the whole temporal stretch of things, any actual change involves some novelty, and every novelty is, was, or will be a bit of the ontological act. No actual condition fails to be analyzable into its own expressions of novelty in its present moments and the actual conditions for those moments, which themselves derive from inherited acts of novel creation. Actual existence is not the whole of reality, of course, because there is also possibility, which the hypothesis about time says is the character of the future and therefore an integral part of time’s flow. The pure form constituting possibilities as such is created itself in the eternal ontological act in connection with the shifting novel moments of the present and the accretions of the past. In sum, the ontological creative act is like every finite act of present creativity except that it creates everything new and inherits nothing.

Symbols of Ontological Asymmetry The ontological creative act is radically asymmetrical, as a finite creative act is partially asymmetrical, namely, in adding something new to the actualized past. Ontological creativity is the making of something, starting from nothing (not just the past) and ending with the entire world of determinate things (not a mere addition). The explanatory reference to the ontological act has three dimensions: it requires an icon, an index, and a conventional symbol or name. Treating these three modes of reference, themselves analyzed formally in chapter 3, brings the argument to a close. The icon of the ontological creative act is, of course, the theory that says the reality is like what the theory describes. The ontological creative act must be understood in terms of three notions, the act of making, the source of the act, and the product. None can be understood without the other, and in this sense the three terms are symmetrical. Yet their connection is such that they assert the asymmetry of creation. The source of the act is indeterminate, because

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everything determinate is in need of being created. Moreover, only something indeterminate escapes the requirement for a further ontological ground of mutual relevance between itself and the determinate world. Without the act of creation, the indeterminate ground is nothing, absolute nothingness; it is not even the ground of anything and is wholly inconceivable. In fact, without the act of creation there would be no determinate conceivability at all. But there is the creative act, and therefore the ground is indeed the source of the world. The world itself consists of all determinate things, nature in the most inclusive sense, whatever that might turn out to be. The act itself is determinate only in the sense that it is the creation of the determinate world. The act has no determinate extensionality of its own, no medium that constitutes a nature apart from its product, because all determinateness is in the product; it is simply an act of making. Taken together, the indeterminate source, the act, and the determinate product are the ontological creation of the world and of the creator. Theisms, starting with metaphors of gods as superintensifications of human agents, point out that ontological creation is the voluntaristic making of the nature of God which is itself dependent on the divine creative will. Duns Scotus was a voluntarist in this sense in contrast to Thomas Aquinas, who claimed that God creates according to a preexistent nature, albeit one that is too simple to be determinate! Just as a moral agent gives himself or herself the morally relevant parts of personal identity, so God makes the divine nature in the ontological creative act. The icon of source, act, and determinate product describes the ontological situation of contingency. The indexical reference to the ontolological act is to point our attention toward the act, like finding out who the moral agents are in a complex situation, or where the important causal happenings take place. The entire dialectical argument presented here is a single indexical reference, starting with a general historical assertion of pervasive senses of ontological contingency, directing the issue of contingency to determinateness as the mark of closure for nature, giving a metaphysical analysis of determinateness, and a cosmological analysis of temporal conditioning, pointing out the eternal character of the context in which determinateness and temporality are possible, and then asking for what might be that eternal context. That question indexically points us toward what makes the world in the most basic sense of making. Such a dialectical index is appropriate for philosophers. Many other things function as indices for contingency and its ground for other people. According to the iconic theory, there ought to be three main classes of indexical experience. The determinate world is itself contingent, and any special marker of that, such as a death, an intimation of one’s mortality, a natural disaster, or an observed cosmic singularity can trigger the look toward the creative act. For

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many people the creative dynamism of the act itself, never separate from its determinate work, is an indexical pointer of attention. Gerard Manly Hopkins’ haecceities shimmer creativity like shaken foil, and most of us become nature romantics at least temporarily when confronted with a sublime sunset or sea swell. Then for the mystics the experiences of penetrating deeper and deeper into the basic elements of the created world, until the abyss of nothingness yawns like the fire whose flames come from nothing, point to the source sourcing, that on which all depends, nothing in itself, everything for us. The conventional references to the ontological creative act on which all nature is contingent are to be found, of course, in the cultural references to such contingency in the world’s great civilizations. A brief review of some of the standard ancient motifs of East and South Asian civilizations shows how they mark contingency with different symbols. The language of the argument so far has called up the parallel Western ideas, such as God’s creation of the world so eloquently expressed in the Hebrew Bible and presupposed in the New Testament, Plato’s claims that the form of the Good creates the world and that soul is the primitive source of motion, and Aristotle’s explanation of the contingency of all motion on the imitation of perfection as self-sufficiency. This review of non-Western motifs comes last rather than at the beginning because the philosophical analysis above can be seen to resonate with these symbols, finding in them concrete specializations of the abstract notions. The symbols themselves are generally familiar. From China two basic motifs suffice to illustrate the point. The first and most obvious is the opening of the Daodejing: The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; The Named is the mother of all things. Therefore let there always be non-being so we may see their subtlety, And let there always be being so that we may see their outcome. The two are the same, But after they are produced, they have different names. (Chan 1963, 139) The Confucian tradition picks up the more general Chinese sense of causal process as the subtle interweavings of yin and yang and gives that process an ontological interpretation. The eleventh century Neo-Confucian, Chou Tuni-i, wrote,

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The Ultimate of Non-Being and also the Great Ultimate! The Great Ultimate through movement generates Yang. When its activity reaches its limit, it becomes tranquil. Through tranquillity the Great Ultimate generates yin. When tranquillity reaches its limit, activity begins again. So movement and tranquillity alternate and become the root of each other, giving rise to the distinction of yin and yang, and the two modes are thus established. (Chan 1963, 463)

For Chou, temporal process in the ordinary sense is the result of the not-yettemporal movement from nonbeing to the Great Ultimate as undifferentiated being which is the source of primeval movement, and so forth. From the Indian tradition there are many accounts of the creation of the world with both mythical expressions and highly philosophical expressions of the contingency of not only matter but appearance, as in Advaita Vedanta. Here is the very ancient hymn of creation from the Rg Veda: Non-being then existed not nor being: There was no air, nor sky that is beyond it. What was concealed? Wherein? In whose protection? And was there deep unfathomable water? Death then existed not nor life immortal; Of neither night nor day was any token. By its inherent force the One breathed windless: No other thing than that beyond existed. . . . Desire entered the One in the beginning: It was the earliest seed, of thought the product. The sages searching in their hearts with wisdom, Found out the bond of being in non-being. . . . Who knows for certain? Who shall declare it? Whence was it born, and whence came this creation? The gods were born after this world’s creation: Then who can know from whence it has arisen? None knoweth whence creation has arisen; And whether he has or has not produced it: He who surveys it in the highest heaven, He only knows, or haply he may know not. (Macdonell translation in Radhakrishnan and Moore 1958, 23–24) Philosophers should resist until the end the claim that nature’s existence is a mystery. But it is. Why it is a mystery should be clear by now: nature rests on a

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creative act which has no nature, no necessity, and no existence save in the standing forth of determinate being from nothingness. The alternative to the world is very serious nothingness, and the mystery is the act that makes the difference. Given the primitive character of the conception of making something new, which applies throughout nature in many limited ways, we stand in awe before the Ultimate Making, and the Maker made in the Making.

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CHAPTER 2

Human Nature

Defining Human Nature s there a human nature? Is there an essence of human nature? Proposals concerning an essential human nature have been made in response to at least six kinds of questions. The first is the ancient question of classification: are we featherless bipeds, rational animals, or something else? Related to this is the question of boundaries: how might we differ essentially from smart dolphins, angels, and visitors from the Alpha Centauri system? There is also the question of understanding behavior and motivation as flowing from a human nature: we do certain things because it is our essential nature to do so. In contrast to these descriptive interests there is the normative question: what ought we be by nature such that failure to be this is a failure to be fully human, to be instead inhuman or inhumane? Then there is the opposite question of human rights: to what are, or ought we to be, entitled simply by virtue of being human? Finally is the summary question of identity: what is the human condition? What are we in the grand scheme of things, if anything? Though not equally emphasized by every thinker, these questions form the overall purposive context within which attempts have been made to define an essence for human nature. There are many reasons to say there is no essence of human nature. The first is that to affirm an essence of anything, especially of human nature, is to risk what guilty deconstructionists call “imperialism.” To venture any generalizations about human beings or the human condition is to risk imposing a parochial vision of what constitutes human nature and goodness. Another reason to deny an essence of human nature is that Plato did, in his argument if not in so many words. Plato, of course, is the one usually blamed for

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inventing wicked essentialism, although that is not to be found in Plato’s texts themselves. Aristotle invented the idea of essences for species and individuals and attributed a deficient version of that to Plato.1 Some nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century philosophers, mainly English men, did believe in abstract defining essences for things, and called them “Platonic essences” or “forms”; Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead believed in them at certain times in their careers and hoped to relate them to mathematical ideas. But those notions are only remotely related to Plato’s own ideas. Although Plato discussed the nature of such things as justice, piety, love, and courage, he never discussed human nature as such or said there is a form of it. In fact, at the end of the Republic he said that the most important thing you can do is to find someone to help you balance out all the contingencies in your life—wealth or poverty, talents or ineptitudes, beauty or ugliness—to find the goals and ideals of life that might be unique to yourself.2 Even in his discussions of justice, piety, and other virtues, Plato’s arguments demonstrated that they consist in different things depending on what is included; that is, the ideal patterns defining the virtues are relative to the things that need to be included and the interesting dialectical questions have to do with what ought to be taken as relevant for the virtues under consideration. If even Plato did not believe in an essence of human nature, then that is a good reason to avoid it. A third, more philosophic, reason to deny an essence of human nature can be drawn from an important metaphysical distinction made in the previous chapter between essential and conditional features of things. The best hypothesis about what it is to be a thing, it was argued, is that a thing is a harmony of essential and conditional features. To be determinate at all is to be determinate in certain respects relative to other things that are determinately different. Therefore things are always to be defined in terms of their conditioning relations with other things. Their essential features are what integrate their conditional features to give them both an integrated singular position relative to other things and also their own determinate identities. Conditional and essential features are equally necessary for determinateness, neither being more important than the other. The conditional features define a thing’s relations according to which it is different from other things, and its essential features define how it turns those potential conditions into its ownbeing. A thing’s nature is its essential and conditional features together. At the human level, this means that people are always to be defined in part in terms of their connections in natural and social contexts. Because people are differently connected causally and live in different contexts, their natures are different. Even if one might say that there are some common essential features such as being rational or having obligations, the essential features have to integrate the

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widely different conditional features at hand. Concretely, then, people are by nature different, rich from poor, women from men, one culture from another. Although there might be something universal and essential to human nature, there is not an essential human nature as such because by nature people are different. These three introductory points—the avoidance of imperialist description of the human, Plato’s avoidance of a definition of human nature, and the metaphysical insistence that things are defined in part relationally and that human beings by nature are related to different important conditions—will play crucial if sometimes unacknowledged roles in the following argument. Its point is that although there is no such thing as an essence of human nature, there is something very like that. The first part of the argument will be a discussion of some of the implications of lying under obligation. What is primarily essential about human beings is that they have obligations. But human beings may not be the only beings with obligations, and therefore the second part of the argument will discuss the human condition, or those sets of conditions that collectively distinguish human beings from and relate them to other things, including perhaps other obliged beings. The harmony of essential obligatedness with the conditions that mark off the human sphere comes close to addressing the interest in whether there is an essence of human nature.

To Be under Obligation Obligation is the condition that obtains when a situation exists with various possible outcomes that differ according to better and worse and over which you have some control.3 You are obligated to influence things for the better simply because that is the better thing to do, and your normative or moral identity is built up by how you do the better or worse from one situation to the next. To the question, Why be moral and undertake to fulfill your obligations?, the first and most relevant answer is because that is what is good to do and that you make yourself a better person by doing so, or a worse person by failing to make the attempt. If you choose to pass when it comes to being moral, that does not mean you are free of obligations, only that you have deliberately chosen a course that might not be the better and might in fact be the worse; in finessing obligations you fail a “meta” kind of obligation. You might not be worried about being a bad person, but you ought to be; that is, it is your meta-obligation to attend to your obligations even if you choose to disregard both your obligations and the higher level obligation to address obligations. The apparent simplicity of this point about lying under obligation should not mislead. Immense complexities are involved. The point assumes, for instance,

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that real differences in value exist among the outcomes of situations, that health is generally better than disease or trauma, that enjoyment is better than suffering, that understanding is better than confusion and ignorance, that affection is better than hatred, and so forth. Of course some situations might exist in which the generally worse would be specifically better, but in those situations there would be good reason for the reversal of the customary value, such as in the need for sacrifice.4 Whether we can know accurately what is better and worse is even more complicated. Surely we make mistakes and over time sometimes shift our assessments. But the very fact that we change our minds indicates that there are some apparent grounds, however obscure and difficult to discern, to which we appeal in making evaluative distinctions. But more complicated yet is the fact that we are rarely in situations alone. Most situations are characterized by highly complex social arrangements. Few actions are possible that are not joint actions of several people, actions structured by institutions and social conventions, and nearly always by the meanings conveyed in language. Most situations in which people can exercise some control over outcomes are defined through cultural semiotic constructions, and not just one but several overlapping, competing, and deceptively dissimilar constructions. Therefore a significant social problem lies in relating individuals’ specific responsibilities for the general obligations. Obligations refer to what ought to be done by the public; responsibilities refer to how individuals diversely bear those obligations. A proper correction to classical liberal political theory would argue that general public obligations fall upon everyone as personal responsibilities except insofar as social structures channel responsibilities to particular people, relieving the others of those responsibilities.5 A well-ordered society has social structures that assign responsibilities to people equipped to deal with them, granting the others privacy in those matters. Government offices, parents caring for their own children, and the division of labor in various economic and domestic jobs are examples of socially structured responsibilities for obligations in the social situation. Where a society does not have an effective social structure, the obligations remain the personal responsibilities of everyone, as for instance all Americans are responsible for overcoming the evils of racism given the failures of the law and educational system to complete the job. Whereas classical Lockean liberalism says that freedom comes first in nature and public obligations are consequent to the social contract, the better hypothesis is that individuals are responsible for all public obligations save insofar as the social structure assigns them to specific effective individuals and thus secures freedom from those obligations for the others. Thus when society breaks down, public

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obligations become everyone’s responsibility rather than cease to be anyone’s responsibility as follows from classical liberalism. On top of the complexities of assigning personal responsibilities for obligations in situations is the recursive character of obligation and responsibility. There are situations where possible outcomes differ greatly in value but where we have no control, no capacity to influence the outcome. Nevertheless, if we might have such control, we therefore have an obligation to develop it. Through responsible physicians we have an obligation to cure strep infections because we have effective antibiotics. We do not in 2001 have a cure for AIDS; but we do have an obligation to develop one, that is, to attain the capacity to influence the outcome of the disease. There are special problems, rather well understood, for assigning culpability and responsibility for recursive obligations. Although clinicians have the responsibility to cure strep infections, they do not have the responsibility to develop cures for AIDS: that responsibility in American society falls upon scientific researchers, and the higher level recursive responsibility to fund the research falls on government agencies and drug companies, and beyond that on the electorate to influence the government to structure research well. This illustrates the conjoint character of most actions or potential actions. In the case of personal failures of responsibility, we partially excuse a person who did not know better, but should have. We partially excuse a bumbling social agency or church for inadequacies in welfare, and reserve some criticism for those who should have corrected the bumbling in advance. A painful tension often exists between the stacking up of recursive obligations so that everyone is responsible to make everything perfect, and the humane forgiveness of inattention, unpreparedness, and failure to be able to exercise as much influence on situations as is necessary to bring about the better outcomes. People have many worthwhile things to do other than to prepare themselves for some future responsibility. The stack of recursive obligations carried to an extreme leads to moral and sometimes political totalitarianism. But the admission of incapacity carried to an extreme leads to moral relativism and abrogation of all personal responsibility. American political discourse swings wildly along the spectrum between these two poles in tension. What is essential in human life is having responsibilities to obligations; this is what is meant by lying under obligation. There are of course many kinds of obligations. At least four kinds or families of norms are important for defining how we lie under obligation: norms of order, deference, engagement, and identity.6 Norms of order have to do with ordering or arranging affairs in situations so that the better outcome is attained. Sometimes this takes the form of imposing patterns, as in instances of social justice; other times it is a subtler form of

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arranging means and ends. Most of what we mean by morality—balancing claims, minimizing personal and social costs, building the institutions of a good society—falls within the consideration of norms of order. Norms of deference have to do with acknowledging, attending to, and deferring to the intrinsic and singular values of things. People, animals, mountains, oceans, works of art, even institutions have worthy characters that sometimes resist being assigned roles in a just order. Part of an appropriate response to things is to acknowledge them, to defer to them, to take up an attitude of natural piety before them. Aesthetic apprehension more than moral calculus is involved in deference.7 Sometimes the norms of deference are in competition and tension with norms of order. Surely it is morally obligatory to sacrifice a museum of masterpieces to save a human life; but it is also deeply wrong to put the art and the person in a balancing order. Surely it is right to preserve an environment in which natural species of plants and animals can survive at the price of a human livelihood based on destruction of the environment; but it is also deeply wrong to enforce poverty. Surely it is right for a society to condemn blood feuds and exercise force to prevent them; but it is a deep matter to understand the family loyalties and passions, the biological instincts, that move human relations blind to the requirements of abstract citizenship. Considerations of deference are more prominent in many aspects of East and South Asian cultures than they are in Western European utilitarian cultures. Part of the European Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality was to suppress the claims of norms of deference in favor of giving things a position in a just order. Immanual Kant recognized the beautiful and the sublime as being different from the moral, but not as having a claim against it.8 Current philosophical confusions about ecological obligations and the rights of nonhuman animals, however, indicate that the ordering principles of morality cannot easily be extended far enough to cover our normative intuitions. Norms of deference are at play as well and need to be analyzed. Even in Kant’s moral scheme, the respect for persons as ends in themselves is based on deference and is connected with the ordering principles that make the will free only by a sleight of hand.9 Both norms of order and those of deference apply to the objective features of situations. The norms of engagement and identity apply more to the responsible actors within the situation, though like the objective norms they lay claim to shaping influence on outcomes. Norms of engagement have to do with how people relate to the obligations in the situation, with how they take up responsibilities, especially with their recursive responsibilities to be responsible. Existentialist literature of the twentieth century has been filled with considerations of norms of engagement. Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov tried to be an amoralist; Kafka’s K was numbed to

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insanity by the perfected banality of bureaucracy; Camus’ Meursault laid his heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. Where disappointment and fear might lead us to back away from our situation, to disengage as if we were not the ones who might act, or at least enjoy, the norms of engagement determine how we might take up our lot. The norms of identity are those that determine how our actions or nonactions give us normative identity through time. They are concerned with praise and blame, with being able to commit ourselves for the future and be responsible for past actions. Our own personal normative identity is rarely the only consideration in determining what to do in a situation. Only egotists think their own virtue is that important. But it does count for something, and that in nearly every situation. The norms of identity include not only moral identity but also our identity as deferential, engaged, and concerned with our own normative identity. The norms of order, deference, engagement, and identity together mark out important dimensions of value that define the normative weights of possible outcomes to which we might be obliged. To be under obligation is to have all their kinds of considerations count in the imperatives that define personal and socially structured responsibilities. However complicated and obscure these considerations are, they do define dimensions of responsibility for human life. This is not a human essence in any full sense because the content of the obligations and the complex assigning of responsibilities are relative to the nature of the diverse conditions in which we live and to their social structures. Moreover, beings other than human might have responsibilities to obligations. Any being with the understanding and the causal capacities to control behavior to make a difference to the outcome of normatively freighted situations is under obligation. Some philosophers in the West have said that obligation adheres in any creature that is rational. Yet rationality often has been defined very narrowly. It is better to say that obligation defines any creature with a culture that can articulate possibilities, modes of causal action, and patterns of cooperation in the division of responsibility, and who can exercise control over behavior and its outcomes. To be cultured, or to be possibly cultured, in a world with possible outcomes of different values is to lie under obligation. Human beings, porpoises, angels, and any beings on a planet of Alpha Centauri who might visit us or throw a party when we finally visit them all lie under obligation. The radically different conditions of the lives of these beings mean that their cultures barely overlap, if at all. We imagine angelic culture on the analogies of vocal ensembles and the postal service. But what do we know? Lying under obligation is essential to human beings, but perhaps also to other beings. It does not satisfy the questions of classification, boundaries, and behavior natural to human beings when considering an essence to human nature.

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The Human Condition If there is an essence to human nature, it must lie in a definitive group of conditions that mark off human obligations from the obligations of higher, lower, and alien beings. We can consider candidate conditions for the human by asking about common conditions of existence, common goods or rights, and commonality arising from cultural definition. Human beings share a common nature in at least one clear sense in that they constitute a biological species whose members can interbreed. They do not share all the same genes, but they can reproduce out of a common gene pool. The gene pool is common only potentially, of course, and that potentiality lies in the readiness of genes from any human to join the haploid dance with other genes. Until recently, human beings also enjoyed a common experience of early nurture in a uterine environment, and even now test-tube-conceived babies are nurtured for a long while in wombs. Scientifically produced possibilities can easily be imagined, however, for different sorts of incubation, and so that uterine experience is not necessarily common. Human beings also share common constraints on homeostasis with respect to temperature, breathable air, gravity and air pressure, physical metabolism, and suchlike. In these respects, however, cultures are highly inventive in their adaptation to environing conditions far beyond the naked constraints. Clothing can maintain human body temperature in conditions of killing cold or heat; air can be filtered and artificially mixed so as to be breathable and modified to humanly acceptable pressures; foods can be cooked and otherwise concocted to serve human metabolism. Astronauts simulate earthly conditions in a pure weightless vacuum, and who knows how the constraints of human homeostasis might be modified by multigenerational trips across the galaxy? Moreover, human beings interact with one another culturally to abide in and modify these empirical conditions, one culture learning from another. The historian William McNeill makes a remarkable observation about commonalities and integrities of cultures in comments about his famous world history, The Rise of the West (1963), in the introduction to the 1991 reissue. The plot of the book is to show how civilizations have grown through their mutual influences. In the retrospective reflection, McNeill argues that one of the faults of the book is to overemphasize the integrities of cultures that interact. In any society, only the elite would participate in what we would identify as special to that culture. In addition to some integrity to cultures, there are “world systems,” such as basic adaptations to physical geography, agriculture, shipping trade, and commerce that have moved under and across cultures, taking on local modifications but working with a cross-cultural integrity of their own.

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Common people are plugged more into those elementary world systems than to the culture of their elite civilization, at least in some instances. In our day, with international economics, political and military forces, travel, and the World Wide Web, the world systems might be far more important than the “clash of civilizations.” These systems might provide a centripedal force for commonality of human conditions. With regard to common physical nature and common environing conditions, nothing but temporary empirical generalizations can be made about a common human nature. As genes are modified and humans adapt to nonearthly environments, that sense of human nature will change. There is nothing sacred or especially dignified about the common conditions that obtain now except in their specific excellences and disadvantages, and in how certain congeries of conditions, often unnoticed by us now, are necessary as a basis for other humanly important things we prize. More important, human obligations are not neatly set off or bounded by these empirical conditions. We have obligations toward nonhuman beings, and it is easy to imagine, as science fiction has done, entering into cooperation with dolphins and aliens, and maybe with angels, to cope with normatively freighted situations. When we turn to human goods and rights, however, the common empirical elements of human life take on new importance, especially when regarded in connection with their cultural contexts. We can say, generally and tentatively, that the conditions that make human life possible and healthy are good for all human beings, even when they take different forms. So, all human beings would prosper with a secure environment, however that is produced; all would prosper with an economy that produces goods for food and the maintenance of domestic life, however diverse the appropriate and effective economies; all would prosper with means for gaining and transmitting knowledge, whatever counts as knowledge. Moreover, human prosperity, like obligation, is recursive: whatever enables the conditions for prosperity is also a human good, so that culture itself is a good, the richer in service of primary goods and of itself the better. Beyond the utilitarian functions of culture in securing and improving the lot of human beings, culture brings new possibilities for greater dimensions of excellence. Families, for instance, not only make possible the existence and education of human infants but they also make possible human relations of affection, care, and nurture that have nothing to do with infancy. The satisfaction of sexual urges need not be limited to brute bodily passion but can be transformed into profound, loving, physical, emotional, and intellectual passion. People marry and cohabit in order to attain emotional bonding that was perhaps originally utilitarian for the sake of protecting weak infants but that is

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clearly excellent and self-justifying on its own. Similarly, utilitarian cooperation can make possible friendship that is more important than mere cooperation. Public life arises out of the need for social decision making and control of force, but gives rise to a human excellence of broad vision, compassion, and the institution of public roles to channel general obligations to personal responsibilities. East Asian traditions of philosophy have been more articulate about this than the Western.10 Whereas some human goods are the fulfillments of antecedently given needs for the maintenance of life, others arise as civilizations create new possibilities such as family love, friendship, and public life that are immensely attractive and good on their own. The civilizational goods are cultural, and exist only in the exercise of the culture. But they too are recursive so that their ideals often are taken as signs of ultimacy. Family love is so good that love is the way we symbolize how we should relate to God and God to us. Friendship is so good that the gods are our friends. Public life is so good that the cosmos can be conceived as a divine city or kingdom. Part of human nature is that we are drawn to possible excellences, and where the excellences define possible outcomes of situations, they become obligatory in some way.11 Nevertheless, cultures are so different that we risk imperialism in characterizing any one kind of family life as normative for all, or one kind of friendship, or one form of public life. Furthermore, crucial questions need to be brought to attention about how human beings symbolize these human goods to themselves. We symbolize them differently. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self (1989), has argued that cultures are mightily affected by how they conceive the human good, a conception that orders many if not most of the lesser goods that make up human life. He claims that in mythopoeic Greece the human good had to do with the nobility of pursuing glory, and other occupations were subordinated to the warrior’s. With Plato and his peers the human good was transformed to a kind of heroism of rational self-control and organization of social life. With Christianity that was modified or supplemented with the ideal of the heroic saint. And in the modern period all forms of heroism were subordinated, Taylor argues, to the human good of ordinary life, life as accessible to anyone. These civilization-defining conceptions of the human good that Taylor discusses are diverse, and his list characterizes only the West. Other civilizational traditions have other conceptions. Perhaps some civilizations have no overall defining model of human excellence. Let us now recall the point of this discussion, namely, to determine whether there are any special conditions that define human nature. There is a potentially common gene pool, although it is not clear what the capacity for interbreeding has to do with the fairly high flown questions about normative human

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nature with its ideals. With regard to the gene pool, we are developing capacities to improve it, and also risky techniques that might introduce new harms. There are physiological characteristics of human beings set within limits of toleration. Yet culture allows us to alter those limits and there is no telling how broad those alterations might be. Human beings do have being cultured in common; we could not have developed smart creatures requiring prolonged infancy without that. But the cultures are different in specifics, and cultures in general can be shared with other animals, aliens, and angels—at least in some cultures’ self-conceptions. As to human values, we have noted two kinds. Things are valuable for fulfilling needs, and the needs are defined by the various conditions and cultures of people. And things are valuable as leading us on to higher and better excellences, not just needful fulfillments but satisfactions of high civilized life; these too differ from culture to culture, although perhaps any might come to be appreciated by those who learn its resident culture. Another candidate set of conditions that might define the human is history. In many simple groups the tribe name is the word for human being—simply “the people.” That seems quaint to us who are anciently multicultural. But suppose we say that human beings are defined by the natural history of the evolution of people on the earth, diversifying into tribes and coalescing into nations, a complex singular history in which all peoples in all cultures have distinguished themselves from other animals, divine beings, and aliens. This historical identity of the human is cumbersome in its complexity, not the least of which is the difficulty of making a story out of history. But it does offer a way for us now, with historical consciousness, to do some justice to the complexities of human existence and also to its boundaries. With specific history, we do not have to say what human nature is in general but what these people are and did in relation to those people, and these animals, and just who it is we encounter that seem to be angels or aliens. History is not merely human history but the history of us in relation to anything specific whatsoever. That human beings have a specific, if complicated, history on earth might be the closest we can come to defining the human condition. But the boundaries of that history are as permeable as we have seen the other candidate conditions to be.

Orientation and Poise The final consideration of potential common conditions for the human is hard to explain in Western terms although it is a familiar idea in East Asia. Western thinkers such as the idealists and existentialists have been concerned to define the “centered” self, the self with interiority that looks out on the world and

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struggles to interact with the world with integrity.12 Many have come to criticize that as supposing too sharp and arbitrary a distinction between self and world, led to exaggeration perhaps by Descartes’ distinction between mind and body, which everyone agrees is more wicked even than cultural imperialism. An alternative hypothesis is that instead we treat those problems of selfhood and integrity as matters of subtle and appropriate orientation to reality rather than the construction of a self-substance. We have orientations to the world and develop ways of behaving properly and keeping our balance, existing in harmony with the Dao. The Chinese were quick to point out that orientation is a complex matter because the movements of reality are so diverse and complex. Xunzi, for instance, a third century B.C.E. thinker, distinguished three levels of the operation of nature.13 Some things, such as the rotation of the heavens, are remote and regular and there is nothing we can do about them except note and perhaps admire them. Other things, such as the conditions for farming, are understandable and manipulable; we know how to plant, irrigate, and harvest, as well as how to cook, make clothing, build houses, and the like. We relate to these things with ordinary learning and traditional ways. In between, however, are irregular and often cataclysmic actions of the Dao, such as earthquakes, floods, and famines. They cannot be neatly predicted or controlled, Xunzi thought, but we know that they happen. The excellence of a human civilization consists in part, he said, in how it organizes through government to respond to these lurches in the Dao in the middle distance. A good government is prepared for disaster relief, for sandbagging swollen streams, and for laying away grain for the years of drought. The Chinese allowed that barbarian cultures could cope with everyday nature, but only a civilized society, with its high levels of integration, science, and control for planning ahead and for action over long distances, could make a properly human response to events in that middle distance. The large events of history, such as an invasion by neighbors or the discovery of another high civilization, are on the scale of those matters of the middle distance. Thus there are three scales of orientation here: settling into the cosmic rhythms, learning the regular coping customs of your culture, and organizing to act singularly as individuals and as a people. The Chinese pointed out even more distinctions of scales of orientation than these. On the metaphysical level, the stars are but a distant approximation of the cosmic Dao, and that Dao which is named in nature is not the most basic Dao.14 More proximately, there are rhythms of the seasons that structure much of peasant culture, and different rhythms of the city, of the family, of one’s aging and that of family and friends, of one’s profession, and special interests. To be properly oriented in life is not to define oneself by any one of these scales of or-

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ientation to natural or social processes, but to all of them together, harmonizing their diversities, responding to their different demands and needs. Orientation is a harmonization of orientations. All species of animals are affected by how they stand with reference to all the scales of things to which they might be oriented, from their historical place in the swarming of cosmic gasses, the gravity of their planet, the metabolic options of their local environment, and the contingent development of a new bug in their niche. But we human beings more than any other species we know understand ourselves in terms of how we orient ourselves to the cosmic array of scales of orientation. We all have myths, if not science, about the grounding roots of the cosmos, about what elements of the environment make human life sustainable, about the fundamental cultural importance of singing and brewing beer, and about how our group has related to other groups. We all have understandings of how we can become disoriented in some crucial respect, and have to find orientation again through dancing, prayer, better science and technology, or the grand tour. We understand how orientation and disorientation affect both groups and individuals, and how much of personal maturation is the attainment of what counts as sophisticated orientation to the array of orientation scales in one’s culture. Religion has a lot to do with the harmonization of orientations to the many scales to which human orientation is appropriate. Some religions say that disorientation at certain scales is very serious and perhaps built into the human condition. Disorientation or disattunement of systematic sorts is the East Asian version of what the South Asians characterize as ignorance requiring enlightenment and West Asians characterize as sin requiring justification. The human cultural religious project of developing a harmonious orientation of orientations to the array of scales of processes and events to which we should be oriented is specific and self-referential. The question of problematic orientation has something of this form: what is the proper or best human way to be oriented or to integrate one’s orientations? The reference to the human way might be answered by identification with one’s group, for instance, the American way; or with one’s history, for instance, Western culture, or the accumulated cultures of people on spaceship earth; or with a part of one’s culture, for instance, the educated person’s way; or in reference to physical circumstances, for instance, the desert way or arctic way; or in biological terms, for instance, the way appropriate to the genetically shaped forms of human life. We want to define the achievement of orientation in reference to all these things that go into our definition. In so doing, we note that the project of orientation, of orientation of orientations, defines us as it defines the orienting activities and attitudes. Becoming oriented gives us a center, an accumulated nature honed by sensitivity to the myriad conditions to which we should be oriented. And

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because the process of orientation is recursive, we need to develop more and different parts of our natures in order better to become oriented, and so take up orientation to those things which we identify with ourselves and our responses. Human nature is partly, indeed largely, framed by our representations of what we should be, in all complexity, in order properly to be oriented to all that is relevant to our position. The human self is not to be understood primarily by looking inward to a substantial core, but outward to the world, and to the structuring of personal physical processes, habits of behavior, social roles, and internal guiding representations of the world’s happenings and the self ’s orientations. As Kierkegaard so poignantly demonstrated, the self is a relation to representations of relations. But he supposed a substantialist notion of things in relations, of internal parts of the self in relation. The thesis of this book is that the most important kinds of relations for constituting the self are those of orientation to things, and of harmonizing orientations so as to stay oriented as we face first one thing and then another, and all things at once . A virtuous self is not so much consistent or accomplished, but poised. Our selfhood is the way we attempt to keep abreast of the moving currents of things, especially the things that are important and obligatory. This approach to the self is a conscious reversal of direction from that typical of Western philosophy and religion. From Aristotle to Maslow, Western thinkers have tried to understand the self according to the metaphors of actualizing substance. Christianity reinforced this with its notions of soul as an entity that survives the death of the body. A somewhat similar set of metaphors has been current in much of South Asian philosophy, according to which the self is a center of consciousness, not distinct from Brahman the ultimate self. An added theme in the West has been a focus on consistency of self in consciousness or, more sharply, a preoccupation with self-contradiction. The approach to the self as a harmony of orientations is the opposite of this substantialist and consciousness-centered philosophy. Process philosophy in the twentieth century has been a halfway house to the conception defended here, denying substantialist metaphors in favor of those of process, and naturalizing consciousness. Pragmatism has been in agreement with process philosophy on these points. But there are limits to the visions of process philosophy and pragmatism. The former rightly defines the self in terms of perceptions of other things, and of what the self must do in order to integrate perceptions. But it does not reach from perception to attaining and maintaining orientations to things because the latter require long stretches of time in which both the world and the self change; process philosophy is too focused on the present moment. Pragmatism, especially in Dewey’s form, defines the self in terms of functional

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interactions with things, all of which require basic contextual orientation, and it emphasizes the fluidity of both the self and the world. But it does not sufficiently articulate the different rhythms of the things to which orientation is appropriate, the differences in scale and regularity; consequently it misses the difficulty in maintaining a harmony or balance among orientations. The tradition most affine to the theory of the self as a harmony of orientations is the Chinese, in both its Daoist and Confucian forms. Daoism has stressed orientation to natural processes and Confucianism has developed an elaborate practice of rituals to provide orientation to social as well as natural processes, persons, and events. The purpose of this book is not to trace the Chinese roots of the main thesis.15 Rather it is to elaborate the thesis through a variety of topics, each of which has been taken to be crucial for defining the self. Where has the argument of this chapter brought the discussion? So far it has two sides. One pursued the point that human beings, like all beings, have essential features, and the other tracked the point that they have conditional features; human nature would have to be the harmony of both. The first side argued that what is essential to all cultured creatures, including human beings, is that we lie under obligation. The obligations pertain not just to possibilities for human beings but to the whole field of possibilities outcomes in which we might influence. The field of possibilities includes a wide array of nature beyond those things considered as possible common conditions defining the human. The discussion of orientation reformulated the issues of relating to the field of possibilities so that the diversity of scales of obligation might be seen in greater complexity. Furthermore, lying under obligation is not just a defining trait of individuals but needs to be parsed out in terms of the varieties of shared action, institutional actions, and the like, and in terms of various kinds of norms—of order, deference, engagement, and identity. Indeed, our partners in action, who thus share in defining responsibilities for action, might include nonhuman cultural agents who can enter into the cultural definitions of our own agency. The second side argued that the conditional features of human life do not constitute a unique and bounded set but are contingently connected with many factors that might change. Our biology, our habitat, our cultures, and our selfconceptions are contingent and are in fact changing. We might discover that they should change much more. However the boundaries are set, we are parts of biological, physical, cultural, and semiotic systems that have connections far beyond what we might conceive the human to be today. Therefore, although we have essential obligations and contingent defining conditions, there is no discriminable essence for human nature, either descriptive or normative. Our bodies, the definition of membership in our community

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of shared normative obligation, our habitats, and our self-conceptions might change. What we are today might not be what we ought to be, and tomorrow we will be different, and ought to be. In many respects, therefore, the notion of the human as it involves boundaries with the nonhuman is fairly trivial. We share normative responsibilities with a wider community than the human commonly defined, and that common definition is based on conditions that are evolving. When it comes to our responsibility to “save the earth,” “we” might mean “we and the dolphins.” Though not an essence of human nature, there is something very like it, however. It is that there are norms that shape our obligations as a biological species with a history of habitats and cultural adaptations, a history of civilizational extensions beyond the needs of nature to the excellences made possible by culture, and an orientation to the problems of orientation on all scales we can discern. Noting our species characteristics, we can ask how we ought to relate to the ecological systems within which we live, for instance. Noting the conditions of possible habitats, we can ask how our cultures ought to be adapted, especially to the mutual engagement of nearly all the world’s civilizations in our own lifetime; the more or less unified habitat of planet earth means our diverse cultures should be modified to get along together. Noting the vast expanse of the universe beyond primitive ken, we can ask what we should learn and do in order to understand and engage that cosmos. Noting the disparity of privilege in the diverse conditions of human groups, we can ask what minimal conditions of resources, wealth, power, dignity, and self-determination ought to be guaranteed for all people at the price of taxing or limiting people with abundance in those respects, all on the grounds of how human and other goods are best conceived in our complex time. All this is to say that the normative identity of each one of us is partly defined by what is normative for the communities of human beings in historical connection. Orienting ourselves to being human, and in continuity with other human beings, is part of individual as well as cultural normative identity. Of course we are also oriented to other cultured animals, animals such as pets that share our cultures, someday aliens, and perhaps angels.16 But we are not oriented to them as needing human goods, variously defined, or as having issues of human orientation to the array of orientation scales in the cosmos. The closest thing to an essence of human nature is having the obligation to take responsibility for being part of the history in which we ourselves are engaged, and including that in one’s orientation to the orientation points of reality.

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CHAPTER 3

Religious Symbols

Symbolic Meaning and Religion estern theories of religious symbolism generally have been reductionistic in vicious senses. Those deriving from anthropology and phenomenology of religions are overly indebted to classificatory schemes that rightly have been criticized for cultural bias. Neo-Kantian theories such as Cassirer’s suppose that the ontological realities that are so much the subject matter of religious symbols are determined instead by some kind of transcendental analysis outside the testimony of the symbolism itself. Often both the classificatory and neo-Kantian theories are committed to a scientism that delegitimates most primal and traditional symbols. The “thick description” cultural approach associated with Clifford Geertz and developed theologically by George Lindbeck suppose on principle that religious symbols do not refer, as those who use them usually think they do, but instead are only shapers of cultural activity and community. Deconstructive approaches affirm that nearly all symbols fail to have real reference, including religious ones. Another kind of theory of religious symbolism is needed to “save the appearances.” This chapter proposes and sketches a pragmatic theory of religious symbolism drawn from the semiotic theory initially developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.1 Unlike most European semiotic theories that have taken the interpretation of texts as the paradigmatic semiotic activity, Peirce took the paradigm of interpretation to be engagement with nature. In part, engagement with nature was construed in a romantic sense derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson (see chapter 10). But in larger part Peirce construed it in terms of experimental science. Peirce’s philosophy of science was not a Kantian theory of the nature of scientific knowledge but rather a theory of how to experiment so as to correct and improve our ideas and beliefs about things. Whereas Kant believed that

W

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philosophy of science is epistemology and abandoned philosophy of nature for the disciplinarily distinct natural sciences, Peirce laid out a continuum between philosophy of science and philosophy of nature. In this he was followed by John Dewey and other pragmatists.2 Engagement with nature (and society, other people, and ourselves) takes place through what Peirce called “interpretation,” around which he developed his semiotic theory. Interpretation is an interaction between interpreters and their world guided by the signs and semiotic systems of their culture. We engage real things differentially because there are symbols for those things within our semiotic codes. There is nothing, in fact, that we can point out as a reality for which we do not have referring symbols within the codes. Some thinkers have inferred from this that all interpretation is merely play within the code, denying real intentional reference. But that is to miss the function of semiotic codes, which is to allow us to engage reality intentionally. Our codes are constantly under modification as our engagements with reality teach that some symbols mislead us or simply miss what is important. An interpretation is a logically triadic relationship, Peirce thought, in which a sign is taken to stand for its object or referent in some respect by an interpreter who in principle might express the interpretation as a propositional interpretant. A sign stands for an object in some respect, and the overall interpretation determines the respect. Discussions since Peirce’s time about objects in contexts, and background and focal elements, require his discussion of signs, objects, and interpretants to be more complicated than he thought. But for our purposes here we can accept the central point of his semiotic theory and apply it to religious symbols. That point is that signs or symbols are to be understood in three ways: in terms of their meaning structures, in terms of their reference, and in terms of their interpretation.3 Before exploring meaning, reference, and interpretation, however, it is necessary to say something about what makes a religious symbol religious, or how religious symbols are differentiated from other kinds. The principal hypothesis about the differentiation of religious symbols from others is that they are symbols whose primary referents are finite/infinite contrasts.4 This hypothesis derives from a philosophy of religion which is not the topic here, though the hypothesis is necessary for the theory of religious symbolism. A finite/infinite contrast is some finite thing to which reference can be made that is taken to be a boundary line or world-founding element in the culture, community, or person bearing the referring symbol. Peter Berger (1966, 1967) has argued persuasively that religions in general articulate what he calls “sacred canopies,” or conceptual and mythic systems that define the existence and meaning of the world for a culture. A finite/infinite contrast is infinite in

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the sense that without the finite thing in its world-founding role, the world would be indeterminate or infinite in that respect. The obvious grand example of a finite/infinite contrast in the West is the existence of the physical cosmos: without that there would be the infinite, or nothing. In Western monotheisms, the infinite is often given a positive interpretation as creator. East Asian religions such as Daoism and Confucianism often do not identify the existence of the cosmos per se as a finite/infinite contrast but rather its internal order and processive principles such as the Dao; the Daodejing begins with the contrast between the Dao that can be named and the underlying background Dao that cannot. Some South Asian traditions, for instance Vedanta and Vaishnava, focus the existence and creation theme in ways analogous to West Asian monotheisms. But others such as Buddhism are careful to deny the possibility of focusing referentially on the existence of the cosmos and deny anything positive in the infinite or emptiness that is the true condition of form. The notion of finite/infinite contrasts is vague with respect to the many ways cultures articulate the distinction between the finite and infinite, the nonfinite. Finite/infinite contrasts are not limited to holistic subjects but can also be more limited world-founding elements. The Exodus from Egypt is world founding for the Israelites’ religious status as a people in special relation to God. Moses’ rod is a religious object because of its role bearing God’s power in confounding the Egyptians and getting water from rocks. The fire ritual in Hinduism, as described for instance in the Kathopanisad, is a finite/infinite contrast because it establishes the relation between people and the gods.5 Relics of the Buddha in temples are finite/infinite contrasts because they found the world of dharma brought by the Buddha (Eckel 1992). In general, finite/infinite contrasts shape cultures’ apprehension of (1) the physical world (2) the place of people within that (3) the grounds for value and meaning, and for worldsignificant identity, and (4) the elements of religious purpose such as salvation (the West Asian problematic), enlightenment (the South Asian problematic), and profound harmony (the East Asian problematic). These examples contain confusions that call for some further technical distinctions. The first is that between a finite/infinite contrast, its schema, and its schema image, a distinction inspired by Kant’s discussion of the Schematism in The Critique of Pure Reason. If the contrast truly embraces both finite and infinite, it cannot be symbolized adequately with a finite symbol alone. The Exodus was not just a happy escape but is religiously significant because it was engineered by God. Krishna’s manifestation of Vishnu the creator in the Bhagavad Gita was not just a large, bright, many-headed being but the creator of infinite worlds of divine things. To sort this out, let us say that a schema is a

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set of symbols that schematizes the finite/infinite contrast to finite proportions. Nearly all religions, for instance, have representations of heaven or paradise, which is the schematization of the religious infinite as goal of human life to a spatial representation. In that spatial representation people can imagine going to the infinite, being in its presence or place, feasting with it, and so on. Apophatic theology testifies to the difference between the finite/infinite contrast and its schemata: God is not really in a place on a throne, but imagining God that way helps structure the relation between people and God (or their religiously finite/infinite goal). Whereas we might think that metaphysics gives us a less “imagistic” representation of some finite/infinite contrasts, metaphysical schemes in their own abstract and universalistic ways are schemata. Schema images are specific representations of finite/infinite contrasts, specific pictures of heaven, the actual Exodus journey and its telling in story, and so forth. As Kant pointed out, a schema is a rule for generating a schema image. If heaven as a spatialized place for the infinite is a schema, the schema images might be a garden place, a throne room, a mansion, a banquet table, and so forth. A thorough analysis of symbolizing a finite/infinite contrast would have to specify how the schemata generate the schema images. Most religious symbols used in referring to finite/infinite contrasts are schema images. Much philosophically shaped theology, in Aquinas, Fa-zang, Sankara, and Zhu Xi, for instance, move from the schema images into analysis of the schemata. Another important distinction is between partial and systemic symbols of finite/infinite contrasts. The Exodus is a partial symbol because it supposes the identity of God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the further determination of the people of Israel through the Sinai covenant, and so forth. The whole system of symbols is taken to be iconic, in ways to be discussed shortly, of a more comprehensive finite/infinite contrast in the context of which the Exodus can be world founding for Israel. Similarly, the relic bones of the Buddha are finite/infinite contrasts because of the larger symbolic system that takes them to be the remains of the once alive Buddha who was himself significant because of the dharma he discerned and communicated. The vestments of a Daoist priest are schema images of a finite/infinite contrast because of the larger system of symbols that set them as markers of some deity’s holy powers. A third distinction, helpful for clarifying religious symbols, is between schema images and their replicas. A particular cross on a Christian church altar is a replica of the symbol of the cross. A particular recitation of the Exodus story is a replica of the Exodus. These distinctions are preliminary to the discussion of meaning, reference, and interpretation in religious symbols and will be fleshed out in that discussion. Religious symbols exist in semiotic codes whose extensions are structured

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syntactically and semantically to define the meanings of the symbols in reference to one another. The semiotic codes contain the possibilities for all the formal interpretations or propositions involving their symbols. Insofar as the symbols are determinate, the codes thus express the determinate character of (1) which symbols can stand (2) for certain others as objects (3) in which respects as interpreted by (4) certain others functioning as interpretants. The meanings of symbols are defined by the semiotic codes in which they lie. Among the many things shaped by semiotic codes are the rules that relate symbols to other signs or symbols to which they might refer, and that specify what interpretations are allowed of the symbols when referring to each of the referent signs in various respects in which they might represent them. A given symbol might stand for a given referent in a number of different ways, depending on the respects in which it is taken by the interpretant signs to represent the referent. Some symbols also can refer to a variety of different objects, with appropriately different interpreting signs. These intracode relations among symbols constitute their extension. Semiotic codes are immensely complicated and subtle in their extension. To note that a symbol’s extension might have several different potential referents, and several different interpreting signs based on different respects of interpretation, is to indicate only the roughest and most schematic sense of semiotic structure. The important point to stress is that the analysis of meaning in this sense, extensional analysis, works entirely within the coded semiotic system. The symbols are signs within the semiotic system; so are the referents, and so are the interpreting signs. The study of symbols’ meanings in this sense is the analysis of possible legitimate interpretations of signs relative to referents within the semiotic system. It is not an intentional study of actual interpretations, in which real objects are engaged, but only of possible interpretations as these are made possible by semiotic structures. The symbols in their extensional structure are referred to other signs of objects, not to real objects themselves. Many thinkers have taken the fact that the intracode meanings of symbols involve reference to objects only as signified by other signs to mean that there is no real reference outside symbol systems. But this is to confuse the extensional potential structure of meaning in a semiotic system with intentional actual interpretations in which the system itself is employed to engage realities for real interpreters. An act of interpretation is a real engagement, shaped for better or worse by the structure of the semiotic system at hand that enables discerning distinctions to be made. The analysis of semiotic codes has been a preoccupation of European semiotics from Saussure to Derrida, culminating in the discussions of structuralism and difference. Peirce’s approach to semiotic codes differed by virtue of his

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interest in the genesis of symbols, the shifts and extensions of their meanings, and their decay into triviality. Sometimes symbols grow toward greater determination, and sometimes they grow toward vague extension; sometimes the symbols do both at once, leading to ambiguity. The growth and changes in semiotic codes come about as they are used by people to engage the world. Pragmatic reasons explain the sharpening of some symbols and the diffusing of others, the invention of new symbols and production of analogical variations. Some symbols cease to have use, and others arise because the need for new discriminations is felt when people engage reality under the shaping direction of the code. Religious symbols are organized within semiotic codes according to symbolic systems. A symbolic system is a set of symbols that are at least partially interdefined and that together constitute a complex meaning. In Confucianism, for instance, there is a set of symbols clustered around notions of filial piety that have meanings for adult children taking care of parents, for parents teaching the capacity for love to small children, for the definition of orders of respect and care among unequals throughout society modeled on filiality, and for definition of the nature of imperial power and authority. At the same time in Confucianism, there is another set of symbols clustered around notions of sacrifice, from the emperor’s annual cycle of sacrifices through the many layers of government and community sacrifices down to family rituals; the sacrifice symbol system is different from that of filial piety, but overlaps or joins it at various points. The emperor is both father of the people and priest to heaven. Yet a different system of sacrifice symbols flourished in ancient Israel having to do with the means God provides for a sinful people, or sinful individuals, to restore their broken relation to the divine covenant. That system was extended by Christians in one form of the atonement theory in which Jesus was the redeeming sacrifice to save the whole world; Jews very carefully did not make that extension, although the suffering of Jews in various parts of the world has sometimes been interpreted as a different kind of extension (“holocaust” originally meant the Levitical priest’s offering of a sacrificial animal in the fire of the altar). The ancient Israelite symbols of the messiah, the good king representing God and defending Israel from enemies while executing justice within the nation, were extended from Saul to David to Cyrus. The Christians developed that system to apply to Jesus, reversing some of its monarchical interpretations, while rabbinic Judaism extended that symbol system in ways that precluded its application to Jesus and looked for a future historical eschatological messiah. The sacrifice and messiah symbol systems in both Judaism and Christianity are different but sometimes connected and overlapping. Judaism would never join the systems to say that the messiah is a redemptive sacrifice, as some kinds of Christianity claim.

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Symbol systems within a semiotic code relate to one another in a bewildering variety of ways, ranging from neat logical integration, as in a theological system with its doctrines lined up in a row, to virtual independence and incommensurability. Most often, however, the symbol systems are juxtaposed so as to overlap and resonate with one another. For instance, among the symbols within Christianity for interpreting the religious significance of Jesus is the network of symbols centered around the dominant symbol of messiah. This network includes connotations of anointing victors and kings, the exercise of political kingship, protection of the poor and solitary, and the fact that the anointed king of Israel is the substitute for God, who prior to the anointing had been regarded as the real king (1 Samuel 8). The “messiah network” is different from but related to the network of symbols for Jesus as teacher, involving the message of forgiveness and repentence, the kingdom of God, and ethical matters. Both of these networks are different from that concerning Jesus as the atoning Lamb of God, picking up on the history of the Passover and Exodus, and also the scapegoat sacrifice imagery of the Law. The relations among networks of religious symbols are rarely like logical theoretical implications. Rather, they are overlaid resonances, mutually reinforcing or correcting images. The networks mentioned are sometimes listed in classical Christian theologies such as Calvin’s under the titles “King,” “Prophet,” and “Priest.” Together they sometimes are taken to describe the “Work of Jesus Christ.” Considered this way, they surely are coherent in the sense that a person can have three jobs; it was not uncommon for ancient kings to be construed as having priestly and pedagogical roles. The relevant symbolic networks do not articulate three job descriptions, however, but far deeper symbolic meanings. They each express in their way something of what makes Jesus divine in the collected networks of Christian symbolism. They point beyond Jesus the man to something infinite. As they actually function in religious life, the various symbolic networks work together. No functional Christology could be based on the messiah network alone, nor on any of the others alone. Theologians sometimes strive to reduce the symbolic networks to abstractions that can be harmonized and reconciled. All to the good. But the symbolic function of religious symbols, which is to engage religious people with the religious realities, involves the symbolic networks, not as abstracted, but as overlaid together, compacted, conjoined, juxtaposed, alternated, and sometimes plainly confused. The saints wash their clothes in the blood of the Lamb and have them come out white; this confounds the rationalists but makes perfect symbolic sense (Revelation 7). The intensity of symbolic engagement of religious realities often is achieved only by the fusion of networks, mixed together, alternated, or strung out as in a liturgical calendar.

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Furthermore, the networks often serve as limitations or correctives of one another. For instance, the cannibalism network in the Christian eucharist, in which the communicants eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus, is directly limited by the network of the Righteous King who forbids murder and cannibalism: because Jesus is a righteous lord, the symbolic acts of ingesting him are only symbolic, with the bread and wine substitutes being significant precisely as substitutes. Probably no important symbolic religious act, practice, ritual, or text has only one system of symbolic meaning, but is the cumulative resonance of many. The reason theology seems so thin to many religious people is that its attempt to find univocal signification reduces or rationalizes the unspeakable interresonances of the diverse symbolic systems. Scholars can study how a religious tradition shapes the semantic content of its semiotic code, tracing the possible connections among signs as symbols, referents, and interpretations. These connections can be called extensional because they exhibit the extensions of meaning within a sign system. Actual intentional interpretations use symbols as structured by semiotic systems to interpret reality. The symbol, with its semiotically coded extensional meanings, is used representatively to engage the reality to which it is referred in actual interpretation. Chapter 10 elaborates some of these distinctions.

The Reference of Religious Symbols Symbolic systems and their extensional connections in semiotic codes can be studied by scholars of symbols who articulate their various meanings. All interpretations can be figured within a semiotic code, and thus any independent description of a reference is made by symbols within the code. Deconstructionists and others have concluded from this that there is no real reference, that interpretation is only the entertainment of possibilities within the code, that the only objects of symbols are other symbols. But actual interpreters use the figures of interpretation within the code to map and articulate their engagement with reality. Religious people interpreting the world are not interested primarily in how the symbols relate to one another but in how they refer truly or falsely to what is real. The symbols, along with the systems and codes in which they have meaning, are used to refer to real objects. Whether the symbols rightly refer to those objects when interpreted to stand for them in certain respects is the question of truth. But the question of truth cannot be raised if there is no real reference. Religious people employing religious symbols do take them to have reference, for better or worse. Even Buddhists who

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deny that there are ontologically significant real objects take that claim to express the way things really are. Actual reference in interpretation is to realities (1) as potentially pointed to by the structure of the semiotic system and (2) as selected by the act of interpretation to be intentionally referred to by the symbols taken to represent them in certain respects. Interpretation is the engagement of realities by means of cognitive and other activities shaped by the symbol system. Actual interpretation is a function of intentionality, and hence the actual referents and actual interpretants can be called “intentional referents and interpretants.” Symbols shaped by their codes represent their intentional referents more or less well, and the process of interpretation, carried on over time by communities, involves correction. The distinction between intracode extensional reference and interpretation, and actual intentional reference and interpretation, is abundantly illustrated in the history of religions as traditional symbols systems are broken and amended, cut, filed, and polished, better to carry out the semiotic functions involved in real engagement. If all interpretation were intratextual, it would be difficult to understand whence the constant sense of frustration, misexpression, and misdirection come. Reference has a doubled referent. The primary referent is the religious object, which is best understood as a contrast joining something finite and something infinite, as explained above. (For the sake of the present point, however, that particular analysis of what it means to be a religious object of reference need not be accepted. The present point is that a religious symbol functions in an interpretation to refer to some object as being what the symbol says it is.) The secondary referent is to the symbolizers’ own culture, stage of life, and state of soul. That a finite thing can function in a finite/infinite contrast is relative to the nature of the interpreter referring to it. It is as if to say, this finite thing bears the infinite, or demarks the border of the infinite, for interpreters of this type. Consider a familiar example. Within Christian symbol systems, “Father” is a standard symbol for God with great extensional weight. Yet for those people who as children were abused by their fathers, “Father” is often an impossible symbol for God, no matter how much they know the extensional meaning of the symbol as specified in scriptures, prayers, and theological explanations that distinguish God the Father from every mortal father including their own. Whereas many Christians can refer to God as Father with full engagement, for some who have been abused that actual reference is simply impossible. Therefore we should say that the symbol “Father” refers to God as the primary referent only for those secondaryreferent interpreters whose culture, state of soul, and maturity are of sorts that allow such an actual interpretation.

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There are countless other examples. Symbols that actually refer for adults often do not do so for children, and vice versa. The creation of the world can be referred to with religious symbols for people in cultures that give importance to physical cosmology; it would not be a religious referent in those Buddhist cultures that eschew physical cosmology. Torah or the Quran could be grounds of meaning only in cultures that find meaning in law or patterned behavior. Jesus could be referred to as a redeemer, bearing the infinite in finite acts, only for those prepared to take their situation as in need of redemption. In the practical contexts of symbolization, the community needs to be sufficiently informed by the symbols of the tradition that it is constituted by them, and therefore can refer to the religious objects in ways that make that reference secondarily appropriate for the community. And in devotional life, symbols often take on fantastic and exaggerated characters because they refer to primary referents that have highly idiosyncratic secondary reference to the state of soul of the worshipper. Jesus can be depicted as brown, black, yellow, red, or white, depending on the race of the community. Liberating divinities can be shown as large fierce women girdled in skulls and waving swords, for some people but not for others. Even music can symbolize divine things only if its primary referent is coordinated with the emotionally and culturally shaped state of soul of the listener. In the history of a person’s devotional life, different symbols take on meaning at different stages and sometimes change in meaning, playing childish roles and then adult roles, roles relative to spiritual fear and then again roles relative to spiritual love. Symbols are differentially referential for different stages of psychological and spiritual development, and so forth. The ascertainment of the validity of personal symbols for God will depend not only on the cogency of systematic meaning connections within the extensional system of a symbolic code but also on the character of the various interpreters who attempt to employ those symbols intentionally. The limitations of secondary reference in individuals has its analogue in groups: given the history of Christian love regarding Jews, it is not likely that “Jesus” could ever function as a symbol referring to the messiah for the larger Jewish community. Peirce distinguished three kinds of reference. The simplest is iconic reference in which the symbol, broadly conceived, has an inner structure and the reality referred to is taken to be like that structure. Semiotic codes themselves are taken to be iconic of the meaning possibilities within the world. Of religious importance within those codes are myths and grand narratives as well as basic orienting symbols such as the center of the world in the great World Tree, the cosmic geography of heaven, earth, and maybe hell, and various doctrinal expositions of what’s what. Myths sometimes involve iconic representations of the “ancient time” before historical time, and eschatological time afterward.

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Mircea Eliade’s (1959) study of the sacred and the profane highlights many symbols of iconic reference. Symbols refer to their objects or referents always in a certain respect, and with religious symbols it is sometimes difficult to determine what that respect is. For, the symbols do not refer in other respects which might be confused with the one intrinsic to the culture’s interpretive use of the symbol. Yet religious symbols are often hypostasized to have universal reference. Many religious controversies and stupidities result from being unaware of the respect in which the symbol is taken legitimately to interpret reality. And rarely do religious symbols contain explicit interpretations of the respects in which they stand for their objects. Some myths, for instance, intend in respects that are rather like maps, so that it is assumed that if you sail far enough to the West you will come to the Isle of the Blest. Other myths are much harder to understand in their iconic function. Does Marduk’s murder of his mother to create the safe place for human life mean that civilization is based on violent destruction of roots in nature? Does the Chinese myth of the original people without anuses who eat by inhaling the steam of cooking rice stand for human origins that are in perfect harmony with nature such that no consumption is needed? The Exodus story is iconic of a relation between God and the children of Israel that has been interpreted and asserted in different respects in Jewish history, as witnessed in the claims of Joshua, Solomon, Ezra, Akiba, Maimonides, Herzl, and Richard Rubinstein. It is not merely that these people have drawn different interpretive conclusions; they have taken the story to be referential in different respects. Peirce’s second kind of reference is indexical. An index points to something, and is especially important when the iconic referential matrix misses or obscures something. The burning bush was a surprise to Moses. The middle way was a surprise to the Buddha who had exhausted the spiritual paths of his day. The experience of energy and breath in Daoism points to a deeper connection with the powers of the universe than commonly is thought. The Ayatolla Khomeini’s assassination edict against Salmon Rushdie points to blasphemy as a matter of religious seriousness that modern culture obscures, however much we might think capital punishment for blasphemy immoral in the modern sense. The samurai’s willingness to commit suicide to demonstrate and exercise loyalty testifies to a religious dimension to loyalty to which most people are blind. The fragile haecceity of creation points to a creator without which there would be nothing but nothingness. Indexical reference is particularly important when interpretations guide religious practice, for it is what points out appropriate behavior and discriminates religious things in terms of practical action. When religions emphasize “actualization,” “being true rather than having truth about,” and suchlike, they are

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playing upon the indexical character of symbolic reference that actually orients behavior, in the sense of orientation discussed in chapter 2. Because so much of religion involves symbols in soteriological ways, leading to attunement, enlightenment, or righteousness, the indexical quality of signs as causal engagers is of great importance, a point often lost on those who think of truth as descriptive in a mirroring (iconic) sense. A symbol might be ridiculous if interpreted as referring iconically, for instance by being contradictory to modern science or moral learning, but quite felicitous and true if interpreted as referring iconically so that the interpreter picks up what is valuable in the object interpreted. The third kind of reference Peirce noted (which he called “symbolism”) is conventional reference in which the way symbols refer within a coded semiotic system is taken straightaway to be the way they refer to realities. Perhaps the best examples of this are theological and philosophical systems in which the symbols themselves attempt to define their reference. When Hua-yen Buddhism, for instance, defines a theory of time in which the past, present, and future interpenetrate with perfectly symmetrical relations, like reflections in the jeweled net of Indra, it asserts that temporal reality has that character. One might step back and take a philosophical theory to be an icon of reality. But while that is valid, most such theories also interpret their own reference according to the conceptions of their system. Fa-zang means to be talking not just about the symbols of time as his referents but about time itself, and says so. Now it is clear that most if not all religious symbols refer iconically, indexically, and conventionally together. No symbol that we can talk about fails to have a conventional reference in terms of the language of the semiotic system. Most also have the steady iconic referential assumption that reality is like what they suppose when asserted. And most also are indexical when employed in particular interpretations. Perhaps there is little indexicality in symbols employed as background assumptions, as in rituals; but when made explicit they are intended to lift their referents out of the background articulation assumed in the underlying myth of cosmology. And of course living unconsciously within the background system involves the most basic kind of orientation. All that has been mentioned so far falls under what should be called the primary referent of religious symbols. This is the referent addressed in Peirce’s triadic theory of sign, object (referent), and interpretation (interpretant). Can more be said about the secondary referent? The secondary referent is the interpreter with the right culture, state of soul, and perhaps spiritual maturity for the symbol. Only for persons of a particular cultural or spiritual condition would a given symbol refer to its primary referent in the relevant respect. These persons or their cultural definitions are the secondary referents. Other persons, with different cultures, states of soul, or levels of maturity, might use the symbol in

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question all they want but the symbol simply will not engage reality interpretively in the relevant respect. Once the importance of the secondary referent is seen within a religious tradition whose symbolic system’s meanings are betrayed by people who cannot use those meanings to refer to their objects, we can see how that problem separates religious cultures generally. In cultures such as the East Asian that do not have a neat way of summing up the universe as bounded, symbols of the creation of the world as if by a maker cannot refer to the world’s finite/infinite contingency. Those cultures rather make something like that reference by symbols of the relation between nonbeing (wu-ji) and fecund great being (tai-ji); that relation appears in every part of the world, and requires no conception of a summing up of the world. To cultures with a late modern scientific view of the cosmos, the up-down imagery of heaven and hell cannot be referential in all the respects it was in the first century when that reflected literal cosmic geography, although perhaps it can still refer in certain crucial respects for schematizing eschatological matters. Why construe the relativity of reference to the culture, life stage, and state of soul to be a matter of reference and not interpretation? The fact is that people of different sorts interpret the symbols differently, which is a matter to be analyzed in connection with interpretation. But it is also a matter of reference: the symbols simply do not refer in an engaging way for people who are not the secondary referents of the signs. The semiotic code might legitimate the reference extensionally; but the intentional engagement with reality through reference to it by those symbols is limited to those for whom the culture and state of soul is appropriate. Reference is doubled in that a symbol refers to a primary referent for people constituting the secondary referent. For other people, the symbol does not actually refer to the primary referent except as an extensional construction within the semiotic code.

The Interpretation of Religious Symbols To understand interpretation it is necessary again to distinguish extensional from intentional interpretation. Extension refers to the structure of symbols within a semiotic code, the systems of systems of religious symbols. Extensional interpretation thus means the range of potential propositions that can be formulated within the code which draw out the meaning of a symbol in the code when it is taken to refer to another symbol in the code. Extensional interpretation plays out all the inferences that arise from taking a symbol as a meaning which refers to other symbols in certain respects. Following Peirce, those

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interpretive inferences can be called “interpretants.” Or extensional interpretation can mean the acts of interpretation whose point is to spell out the coded interconnections of symbols. An art historian, for instance, can provide an interpretation of the symbols in a temple or stupa. Intention refers to the engagement of reality by means of symbols structured in their codes. Intentional interpretation means actually referring to reality as discriminated by the coded symbols. This means taking real objects, finite/infinite contrasts in the case of religious symbols, to be as the symbols say they are, nested in the context of background reference as the symbol systems suggest. Because life is a tumble, our symbols in their systems are frequently being changed by their use, modified to be more relevant, broken up when misleading. Symbolic engagement in difficult areas such as religion is often highly imaginative in that the need for new and better symbols is a constant concern. The point here is not that symbols of finite/infinite contrasts need always to be ready for qualification, as in apophatic theology, though that is true; the point rather is that whereas the structure of a semiotic code is fixed and ready for analysis when the topic is extensional interpretation, intentional interpretation treats the symbols as tools for engagement and changes them as the situation warrants. Heidegger and others have objected to the view that symbols (language in his case) are tools, arguing that we have no place to stand outside of symbols from which to select and improve the tools. Language, for him, is “the house of being.” The validity of this point is that we are never without a symbolic structure that connects us with reality, including ourselves. The instrumentalist rejoinder is that we are always improving or adapting the symbols, not that we ever have a nonsymbolic platform from which to do so. Heidegger was enough of a foundationalist to believe that if language is instrumental, it must be grounded in a nonsymbolic purposive view of the world. But that foundationalism is vain. The danger in Heidegger’s view is that it lends credence to the belief that we are always locked within the extensional meanings of symbol systems, never referring to reality. In actual interpretation, however, the symbols employed plus the codes within which they have extensional meaning are used to engage reality. Reality is referred to by the symbols with the background of their code and as taken up in the interpreters in the respects in which the symbols-plus-code can register the reality for the interpreters. To engage reality intentionally is to interact with it in ways shaped by our symbols in their semiotic codes. The codes of all peoples have evolved through pragmatic necessities to pick up what is important for human survival and various kinds of flourishing. Through our codes we discriminate objects against backgrounds and discern things that are threatening or valuable. Peirce himself claimed that all causal activity, such as

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human beings physically acting in their environments, and their environments acting upon them, has the form of interpretation. We need not be committed to that claim to see the difference between the extensional layout of symbols in semiotic codes and the intentional activity shaped by those codes in terms of which (literally) we engage the reality around and within us. Interpretation is the intentional act of taking reality to be the way the symbols say it is. Most of our interpretations are not at the level of consciousness as we move through life with fair discriminations, and even those interpretations that are at the center of conscious attention are surrounded and contextualized by millions of other ongoing interpretive takes on reality. But at whatever level and in whatever admixtures of interlocked interpretations, interpretation has the form of taking the symbol with its extensionally defined meaning to stand for its primary referent in a certain respect; for the interpretation to be actual, the interpreter must be an appropriate secondary referent. The respect in which the symbol is taken to stand for its referent is a function of the intention in the interpretation, which in turn is dependent on the interpretive context. Intentional interpretation is concrete and actual, and therefore always contextual. Interpretation carries over the reality of the referent into the concrete, contextualized interpreters in the respects in which the symbol interprets the referent. Intentional interpretants, therefore, are shaped in part by contextual location. To understand the interpretation of religious symbols it is worthwhile to mention some of the basic contexts within which interpretation takes place. Although no list can be exhaustive, the range of contexts can be illustrated by mentioning the theological, the communal, and the devotional. The theological context of interpretation, probably the most familiar for scholars of religious symbols, is shaped by concerns for intercommunicability across all contexts, for universality of statement, and for expressions that explain differences in contexts but themselves do not have to be changed from one context to another. Perhaps the best way to put this is that the theological interpretation of religious symbols aims to make them maximally public. When theologians or philosophers attempt to limit their public to a confessional group, such as Advaita but not Visistadvaita Vedantins, neo-Confucians but not Hua-yen Buddhists, Lutherans but not Roman Catholics, there is a tension regarding whether they are making truth claims or reporting on beliefs that they are trying to explain. At any rate, the theological or philosophical context for the interpretation of religious symbols attempts to find abstractions to interpret them that can be logically defined, arranged systematically, and asserted with minimal qualification. When truth claims are made in theology, they often have a propositional form, even when theologians understand what is left behind in the abstractive process. The dominant purpose shaping the

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theological context is the examination of what symbols are true and in what respects, context by context, and for which secondary referents. The communal contexts for interpretation, by contrast, interpret symbols with interpretants that shape behaviors and emotions as well as thoughts. Moreover, communal interpretions are often multivalent. Like the Christian eucharist, a given symbol in a religious community can be taken to engage reality at many different levels all at once. The important religious symbols in religious communities are those that mean something, usually many things, for many different individuals making up the community. The dominant purpose of interpretation in the communal context is the shaping and direction of the life of the community. Important religious symbols for communities are the words in songs and liturgies, the music and liturgical acts themselves, religious architecture and art, typical activities in the church such as care for the needy, communal meals, and so forth. Religious communities often want theoretical understanding of their symbols, which is why they pay for theologians, but in the communal context the symbols are interpreted in such respects as to embody their referents, for instance God, in the life of the community and its members. Often there are no sharp boundaries between a religious community and a wider public, or between a community and the family and personal lives led within it. An interpretation is true in a communal context not so much according to whether the community’s theology is true but according to whether the implications of the religious object for the shape of the community are embodied in the community’s response. The devotional context for religious symbols is dominated by the purpose of conforming the soul or self to the religious object in whatever respects the symbols can represent the object. Unlike theological contexts, devotional contexts care little about whether the symbols are descriptively true in metaphysical or historical senses, or whether they are constitutively true for the shape of the community. Rather, interpretations in devotional contexts are true to the extent that they transform the soul the better to reflect or embody the religious reality. As a result, symbols for devotional interpretion can be far more fantastical and imaginatively extreme than those in theological or social contexts. Not believing in gods in any literal sense, Tibetan Buddhists meditate on horrific images of bloody gods girdled with skulls in order to become awakened from their sleep. Christians, Daoists, and Muslims meditate on hells for similar reasons. The devotional imagery of the Bhagavad Gita is anthropomorphic in ways the theological imagery denies. Protestant Christians can sing, “What a friend we have in Jesus,” knowing full well that the orthodox doctrine is that Jesus has ascended to heaven, departing from the church, and is represented among human beings only by the Holy Spirit.

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The contextual character of interpretation, over and above people’s explicit purposes, explains much of why symbols are employed to engage their referents in specific respects. The context often determines what respects of interpretation are relevant. Sometimes religious cultures have symbols for which there are no longer relevant contexts of interpretation. But the more frequent problem is that new circumstances provide contexts in which certain respects of interpretation are needed but for which no existing symbols are adequate. Because the contexts of interpretation are always wider than any particular interpretations, it is important to be alert to distinctions between primary interpretations, which are representative, and secondary interpretations, which are practical consequences. The primary, representative interpretations are those in which the religious referent is carried over into the interpreters in the respects mediated by the symbols. The secondary, consequential interpretations are the implications of the primary interpretations for other parts of the context. In the theological context, the interpretation of one symbolic doctrine might have implications for another doctrine, or for ethical theory, or artistic endeavors. In a communal context a secondary interpretation might have to do with changing the community’s policies and practices. In a devotional context the practical consequences of a transformed soul run throughout the whole of life. Calling the practical consequences a secondary interpretation attends to the fact that the drawing of them is subject to critical interpretive control. What results from a primary interpretation is not always a legitimate practical inference, and it should be.

The Truth of Religious Symbols The discussion has moved ineluctably into the question of the truth of religious symbols, for an interpretation guiding engagement with reality aims to be true. Many conceptions of truth make religious symbols highly problematic. Specifically, this is so for all those theories based on Aristotle’s root metaphor of knowledge as the carryover of the form of a thing into the mind, forming the mind: to know is to get the form of the thing into the mind, and truth has to do with the identity of form in the thing’s matter and the mind’s matter. This metaphor carried over into conceptions of representative knowledge in modern European philosophy. The insoluble problem of how to conceive the comparison of the form in the thing with that in the mind has rendered this approach moot. An alternative root metaphor is to conceive of knowledge as the carryover of the value, worth, or importance of the object into the interpreter.6 The forms involved in achieving that value in the object might be quite different from

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those achieving that value in the interpreter. According to semiotic theory, the carryover is accomplished through the signs and symbols of the semiotic code when that code shapes interpretive engagement with reality. Therefore the carryover is qualified by the respects in which the symbols interpret their referents. Not all the reality of the objects is carried over, only that accommodated by the respects of interpretation. Moreover, the carryover is qualified by the biological structures of the interpreters, their culture, their semiotic codes, and their personal, social, and civilizational purposes. Only the value or importance in objects of reference that can be registered in biological beings with nervous systems such as we have can be carried over so that we recognize and treat that importance appropriately. Flies and angels, having different kinds of bodies, would have different kinds of carryover, picking up different aspects of reality. Similarly, our culture lifts up certain kinds of things as important to notice and attend to, sinking the rest into triviality; pragmatic considerations affect this qualification of carryover. The semiotic codes supply the symbols for the carryover, and we have discussed the limitations of this and the flexibility in code building required for engaging reality. Finally, our intepretations are driven by interests and purposes. Those interests and purposes, to be sure, are determined largely by what our interpretive experience has revealed to be really valuable and important. There is no ground in a pragmatic theory to believe that purpose is a function of arbitrary will. But a pragmatic semiotic would also emphasize the importance of continued reevaluation of interests and purposes in terms of new learning. Truth exists only within triadic interpretations. But it is itself a dyadic relation. Within an interpretation, taking into account all the qualifications and limitations to the respect in which the symbol interprets its referent, it is either true or false. One can say true more or less, in this respect but not that, and yet however the representative relation is construed with all these qualifications, the symbol is either right or wrong. Religious symbols are notoriously vague, which means that in certain respects the principle of contradiction does not apply to them (Raposa 1993). But to the extent that they assert something determinate, they are either right or wrong. Applied to religious symbols, the theory of truth as the carryover of value or importance claims that finite/infinite contrasts are carried over, properly qualified, into interpreters’ lives and communities. Or to put the point more exactly, if the value or importance is carried over in the respects intended in the symbolic interpretation, the interpretation is true. In theological or philosophical contexts, the line of carryover is explicitly examined and the interpretive symbols (complex, more or less systematic propositions) are sensitive to the needs both to represent universally and publicly

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and to provide a justification for the representation. Theology often simplifies interpretation into what can be expressed propositionally. But good theology always knows that the background that provides propositions with their semantic context is usually as controversial as the propositional foreground. Theological truth claims are either right or wrong as asserted within the symbol systems’ assumptions, themselves nested within the semiotic code’s elementary possibilities, all taken to be roughly iconic with the structure of the universe within which finite/infinite contrasts occur as founding elements. This makes theology harder than some would like who believe that propositions have an integrity apart from the historicity of cultures and semiotic codes. But it is wiser for all that, as known by the theological greats who understood themselves to be reorienting entire cultures. Whereas interpretation in the theological context aims to represent and interpret how it is representing, the truth of interpretations in a communal context is focused more on faithfulness to the religious object in the community’s life. Faithfulness is perhaps too Western a term to express what it means for a community to be true to its foundations, its founder’s vision, its spiritual ground. Yet it expresses the importance of the conformation of the community in its many faceted existence to the religious objects that are worldfounding for it. Although not easily articulable in propositional form, that communities can be faithful or unfaithful to their justifying ground has been illustrated abundantly in the twentieth century. The devotional context is hardest to articulate as an arena of true and false symbols because it is farthest from the propositional form of truth. Nevertheless, the point can be understood in the abstract: a symbol is true in devotion when it affects the soul so as better to embody what the value or importance of the religious object is for the soul. The most obvious example of this is expressed in the Buddhist notion of upaya, or expedient means. Symbols can be anthropomorphic when that is officially denied, as in the worship of Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin) or significantly insignificant, as in the Zen master’s blows, or ambiguously between as in koans and boring mantras. Most symbols in the bhakti traditions of Hinduism, for instance in the Bhagavad Gita, are true or false insofar as they produce their proper effect. When no direct, articulate representative relation is in play, how does one tell whether what is carried over into the interpreter is true or false? There is no single answer to this. The marks of devotional improvement have to do with large and vague character transformations that need to be coordinated with theological and communal interpretations of religious norms. Truth in communal contexts is difficult to measure because faithfulness to the wrong referent, an idolatrous alleged finite/infinite contrast, might go unnoticed. The abstract truth claims of theology are themselves hard to judge, despite the internalizing

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of certain processes of truth testing, because the symbols interpreted theologically might not dovetail with communal and devotional interests, resulting in desiccated abstractions. The contexts of interpretation are themselves normatively interconnected in ways too complex to explore here. Nothing is more important to people using religious symbols to engage reality and to conform their lives to the religious dimension of existence than the truth of those symbols. Yet the very idea of the truth of religious symbols is suspect in our time. Partly this stems from the Enlightenment skepticism that insists on either billiard ball common sense or arcane transcendental evasion of the problem, both of which delegitimate taking religious symbols seriously to have referents. Partly it stems from the more general skepticism and disillusionment of our century, which has seen devastating wars ruin the innocence of all traditional religions. But the largest part of the difficulty with the question of truth stems simply from the vast complexity of religious symbolism. Where our paradigms for symbolism are maps for topology and picture images for physical objects, symbols referring to finite/infinite contrasts are weird. Who likes to think that most of our religious symbols are schema images of schemata of even more elusive finite/infinite contrasts that are inaccessible symbolically except by other schemata and schema images? Our engagements are direct but their interpretations are always symbolically mediated.7 Where our suppositions are that the respects in which symbols interpret objects are understood and expressed in common sense, even below the level of consciousness, it is hard to hear that most religious confusions come from failure to identify the fragile respect in which a symbol interprets its object, especially when other respects are customary candidates and are suggested by linguistic analogies. Where we expect good symbols to have univocal reference, it is disconcerting to have to qualify that in the religious case by the secondary referents which limit the existential range of reference. Where we intellectuals would hope to interpret religious symbols in contexts that would explain all contexts, it is disconcerting to admit that the norms for universality and abstraction in theology and philosophy prohibit some of the most important religious symbols from getting a hearing for truth just because they are concretely appropriate only for limited communities or are fantastic enough to make a difference to a soul. In the face of all this complexity, it is tempting to retreat to hermeneutics and limit investigation to what symbols purport to mean. Surely that by itself is a worthy task. But that limitation denies and thereby obscures the most important thing about religious symbols, namely, that they are supposed to symbolize the most important and ultimate things in the universe. In its attempt to mimic real religious dialogue, hermeneutics thinks it is getting to the bottom of reli-

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gious meaning while being scientific all the while. But it cannot take religious symbols and their interpreters seriously until it joins them in the inquiry as to whether the symbols are true. That is the most important point about the symbols: their claim to truth, which is the conveyance to people of the most important things they might encounter for their lives.

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CHAPTER 4

The Symbols of Divine Action

he field of science and religion in Europe and North America is cultivated by several separate conversations that are not in adequate communication with one another, two of which will be joined here. One is the inquiry concerning divine action that takes its rise from people who affirm as a supposition the belief that God is a personal being of some sort. For these people the chief science-and-religion question is whether such a God can act in the world, in ways suggested by an interpretation of religion they sometimes claim to be “classical,” without contravening what contemporary science has found or thinks it needs to presuppose.1 Within this conversation the conception of God itself is not up for consideration to any great degree, and the debate is how to conceive the world so as to allow it to register the claims of both science and a certain kind of traditional religion. The other conversation derives from the philosophical tradition of European modernity in which from Descartes onward the philosophical conception of God has been up for reconsideration itself just as much as the conception of nature. Alfred North Whitehead (1929) and Paul Tillich (1951–63) are major recent voices in this conversation, holding quite different conceptions of God but united in the views that God is not much like a person and that religious belief needs to be modified in order to relate to the scientific worldpicture. Important thinkers such as Ian Barbour (1997) and David Griffin (1973) have attempted to join these two conversations from the standpoint of process philosophy. This chapter joins them from a heritage closer to that of Tillich. The argument shall be this: The first section will sketch a conception of God (extending that in chapter 1, though with little elaborate defense here) according to which nothing in that conception directly implies anything about the world except that it is the creature of God. The conception of God is thus vague with respect to, and tolerant of, anything that science or any other mode

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of inquiry such as ethics or metaphysics might say about the world. On the other hand, anything we might know about the world, from science or elsewhere, tells us something about the character of God as creator of that world. The second section extends the point to argue that what we know about the world precludes any literal claim that God acts in the world like a person, or is a personal being. This implication stems from both empirical and metaphysical sources. The metaphysical argument is that the divine creative act is eternal, as discussed in chapter 1, and that temporal interactions and intentional acts are among the things created. The question then becomes whether and in what contexts divine personal agency might have legitimate symbolic, analogical, or metaphorical uses. The third section will review certain of these conditions with respect to the symbol of God as a personal agent. In the conditions of philosophical theology, and most other forms of theology aiming to describe or assert characteristics of God, the symbol of God as a personal agent is literally false and often mischievous. At the other extreme, under conditions of devotional usage when the soul is made truer of reality by imagining Jesus as its friend or Guanyin as its doctor, the symbol can have great validity and truthful interpretations, subject to the disciplines of spiritual discernment. Between these extremes lies a range of liturgical, artistic, imaginative, and community-shaping conditions, as well as variations in culture, maturity, and the state of one’s soul, in which uses of that symbol might be true but only within highly circumscribed conditions. This section employs the theory of religious symbols and the distinction of theological, devotional, and communal contexts drawn out in chapter 3. The conclusion is twofold: First, the symbol of God as personal agent has little or no application with regard to the scientific understanding of the world and is to be judged exclusively with respect to pragmatic considerations of conveying what is contextually important about God, who is not a personal agent but creator of the world ex nihilo. Second, the conception of God as creator, tolerant of anything science or other modes of inquiry might find, and given content by all those findings, can be symbolized by any symbols that pick up on what is important in the creator, judged in context by whatever tests are relevant.

The Concept of God The first step in the argument is the presentation of a concept of God and an explication of its disposition of the mutual claims of science and philosophical theology. Like any concept, it has significance only within a larger intellectual

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context. For efficiency of exposition, that context can be spelled out by reference to the argument in chapter 1: the world is conceived as consisting of any and everything that is determinate in any respect. To be determinate is to harmonize within oneself two kinds of features. One kind relates one to the things with respect to which one is determinate; these express how things condition one another. The second kind of feature essentially integrates one’s conditional features and gives them position, singularity, and ownbeing. Without conditional features, things would not be determinate with respect to other things, part of the meaning of being determinate. Without essential features the conditional features would reduce to the other things alone, without the reality of coming together as determinations of the determinate thing. Now consider the metaphysical question of the one-and-many. How are determinate things to be understood to be together? One obvious way is by the conditioning connections of their conditional features. But because determinate things would never make their conditional features real save by their essential features, things must also be together in some sense with their respective essential features. The essential features are precisely those that stand outside the conditioning connections. What is the ontological one that makes possible the togetherness of mutually conditioning things with their in principle independent features? The one itself cannot be anything determinate, for that would call for a deeper one, resulting in an infinite regress. But what could be indeterminate, escaping the infinite regress, and yet constitute the ontological togetherness of many determinate things? The answer developed in chapter 1 is a creator who makes all the determinate things in their complete, interdeterminate realities. This creator needs to be understood in terms of three connected notions. One is that the creator is the complete and sole source of all determinate things. As such, the creator has no determinate nature that is not itself created—no prior possibilities, potentials, plans, intentions, or character of any determinate sort. As source of everything determinate, the creator is completely indeterminate apart from creating, and is indistinguishable from nothing. Mystical reflection on this aspect of the creator is expressed in language of the Abyss and Nothingness. The second notion in conceiving the creator ex nihilo is that of the determinate world considered in its ontological contingency as product of the creative act. Whatever is determinate can be considered in two metaphysical respects. With respect to what can be called its “cosmological contingency,” each thing has its determinate and indeterminate characters relative to other things, including its spatial and temporal processes where relevant. Science and many other modes of inquiry and cognitive experience discern what the cosmological characters of things are. Determinateness means any kind of character what-

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soever, including characters of value, change and process. With respect to its ontological contingency, however, in addition to its cosmological contingency, any thing with its determining connections is ontologically dependent on the ontological creative act which makes it and the things with respect to which it is determinate exist, in whatever mode of existence is relevant. That a thing is determinate in its determining context is its ontological dependence; what it is in that context is its cosmological dependence and causal character. This is a version of the primary-secondary causation thesis. The third notion in understanding the creator is the creative act itself. The act is not a principle or structure but a making of something new. The act is asymmetrical in that it starts with nothing and ends with the world. But it has no intermediate steps, for that would require determinateness before the creation of determinateness; thus is it asymmetrical and immediate with no determinate character except as derivative from its product. The act is eternal because time and everything temporal is created. Temporality means that temporal things change, have shifting pasts and accreting futures; the identity of temporal things thus includes processes of increasing determination of what is actual, with shifts in what is possible. Temporal things stretch across the three modes of time—past, present, and future. Those modes of time are not together temporally—not before, after, or simultaneous with one another—but eternally; the eternal togetherness of the modes of time is what makes possible the shifting dynamism of temporality as the date of the present moves forward, adding to the actualized past and changing the contours of what is still possible. Modern science articulates certain spatio-temporal connections that do not accord with common sense; but they are determinate, or determinately indeterminate, in ways their mathematical structures express. Whatever the structures of temporality and temporal relations among things, the eternality of the act creating them together ontologically is what allows for change and temporal dynamics. The creative act is not only asymmetrical, immediate, and eternal, it is also singular. It has the singularity of being the one act by virtue of which all diverse and related things come to be. It is not in time, neither a comprehensive present, a determinate rolled out past, nor a future of static possibilities. It is the singular act of determinate reality making whose achieved content is temporally dynamic. Because of its singularity, it is appropriate to call the act of the creating the determinate world “God,” not a principle but a singular. So much for a restatement of the argument in chapter 1, focused this time on the creator rather than the contingency of the created. God the creator thus has a complex nature as source, ontological product, and creative act. This nature is itself part of the product of creation, however, not antecedent to creation in any sense. Thus this conception bears more

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similarity to Scotus’s view that the divine will precedes the divine nature than to Thomas’s that the divine nature is prior and expressed in the divine creative will. Apart from creation, God is wholly indeterminate, indistinguishable from nothing, and not God in any sense at all. With the creation, God not only has the abstract nature of being source, product, and act, but also the more concrete nature of being creator of this world, whatever it might turn out to be. The abstract nature of God as creator determines nothing of the empirical character of the determinate world, and thus does not impinge on science in this sense. Although the arguments for this conception of God do not need to be restated here, some typical objections can be rebutted so as to make it plausible. Some theists (for example, Keith Ward [1996]) object that this conception must be inadequate because it denies that God is anything in aseity apart from the world. To this the answer is first that the objection has no religious merit, because all theistic religions are interested only in what God is in relation to the world, as creator, judge, redeemer, sanctifier, or whatever. Second, the philosophical assumption that God must already be something in order to create the world or to enter into creative or other relations with it reflects the family of substance metaphysics to which there are preferable alternatives. Substance metaphysics argue that if something can enter into a relation, it has to have a character apart from that relation. On the contrary, suppose that, for determinate things within the world, there only have to be essential features if there are to be relational conditioning features, and that both essential and conditional features are needed for their harmony to be possible. For the creator, the creative act constitutes both the world to which God is related and the determinate character of God as creator in that relation, and any other relations God might have with the world. It is objected by some that the conception of God as creator ex nihilo requires something to come out of nothing, which is right. The very meaning of creativity is that something new is made. Whiteheadian process philosophy says that every event in time is a combination or blend of old determinate things with such newly arising subjective novelty so as to produce new singular things, with more reality than the past alone, and this might well describe process within time. But the divine creative act involves only novelty and no antecedent material. As each processive temporal event can contain only a little novelty not derived from the past, the divine creative act involves only that. Thus the conception of the divine creative act defended here finds analogues in every temporal event, as articulated by process philosophy, with a clear indication of what is to be denied in the analogy, that is, the presence of determinate

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antecedents. Creativity with antecedents requires time, whereas creativity without antecedents requires eternity and can make time. This conception of God and of the world as ontologically contingent is not only extremely abstract but also vague, in the sense that it can be illustrated, specified, or filled in by a variety of far more concrete metaphorical systems as arising from historical religions. Thus, as mentioned earlier, one version of the creativity and ontological dependence theory is the Daodejing’s claim that the Dao that can be named is not the true Dao, which is in fact its mother; another version lies in the neo-Confucian theory of Principle, yet others in the Advaita and Visistadvaita versions of Vedanta, and so on. The claim is not that all religions recognize some version of creation ex nihilo; surely not all use the causal metaphors that lie behind it. But many do, especially the West Asian monotheisms. The West Asian conceptions of God developed historically from very anthropomorphic conceptions of gods as big finite beings, especially sky gods. Because Christianity, Judaism and Islam take their primary metaphoric systems from the anthropomorphic period in their development, they specify God the creator as a big person, with a personal character expressed in creation, though not necessarily antecedent to it. Chinese religion, by contrast, went through a phase of anthropomophic symbols centering on Shangdi, the sky god. But its classic writings in Daoism and Confucianism employ a later phase of metaphoric development in which personalizing images are deconstructed in favor of principle images. Protestant reformed Christianity is especially wedded to biblical personalistic images for God because of its emphasis on scripture as the language for theology, even when it knows that God does not live in a mansion in the sky with a throne room. Some qualifications should be noted of the claim that the conception of God as creator puts no limits on what science or other modes of inquiry might find to be in the determinate world. Strictly speaking, the abstract conception of the creator is open to any empirical possibility. But conceptions of God are usually entertained by people involved in religious practice, and that practice might have implications for science, for instance, to foster conceptions and technologies that make for peace, that help understand spiritual development, and so forth. Moreover, no practicing religious person lives only by such an abstract conception as has been outlined here, but fills it in with the symbols of one or several religious traditions. Those more concrete symbols might well bias both the directions and the plausibility weightings of science. Moreover, the very universality of tolerance for any determinateness that lies within the conception of God as creator might have a freeing effect on science, a bias to be open to possibilities that are precluded by the assumption of current scientific theories.

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What Can We Know about God? What we can know about God, conceived as creator ex nihilo? There are at least five senses in which we can know something about the creator. The first is that God is the creator of absolutely everything determinate, including all the things with respect to which anything is determinate. This is both helpful and unhelpful. In devotional contexts it means that we can find God in anything, or any field of things no matter how we set the boundaries. This is a source of simple joy, and it might also help us face up to hard realities in which God is as much present as in good things. But it is a trivial truth that God is the creator of each and every thing; if the world were different, God would be the cause of that instead. Because the world is so vast, and we seem to find so much bad and so much good, so much indifference and so much tight order, it is very hard to make any summary judgments about what kind of character God is in being the creator of each and every thing in this world. In another sense, God is the creator of a world that might have some transcendental properties common to all things, for instance as expressed in the theory of determinateness. God creates a world of harmonies of conditional and essential features, if the metaphysics of determinateness is on the mark. It might be that all or most things might have pattern or form, components to be formed such as essential and conditional features, some kind of spacetime existential location, perhaps value. On the one hand such transcendentals express universal traits of existence. On the other they provide a short list of traits for what the creator makes in creating any and every thing, a list whose shortness stands in contrast to the unsummable complexity of noting that God is the creator of everything. In deference to Christian usage we can say that the transcendentals constitute the Logos within which everything has its being and according to which everything is made. For human beings and perhaps others who have some control over what they are and do, the Logos can take on normative dimensions, as when considering whether we get the right patterns over the relevant components in the right place and time and achieving the right values. Although this is not the place (but see Neville 1991a, chapter 4) to elaborate and defend a theory of the Logos, or even a metaphysics of transcendentals, we can note that this focus provides a certain kind of potentially important knowledge about what God is as creator in every part of creation. A third kind of knowledge of God is derived through the age-long interpretation of common experience. Thus people have come to appreciate God as the creator of an earth delightful for human habitation, made poignant in contrast with the human pollution of it; God is the creator of a universe sublimely

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beautiful in the smallest particle and the largest vista of the stars; the organic interconnections of things in the natural world bespeak a God who creates things in relations of means to ends, perhaps like a rational utilitarian creator. The problem with such age-long interpretations of common experience is that they are controversial, and the controversies are often contained within religious traditions, not found only in their external confrontation. So, the earth is a habitable but hardscrabble home for many; things look beautiful if small or distant enough, but their mindless aesthetic structure is dangerous to human life up close. Such organic connections as we see in nature have resulted from prodigious waste, and are tenuous—the creator is not a rational utilitarian but a teasing gamester. Though difficult, it might be possible to identify some fundamental lessons learned about the character of the creation as contingent upon the creator that constitute solid knowledge. The world religions are in surprising unanimity in saying something like that the cosmos is at bottom loving with a love that causes and embraces pain and death, and that the grasp of this gives a peace that cannot be understood as a response to the particular contingencies of one’s environment. A fourth kind of knowledge that is possible but that in no way flows from the creation conception of God and world is that there are special revelations, revelations about substantive characters of God that bear an authentication different from the other kinds of knowledge of God. Controversies about special revelations are even more problematic than in cases of making summary judgments of experience. The more such revelations are cut off from the other kinds of knowledge of God whose various kinds of fallibility would infect them, the more they are arbitrary. Belief in them is more a matter of the believer’s will than traits of the revelation that justify belief. The fifth kind of knowledge of God is that which is expressed in conceptions of the cosmos, nature, social institutions, and persons which, in modern times have been shaped by science. For ancient times it is hard to say whether the belief that God lived on high as the sky god influenced the cosmological conception of the heavens as vast domes above the earth, or vice versa; surely the conceptions evolved together. In modern times science has attempted to develop on its own terms without reference to antecedent conceptions of God, though of course many scientists considered the implications of their science for theology. According to the conception of God as creator ex nihilo, whatever science makes the best case for, concerning what world God has created, is what we should believe with properly weighted confidence and tentativeness. The concern here is not with the first four possible kinds of knowledge of God but with that which comes from science, and the first question is whether recent good science supports the view that God can be described as a person

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who might act within the world. Most likely it does not, as can be seen from a quick review of several familiar arguments. Much of the historical weight for personalistic conceptions of God in West Asian religions comes from the Israelites, then Jews, Christians, and Muslims interpreting their own histories as defined in relation to an historical personal God who acted in saving and revealing ways. Their conceptions of their own identities as historical people were defined in relation to the personal God who shaped them historically. Quite irrespective of how valid those historical interpretations of divine agency are, modern science has demonstrated a temporal and spatial expanse within which human history is trivially small. Even if we believe that there are billions of other worlds like the earth with sentient, intelligent, purposive creatures like ourselves, each of which has a history in which God has acted historically, historical agency can be at most a miniscule part of the creator’s character. Far more than any domesticated historical lordly role, God is the wild, untamed maker of cosmic blasts, expanding gasses, black holes, and a final faint entropy of straightline order where things become more distant and irrelevant to one another until no order is left at all, not even geometry. Even with the self-enclosed conception of the cosmos in the ancient world, the Biblical traditions record such wild images of God in tension with tamer ones of historical agency. Think of the first few days of creation in Genesis 1, or the God who tries to descend to Moses on Mt. Sinai, according to Exodus, and cannot fit, causing tremors, fires and deep thunders so that the mountain has to be roped off. The theme of divine holiness often though not always stands in strong contrast to personalistic historical agency conceptions of God. Neither the ontological nor cosmological arguments for God’s reality are committed to conceptions of God as a personal agent. But the argument from design, popular during the Enlightenment, argues that the particular order in the world is what you would expect from a rational agent; it can then be argued that if a rational agent makes the world, that agent can intervene to fix it, though the deists denied that in order to protect the integrity of science. Yet the scientific pictures of the vast reaches of the cosmos consisting of expanding gasses do not support the analogy that the cosmos is a garden. Even on earth, the fit of things seems most plausibly to have come from evolution, and if we want to keep our ecology friendly it seems wise to attend to evolutionary conditions and forces rather than appeal to divine designs that make nature the means to a human homeland. Moreover, assuming the whole of natural history to be a teleological design on the part of the creator, thus conceived to be a teleological designer, the cumulative waste in destroyed suns, failed species, and the negative selection of individuals to achieve the human state cannot justify calling such a teleological designer “benign” in any sense.

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These are all familiar arguments. Add to these the problems in theodicy, and then the thesis that God should be seen as a personal creative agent must be accompanied by the qualification that God does not have good intentions. Let us now turn from the evidences of the scientific world picture to the implications of the metaphysical argument for the conception of God as creator ex nihilo. If God creates time and temporal things, an ancient claim within Christianity and certain strands of the other West Asian monotheisms, then that creative act is not itself temporal or within time. From a finite standpoint within time, the future may well be uncertain and it makes sense for people attempting to live honestly before God to give thanks for their lives and to pray for what they need or want. It also sometimes might make sense for them symbolically to personify the eternal creator as a large person in time with them. But the eternal God is not at a finite time, and does not at such a time know the future or wait upon petitions to decide it. It is wrong to think that God foreordains the future, which would suppose that God is locked into a present before the ordained future. It is also wrong to think that the future, like the present and past, is not in God’s hands, to use that metaphor, or that the future constitutes part of the dynamism of the divine life. Process theology partially agrees with the claim that God’s character is the result of God’s self-constitution or action, not antecedent to it. It disagrees with the Creation conception, however, in its claim that God is an independent being over and against the world. Process theology does not say that God can exist without the world, as many classical theologians have. In fact, in its doctrine that God has to prehend the world and integrate that prehension in order to have definite character, process theology agrees that God has conditional features as well as the essential ones coming from the abstract divine conceptuality. But, for process theology, what grounds the togetherness of God with the world such that their essential creative features as well as prehensive conditional features can be harmonized? Creativity is the answer from process theology, creativity of which God has a part and creatures other parts. But precisely because creativity, on the process theory, is parceled out separately to God and other actual occasions, it cannot account for their ontological togetherness. Creativity breaks up into merely the separate essential features, the very things whose togetherness with the conditional prehensions needs an account; creativity for process thought is not an act that creates creatures together conditionally and essentially, but rather is the act of creatures, the possibility for which still needs an account. To put the point more traditionally, if God is a being, and thus possibly like a person, no matter how conditioned by and conditioning of the world of other beings, then a deeper ground between God and

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the world must be sought. The process category of creativity is indeterminate apart from actual occasions, and determinate only within them, making it an initially plausible candidate for the one for the many as argued above. But that creativity does not do anything regarding the togetherness of actual occasions, acting only within them to integrate them internally. Or if creativity does indeed proceed from a prior indeterminateness to the creation of the unfolding world of mutually prehending things, then it is identical to the conception of God as creator ex nihilo. If so, then that is God, rather than the process conception of God as a being, possibly a person. The remarks in this section have argued on two fronts that God should not be conceived as a person in anything like a literal sense. One front has rehearsed some familiar arguments in the religion-and-science debate about whether the world science knows is the kind of thing a personal agent would create, and has concluded it is not. The empirical comments have not considered except in passing the question whether such a divine person could act within history because if God is not a person, then divine action within history cannot be personal. The second front has argued metaphysically that God should not be considered to be a being apart from or engaged with the world. The process theology conception is the best candidate, and indeed a strong one, for the claim that God is a being, making a personal character in relating to the world. But that conception is metaphysically incoherent in accounting for the togetherness of things that might prehend one another, or it reduces to the creation ex nihilo position. From the standpoint of religious practice, however, all these considerations are annoying. Let the niceties of philosophical theology be handled by the theologians. Religious practice has always known that the characterizations of God are symbolic, that God is a mystery beyond our descriptive reason, and that the real question is what symbols are appropriate and in what contexts. It might very well be that the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is most importantly symbolized as a person, one who acts in history and in personal lives. To shift to this practical religious perspective, it is necessary to build upon the theory of religious symbolism sketched in the previous chapter. Symbols are the means by which we engage reality. Engagement requires systems of symbolic meanings that can be referred to reality in interpretive ways relevant to the various theoretical and practical contexts of interpretation. Two highly contingent conditions are crucial for engagement. First, there need to be interpretive contexts in which the symbols can represent reality in relevant respects. Second there need to be secondary referents, that is, people or groups whose culture, stage of life, and state of soul are ready for the symbols at hand to engage them with the reality. So the proper way to formulate the

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question whether God should be conceived to be a personal agent capable of acting within nature and history is to ask whether there are any interpretive contexts and any secondary referents for which such a conception would be true, and what networks of symbols should be allowed to interpret that conception extensionally.

When Can We Say God Is a Personal Agent? The previous section has argued that there is no justification for describing God as a personal agent in the context of philosophical theology or dogmatics, in which the attempts are made (1) to describe God and explain the relation of God to the world (2) to indicate the limits of description and explanation in these matters, and (3) to show how the assumptions of the more substantive religious symbols are possible if they are. The reasons can be restated now in terms of the theory of symbols in chapter 3: 1. No consistent meaning system can be devised showing God to be a being alongside worldly beings, personal or otherwise, which does not run afoul of the problem of the one and the many. The context in which such beings could be together would be more profound and divine than the being of God. 2. The empirical checks, to see whether the world is the kind of thing a personal creator would make, turn out to be largely negative. 3. The theory of God as creator ex nihilo, not a temporal supernatural being who intervenes in history, accords with the cumulative expressions of the great monotheistic religions, and also others, to the effects that (1) only God’s character in relation to the world is of interest, not any character in aseity, and hence a character that could be the product, not the cause, of the creative act; (2) the radical ontological contingency felt about the world is expressed in the theory of the creative act itself; and (3) penetrating mystical contemplation behind the acts of God finds God to be indeterminate, transcending of distinctions, characterless, nothing, the abyss, yet somehow the source of all that is determinate. Now the question as it was left above is whether there are any contexts other than descriptive, doctrinal, or explanatory ones in which the symbols of God as personal agent might have metaphoric or limited use. The way to address this question is to note that there are many things people do to engage God or ultimate reality. Some of the most dramatic are religious

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experiences and existential crises, sudden encounters that are interpreted religiously. The model of God as creator ex nihilo suggests three connected classes of such religious experiences: those having to do with the radical contingency of the world or some part of it such as oneself; those having to do with appreciation or awe, mysterium tremendum et fascinans, in face of the power of the ontological creative act on which things depend; and those of moving beyond the determinations of creation to the source as abyss. But far and away the most common engagement is taking up a way of life in which all or most things in life are interpreted in ways shaped by a tradition’s religious symbols. That is, most people engage God or the Ultimate by practicing a religion. The semiotic code by itself offers the religious way as a possibility, and some people take it up. Being religious is like becoming a musician. Anyone can listen to music, but the more you know and can engage discriminatively in the music, the more you hear in the music. Likewise, the more you practice a religion, the more its symbols mature as you mature and, if you are devoted, the practice with the symbols transforms the soul so that you see more and more through the symbols, engaging their referents more fully and finely. The yogic traditions have properly emphasized the transformative power of practice with the religious way of life, with beginners simply engaging less deeply and discriminatively than adepts. Of course there are many paths of religious adeptness, not merely the attainment of religious experience. Communal participation and leadership, discerning judgment of spiritual truth and falsity, theological sophistication, thoroughness in making the religion consistently touch all aspects of life—these are only a few of the paths of religious maturation and transformation. Most of the testing of religious symbols and their metaphoric scope comes in the give-and-take of the extraordinarily complicated communal processes of living life accord to the way of those symbols. Now the major religions arising in West Asia, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have traditional symbol systems replete with symbols of God as a personal being who acts in the world, beginning with the Bible shared by all three faiths and continuing in their commentaries, creeds, liturgies, and the great Quran of Islam. True, there are many nonpersonalistic symbols too. And true, too literal a taking of God to be a person would be thought idolatrous by the sophisticated theologians in all those traditions. But the symbols of God as a personal agent are pervasive and form the dominant symbolic structure. Is it possible to participate in the culture that includes contemporary science, believing something like the hypothesis about God being creator ex nihilo and not a personal agent, and still participate in a West Asian religion whose symbols of divine personal agency are pervasive? Participation includes the serious engagement of what religion is about, say through liturgies, orga-

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nized acts of charity, and personal spiritual practices such as study, prayer, and meditation. A positive answer to this question will be defended. Consider the distinction between personalizing and personification. Personalizing is the description of an object in personal imagery. Religious people who believe that God indeed is a personal agent personalize their descriptions of God. Personification is the use of personal imagery when we know that the object is not personal in any literal sense, a use that has a justification or purpose other than description. So we Americans personify death as the Grim Reaper, a spirit of charity as Santa Claus, the United States as Uncle Sam, and ice on the window as Jack Frost. The alleged justifications for personifications are that something important in the object, say, death, is carried over by representing and responding to death as the Grim Reaper. Explication of these personifying metaphors is not difficult. Little children often do not treat their parents’ personifications as such, but rather as literal personalizing descriptions. Parents often cultivate belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy for as long as they can get away with it. Children are sometimes terrified of human skeletons because of associations with the Grim Reaper coming after them. Sooner or later, however, children realize that the imagery is personification and that the real object or referent is not a person at all. At this point, the imagery becomes a broken symbol, known not to be literally descriptive but perhaps true in its engagement of reality because it carries over something important or valuable to the interpreters who use it. Personifications of death do not lose their efficacy and truth no matter how mature and aware one might be. In one sense all the monotheistic religions employ only broken symbols for God, embodied in the apophatic claims that God is beyond any finite name or description. The question here is whether personifications of God as a personal agent are legitimate broken symbols within religious practice. The question is complicated by the fact that religious communities include many people who would not recognize the personal symbols as broken personifications. Moreover, their faith is such that it could not tolerate the breaking of those symbols for reasons of psychological need, identification with a literalistic community, or the convincing history of their own spirituality. So the question is not only whether there is something valid for some people carried across by personifying symbols but also whether harm is done when the symbols are taken literally by some people and not as personifications. The first part of the question will be addressed by briefly describing several religious acts or kinds of situations which traditional religions shape with appropriate personal symbols. Singling them out wrenches them from their interwoven connections and mutual resonances within religious life; but they still serve to make the point that it is legitimate to personify God the creator

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ex nihilo in these contexts. The contexts are expression of gratitude, pleas for life, confession, and devotional efforts as spiritual perfection or holiness. Gratitude: The contingency of the cosmos, especially of one’s life and that of one’s loved ones, makes life seem like a gift, the proper response to which is gratitude. The creator can be personified as the Giver, Father Almighty, to whom gratitude is expressed in song and celebration. Not to personify God in gratitude is likely to flatten the human response to the contingency of life to a mere causal observation, or to short-circuit the first-person intensity of ontologically deep gratitude. Of course, as Job observed, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, to which Job still said, Blessed be the name of the Lord. Serious ontological gratitude is for a cosmos and life that contains suffering and death within it, not just for the good things in life. Such gratitude is not easy when life is brutal and unfair. But the West Asian religions all advocate gratitude through and in spite of suffering, injustice, and death. When the content of life for which one is grateful is particular—for instance being born in a loving family, surviving a war, having access to culture—God can be personified as acting within history, for the creator ex nihilo is the cause of those particulars as well as, and in thorough connection with, all else. It is not that God initiates an action at a particular time, but that the event itself shaping gratitude is temporal—the spatio-temporal part of cosmic creation defining your family comes up with a loving home, or a terrible home, for which gratitude is more difficult. The personification of God as Giver, Father Almighty, does not have to extend so far as to imply that God has antecedent intentions, wanting good things for you and bad things for your enemies, only that the generosity of creation gives the gift of existence and human life. To push the personification to divine intentions working behind the creation selectively to give some people good homes and others bad ones leads to all the problems of theodicy and flies in the face of the obvious fact that the gift of existence includes suffering, evil, and death. Petition: It is common in most religions, and probably all, for people to pray for life, and specifically for whatever means life for them in the circumstances.2 Sometimes there are emergency petitions, like for a deeper foxhole, a cure from illness, or centered attention when taking an examination. Other times it is for opportunity, help with a career, or the health of one’s family. Yet other times the petition is for direction so that one might do or become what is best. Many petitions are on behalf of communities as well as individuals. Prayer for whatever means life is a little like the obverse of gratitude, and like ontological gratitude there are stages of maturity. Immature people pray for

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trivial things, things that do not really mean life; like the adolescent’s prayer for fewer pimples, however, immaturity has its proper stage. Perhaps a lifetime is needed to discover what life is really about, and hence what fundamentally to pray for. The great religious traditions have symbols defining many stages. God the creator ex nihilo can be personified as the one to whom we pour out our petitioning hearts. Not to do so would be to flatten the plea for life to the expression of a desire, not the reconfiguration of our priorities that defines piety, in which true petitionary prayer consists. The temporal orientation of petitionary prayer is toward the future, pleading with God for something to happen. In that sense, God can be conceived to be requested to act in the future, though again we know through broken symbols that God’s eternal act contains the future (not now, for God is not now, but eternally). Of course Judaism, Christianity, and Islam set their symbols shaping petitionary prayer alongside those saying that God will give what God will give, regardless of our petitions. The personification of God as the object of human petitions does not have to extend so far as to suggest that God has an interior subjectivity within which the divine mind might be changed by a really good argument or an extra sincere expression. It only needs to address God as the source of the future to whom it makes sense to plead. The function of petition is really to reorient the petitioner’s priorities and arrange them correctly in the face of the creator, not to change the future however much the petitioner wants a particular outcome: “Not my will but thine be done.” Confession: Confession in general, not just religious confession, seems to be about oneself, confessing one’s own failings, or those of one’s group if the confession is corporate. In an important sense this appearance is right, and it means an identification of one’s failings and a taking of responsibility for them. Part of confession is asking for forgiveness and God often is personified as the main forgiver. Yet another part of confession is admission of guilt and request for forgiveness from those whom one or one’s group has hurt. Confession is in part connected with petition for life insofar as the request for forgiveness leads to petition for regeneration. Confession is subject to relativization, however, and to self-interest: confess in order to get something. How much guilt need one admit in order to patch things up and get what one wants? And how much more guilty is one than one can admit to oneself, let alone to others? The religious dimension of confession radicalizes all this, and puts an added demand on personification. Religious confession is owning up to who one is absolutely and truly, with no excuses, only with reality. In this context the creator ex nihilo is personified as the judge before whom it is impossible to dissemble or cloak one’s faults, before whom one is only who one is. That the creator makes

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one who one is does not detract from one’s own responsibilities and choices which are what they are, created as such. If the creator is personified in such a way as to have antecedent intentions for us to be this (bad) way or that, then the symbol leads to insoluble difficulties of free will. But the personification of the creator as judge, and then as the source of mercy and forgiveness does not have to go that far. God the Merciful is the one who gifts human beings with the same conditions for life they would have if they were innocent, perhaps filled with suffering but always capable of being received with gratitude. Confession, therefore, is really about how to live before God the Creator, self-consciously taking responsibility for oneself coram dei, becoming capable of giving thanks for life in its full complexity and petitioning for the continued fullness of it for oneself and those whom one loves, including sometimes one’s group. This supposes the ordinary condition of life to be one of partial denial, denial of one’s own failings and of what proper innocence and reward would be. The great West Asian religions symbolize the initiative for confession as coming from God because people ordinarily have difficulty getting around their denial. So God sends prophets to accuse and also demonstrations of divine mercy and love. This is a particularly strong emphasis within Christianity. Even if modern people do not believe in the divine origin of the prophets and miraculous demonstrations of divine mercy and favor, the meaning of the ancient symbols is that the initiative comes from God. The spiritual logic is that people cannot abandon their denial and become honest without already sensing themselves to be accepted despite it all. The spiritual logic is not that one first confesses and then receives mercy, but the other way around: by accepting divine mercy people are able to confess and thus live honestly before God with all their gratitude and all their pleas from the heart. Most traditions of spiritual formation say that people work step-by-step, with the confessions becoming more profound the more people’s capacities for engaging the symbols of love and forgiveness gain greater depth. The personifications of the creator as judge and forgiver are particularly limited to deny an anterior subjectivity to God with which one can plea-bargain. Though people do in fact plea-bargain—“Save my child and I will never smoke again”—the logic of confession to God, the ontological creator ex nihilo, is a constant rejection of this possible personification. Holiness: Holiness in the West Asian traditions has two aspects, living in this world in a proper way before God and a proper union with God. The first follows from the spirituality of confession and need not be discussed further here. The second introduces yet another problematic of personification of God. Union with God has been symbolized in many different ways, from mystical merging to a proper relationship within which people keep their separate iden-

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tities. Union across the divide between finite human life and the infinity of the creator, who is indeterminate apart from creation, is difficult to conceptualize in any straight sense. Nearly all religious traditions have schematized the infinite to time, with symbols of heaven and the afterlife, and to space, with symbols of vision of the divine, most often combining the two in symbols of heavenly vision. Diverse images of heaven abound, including throne rooms, banquet tables, houses and communities for the blessed, gardens, reunion with loved ones, and so forth; there are many different senses of vision of the divine. The spirituality of union with God has a dialectical turn in all the West Asian religions. It begins with a self-interested intentionality for one’s own salvation, getting out of the vicissitudes of life to what Tillich called “unambiguous life” with or before God. Somehow the intentionality turns to love for God for God’s own sake. From the subjective side this is bliss; from the objective side it is emptying one’s heart into God’s glory, loving God for God’s own sake. The capacity to love God is the peak spiritual perfection, in the South and West Asian traditions, especially in light of the fact that most traditions recognize that God is not lovely in a nice sense. Personifications of God in this context lie along a spectrum. For the unsophisticated, God is loved for doing good things; but as noted, many of life’s gifts are not pleasant. For the more sophisticated God is loved as the creator for all the cosmos, wild and often indifferent to human life, with love being an intentional extension of gratitude. For the most sophisticated, God is loved regardless. And in these last stages, the personifications of God are themselves transcended: God is symbolized as more than a person, far beyond personal characteristics, light of lights, or the darkness of the fiery abyss. Three summary, if fragmentary and anecdotal, remarks are in order about personifications in gratitude, petition, confession, and holiness in the sense of union with God. The first is that every personification has its built-in limitations, as in the common exhortation to pray but not to expect your petitions to be answered as you want. The chief limitation is that the personification does not legitimate the inference that God has a subjective interior mind that can be appealed to and second-guessed as one can do with a finite person; God’s majesty is beyond that. The second summary remark is that there is a spectrum of sophistication with regard to personification, probably several spectra. One is from the childish to the mature. Another is from those who think God rewards the good (usually oneself when properly confessed) and punishes the evil, to those who recognize that God the creator of the vast cosmos is the source of all the conditions that give life its complexities and ambiguities, including suffering, injustice, and death. There may be other spectra of sophistication as well.

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The third remark is that the great religious traditions suppose that living with and by the important religious symbols effects transformations of soul for individuals and communities so that they move along the various spectra toward more sophisticated spiritual depth. The next chapter will deal with transformation of soul more completely. All this means that there is no simple answer to the question of what contexts are legitimate for the use of personifying symbols for God the creator ex nihilo. For, though the personifying symbols can indeed legitimately engage people with the God who is the source of all the cosmos and yet whose nature as source is tolerant of anything for which science might make a good case, it is also apparent that those engagements are limited to persons who are secondary referents of the right sorts. The final step of the argument has to be the exploration of some of the more important limitations of the personifying symbols.

When Should We Not Say God Is a Personal Agent? Earlier, we argued that we should not say God is a personal agent when doing philosophical theology, except insofar as that enterprise includes the treatment of symbols as symbols. Then we argued, in effect, that personifying symbols are legitimate where people, as secondary referents of personifying symbols, understand them to be broken and yet the symbols are still engaging. More than legitimate, those broken yet engaging symbols are the crucial connections with the West Asian religious traditions that allow for thorough participation in those religious ways of life in which symbols are improved and taken to heart. Such participation is crucial for the transformations of soul important for religion. Two classes of conditions, however, mark the illegitimacy, indeed danger, of personification: those conditions where personification blocks spiritual maturation, and those where the practical or secondary interpretation of those symbols leads to immoral consequences. No quick and easy way exists to indicate how particular symbols can stall or mislead the spiritual development of individuals. Human variety, nuances in stages of life, and the states of soul resulting from diverse experiences make all that hard to understand in any large scheme. Only experienced spiritual directors can be helpful to particular individuals. Nevertheless, two general negative conditions can be mentioned with regard to spiritual maturation. Because religion deals with the heart’s deepest priorities, it needs to be connectable to the fundamental levels of imagination that shape the heart. In modern times, this includes the scientific picture of the world. Therefore, any

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conceptions of God need to be not only compatible with the scientific world picture, or pictures, but harmonizable with them. Indeed, the heart needs to be able to worship the God who creates the entire cosmos. Some fundamentalists attempt to bifurcate their deep imaginations into religious world pictures on the one hand and scientific ones on the other. But even if this is psychologically and sociologically successful, it prevents religion from having the deep and pervasive transformative effects on soul that is at its essence. Where personifying symbols of God as divine agent cannot be broken properly so as to be in harmony with science, they are illegitimate. Related to this is another general negative condition, namely, that such symbols are illegitimate when they prevent community solidarity with fellow religionists who do live fully within a scientific imaginative picture of the cosmos. This is not just the old problem of an older generation being unwilling to accept the imaginative worldview of a younger generation, although sometimes the issue takes this form. It is rather that sometimes the personifying symbols, taken to be literally personalizing of God, are used to infer that those who do not take them literally are not properly engaging God. The engagement with God does not depend on literalness, but on the effectiveness with which what is important in God is carried over into the engaged people. Personal symbols of God as agent are illegitimate when they are used to exclude people from the community who take them to be broken symbols. The converse of this is that personal symbols are used illegitimately when those who construe them as broken metaphors reject the religious legitimacy of the conservatives who do not. The question here is the same as in the other case: Do the symbols, interpreted literally perhaps, carry over what is true and important, even when not deconstructed? Tolerance works both ways, and personal symbols of God as agent can be abused both ways. The second main negative condition for personal symbols is when their use leads to wrong practical consequences in secondary interpretation. The possibilities for wrong consequences are innumerable. Two classes will be mentioned here. One is the interpretation of the personal God as having parochial intentions, to be on the side of Israel against the Canaanites, or for one’s own cause against one’s enemies. Nothing has brought religion to scandal more often and clearly in the modern world than the claim by someone or some nation that God wills them to beat up, drive out, or take over their enemies. Too often both sides have made that claim, and the arbitrariness is offensive. Furthermore, the claim to know a parochial divine intent short circuits the very important but complex and difficult work of figuring out what the moral situation calls for. The second class of wrong consequences is the inferences made in theodicy that God must have willed this or that bad happening or situation. Disease

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happens because of genes, germs, and gravity that breaks the bones of those who fall; evil acts come from people who do evil things; wars often come from the migrations of populations; should the earth be destroyed by comets, the cause is celestial mechanics. The ontological reality of the entire cosmos is the result of the divine creative act (as understood here) and God is thus the cause of all; but the specifics for good or ill are functions of cosmological conditions, not specific divine intentions. This is not to say that God is not responsible in the ontological sense for the world with details of suffering, injustice, and death. On the contrary. But it is to call it a practical mistake, often of great importance, to believe that there is a specific divine motive for things that punish or reward: the cause of specific pain is the specific inertia of causal forces and the ways people respond. In general, the negative conditions concerning symbols of God as a personal agent which have to do with wrong interpretive consequences derive from extending personification to the affirmation and imagination of a divine subjectivity, a divine intent behind the creative act. Divine subjectivity is obviously incompatible with the creation ex nihilo theory according to which God is nothing except in the creating of the specific world. But it also is idolatrous in setting God up as a thing or person in relation to external things and persons. All things, with essential as well as conditional features, are created. The better conception is that God is what God does: God is loving because God creates things bearing value; God is a judge because we are truly ourselves only in the full and naked reality of our moral natures as creatures; God is merciful because we receive the conditions of existence regardless of our sins, and can recognize this when we have confessed and become grateful. Then there are all the other conceptions of God as personal that serve to carry across what is important in God the Creator that would be flattened or anthropomorphized if not symbolized personally. In sum, the conception of God the creator ex nihilo is dialectically superior to alternative hypotheses and is compatible with whatever science or other modes of inquiry can argue to be the case. Yet that conception addresses the religious sense of contingency, and when fleshed out in the symbols of religious traditions provides a proper referent for the symbols whose purpose is engagement for the sake of truly knowing what transforms and perfects the soul and community. The key to the argument is the theory of religious symbols. The flaw in most presentations of the problem of divine personal agency in a world conceived by science is that it neglects the symbolic function of religious conceptions and practices, claiming that all symbols must be taken descriptively. All, or nearly all, descriptions of the divine themselves collapse ultimately in apophatic surrender, however. But before that, the symbolic value of

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the terms and practices of the religious tradition have legitimate places as bearers of the truth about God the creator ex nihilo as this is carried over into the lives of believers in different cultures, in different states of soul, and at different stages of spiritual development. Therefore, a proper conception of God as creator ex nihilo can embrace and legitimate the symbolic life of religious traditions when those symbols are properly understood and criticized as broken.

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CHAPTER 5

Eternity and the Transformation of Soul

Eternity as a Contemporary Problem pirituality, disciplined spiritual formation, and the professional art of spiritual direction are receiving renewed emphasis in late-modern North Atlantic societies. Among the many reasons for this are developments in the understanding of religious symbolism. Quickly put, Paul Tillich’s theory of symbols articulated ways in which certain symbols effect a communicative participation of the symbolizer in the realities symbolized such that the symbols need not be taken literally and yet still can be true and informative. By the theory of participation, Tillich showed how religious symbols are not mere representations, and thus provided an alternative to the Kantian approach to symbolism which requires an agnosticism (if not skepticism) about the religious object symbolized. By his theory of broken symbols, Tillich (1951, 239 ff.; 1957b) provided an alternative to Bultmann’s dichotomy of demythologized symbols versus literal existential philosophic truth. The Tillichian strategy regarding religious symbols has been given considerable technical sophistication by being read through Charles Peirce’s philosophical theory of signs as developed in chapter 3. The result is a new opportunity to interpret religious experience as realistic, capable of progression or improvement, and open to the points made in apophatic theology.1 Given the project of an individual or a community to engage religious objects better, with greater depth and discernment, more clarity and intensity, greater accomodation to the nature of the object, and less refraction by accomodation to the ordinary conditions of human life, better symbols are sought. But the worth of the symbols is not merely enhanced meaning within a semiotic system. The worth is in the quality of the engagement of people with the religious realities. Some people and some societies are religiously superficial, at least at times. There are always historical limitations to what can be symbolized

S

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engagingly at one time. Profundity is something that needs to be sought in every generation, by every religiously interested person. One of the chief projects for improved engagement with religious realities in our own time concerns the recovery of the symbolic significance of eternity. Most cultures of the world now are preoccupied with time and matters in their temporal dimensions. Cultures shaped by modernity are not only preoccupied but obsessed with time. Perhaps this is because the rate of change in modernity is so fast that the most important feature of anything is the fact that it is passing quickly, or so it seems. But this is not a mere feature of popular responses to social technological conditions. The Western philosophic tradition itself has become time-obsessed. Modernity itself did not begin that way. Descartes neatly balanced the spatial characters of corporeality with the temporal characters of thinking and united them both in an eternal divine creative act upon which goodness, reason, and even distinction or difference are dependent. But in Kant’s philosophy, space is reduced to the marks it leaves on more basic temporal forms of intuition, and eternity ceases to be an element of reality to which cognitive reference can be made. Heidegger and Husserl continued Kant’s grounding of things in time or temporal intuition, despite Husserl’s attempt to carry on the more balanced Cartesian program. Dewey charted pragmatism’s way into temporal action and transaction. Much analytic philosophy has focused on language in use, which has mainly a temporal form. And the most popular philosophical theology today is process philosophy. The classic symbols of most religions, however, and many fundamental theological texts, give great importance to eternity. In most religions, eternity is both the ground and the fulfillment of the temporal. Eternity has no single definition, of course. The most common rendering of eternity in Western philosophy is something like a single momentary glance that encompasses all times, past, present, and future, a pantemporal presence-to-consciousness. Augustine is associated with that view. Many religions treat eternity as a kind of container for time, a matrix that has something like temporal qualities but not the finite limitations; for example, the Hwa Yen Buddhists speak of temporal worlds being nested in temporal worlds, the nesting itself being eternal; Origen speaks of aeons within aeons. A degenerate image or theory of eternity is that it is something by nature static and unchanging, such as a mathematical equation or a form; this is sometimes attributed to Plato but it really comes from modern confusions of space with eternity as the contrast term to time.2 The drawback to Descartes’ neat balancing of space and time is that they are not easily related in his view, and thence become contrast terms to one another, leaving out reference to eternity. Few philosophers have taken Descartes’ theory of divine creation seriously.3

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Eternity is an important topic for our time for both philosophical and religious reasons. Philosophically, eternity is important for the understanding of temporal things, for, although temporal things have a past, present, and future, with dates that are temporally related, the past, present, and future modes of time are not temporally related: they are eternally related, as argued above in chapter 1. Temporal things have temporal relations. The modes of time are the conditions for temporal relations, and their own mutual relations are not temporal. Temporal things change as they pass through the temporal modes, and thus the content of the past, present, and future changes with temporal passage. But the modal reality of past, present, and future does not change. The neglect of the eternal togetherness of the temporal modes leads to a reduction of the modes to present time. This is the “being as presence” that so piqued Heidegger, although he could not think his way to eternity as a proper resolution of the difficulty. Process philosophy in Whitehead and Hartshorne, too, comes down to the view that only the present is real, that the past is gone and the future not yet. Of course the past is no longer present and the future is not present yet; or, better put, the things that were present are now past and the things still future have not become present. But without acknowledging that the past is real as past and the future is real as future, it is difficult to acknowledge moral identity over time: past actions are not real if you can forget them in the present, and the future is real only as anticipated. Thus there can be no serious guilt, nor serious commitment, nor cumulative moral identity except that expressed in present behavior. History too would be only a dream save for its present traces. And religious destiny can be given only the most shallow interpretation if it is reduced to present trends and anticipations. Popular consumerism is frequently condemned by philosophers for its obsession with present feelings; but much modern philosophy provides the rationale for the superficiality of present time consciousness. As for religion, if the present alone is real, and the present is defined as presence in experience or presence to consciousness, then the divine is reduced to what can be contained within experience itself. Schleiermacher began more than he knew when he attempted to ground religious symbols and theology in a feeling of absolute dependence, that is, a feeling. But for Schleiermacher, what human beings feel themselves absolutely dependent upon is far vaster than anything that can be contained within present experience. In fact, for him, we experience that which transcends presence, that upon which present existence itself is dependent. More recently, the feeling of absolute dependence has been given an anthropological rather than a theological spin, and there is little sense that religious fulfillment could be anything other than an improvement of present experience. But religious fulfillment in many dimensions and traditions

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includes the attainment of a perspective more encompassing than that of present time, or even of finite human individuality. This is an accurate claim not only for the West Asian religions that thematize the vision of God but also for the South Asian religions that thematize enlightenment and the East Asian religions with their emphasis on attunement and harmony. God, Brahman, Emptiness, the Dao—these are all more than temporal things. They are not whole in a present time, nor reducible to all times. Indeed, their apprehension, attainment, or realization requires not their being fitted into the forms of finite human consciousness, but rather the transformation of the ordinary temporal consciousness into something else. That transformation of ordinary consciousness is a task of spiritual formation. A very important task for present spiritual formation is the development of symbols that can transform the soul so as to enable it to engage eternity.4 The main problem with engaging eternity for late-modern people in North Atlantic cultures is that our souls are badly shaped for it. Because of our temporal preoccupations, and the scientistic culture’s antireligious dismissals of the problematic of eternity, the secondary referents to our cultural readiness do not allow very effective primary referents. Because of our overtemporalized souls, the secondary referents engaging us are compatible only with degenerate primary referents such as eternity-as-space, eternity-as-static-form, or eternity-as-presence-toconsciousness. For us to engage eternity more effectively, it is necessary to find symbols with far better referents. This requires that we change our souls for secondary reference as well as aim at eternity itself more accurately. All this is a complicated way of making the old point that spiritual formation is needed in order to be able to experience or engage some things well. At immature levels of spiritual development, we get it wrong, seem to engage silly things, and set ourselves up for embarrassing symbols, especially when literalized.

Plotinus and Eternity Neoplatonism has at least two principal contributions to make to this point. First, it provides a set of symbols whose primary referents are aspects of eternity more subtle than usually get expressed by the modern terms. Second, and more interesting to the point, Neoplatonism offers an understanding of the transformation of the soul necessary for better engagement with eternity, namely, its interpretation of soul as the flight of the alone to the alone. The first point shall be examined briefly, the second at greater length. In its most general and popular expression, for Plotinus and those influenced by him, eternity is connected with time as source to manifestation. Temporal

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process is seen as not original or sui generis but as the product or effect of something else that is not temporal, and that source is eternal in respect to time. In general, Neoplatonism shares with the creation ex nihilo tradition the claim that the temporal order is dependent on a more original, nontemporal or eternal reality. The niceties of the distinctions between Neoplatonic emanation and ex nihilo creation need not occupy us here.5 Suffice it to say that both construe eternity and time together as one topic, that the togetherness is causal in some sense, and that the entire matter is ontological, having to do with the nature of being, not just of what happens within the temporal cosmos.6 Plotinus’s own analysis is in the seventh tractate of the third Ennead.7 He begins, in section 1, with the hypothesis that eternity and time are two different things, distinguished in the Platonic way (according to him) as exemplar or kind relative to its image. On this hypothesis, if we knew eternity as the exemplar, we would then be able to know time as its image; or because we know time as movement, we can know eternity as that of which time is the moving image. Plotinus then sets this hypothesis aside and asks, in section 2, what we can understand about eternity as a kind or exemplar. He considers and rejects several hypotheses in this regard, finding some truth in each but also dialectical contradictions. In subsequent sections he develops his positive hypothesis about eternity which is defined in reference to time. Eternity is the repose of soul in its infinite completeness. It contains time within it as a potential, but not as actually following out the sequence of moments. Time itself is soul as infinitely differentiating itself, moving sequentially in an even or uniform fashion from future to future. Temporal soul is actually infinite in its sequence potential; that is, time by nature will unfold infinitely; but temporal soul, and all temporal souls, always face a future and therefore at no time have ever run through an actual infinite. By the same token, no temporal soul is ever wholly actual at any one time, nor is the temporal world ever at a time wholly actual. Eternity, for Plotinus, is the supreme reality, which has the character of soul, and enjoys fullness of being without ever having to move from future potential to present actuality. Time is the image of eternity in that it is infinite and perpetual movement imitating the fullness of eternal being which is in repose. Plotinus spells out the causal relation between eternity’s infinite repose and time’s infinite movement in the following passage, worth quoting at length: Time at first—in reality before that “first” was produced by desire of succession— Time lay, self-concentrated, at rest with the Authentic Existent: it was not yet Time; it was merged in the Authentic and motionless with it. But there was an active principle there, one set on governing itself and realizing itself [that is, the AllSoul], and it chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its rest,

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and Time stirred with it. And we, stirring to a ceaseless succession, to a next, to the discrimination of identity and the establishment of ever-new difference, traversed a portion of the out-going path and produced an image of Eternity, produced Time. For the Soul contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of translating elsewhere what it saw in the Authentic Realm, and it could not bear to retain within itself all the dense fullness of its possession. A Seed is at rest; the nature-principle within, uncoiling outwards, makes way towards what seems to it a large life; but by that partition it loses; it was a unity selfgathered, and now, in going forth from itself, it fritters its unity away; it advances in a weaker greatness. It is so with this faculty of the Soul, which it produced the Kosmos known to sense—the mimic of the Divine Sphere, moving not in the very movement of the Divine but in its similitude, in an effort to reproduce that of the Divine. To bring this Kosmos into being, the Soul first laid aside its eternity and clothed itself with Time; this world of its fashioning it then gave over to be a servant to Time, making it at every point a thing of Time, setting all its progressions within the bournes of Time. For the Kosmos moves only in Soul—the only Space within the range of the All open to it to move in—and therefore its Movement has always been in the Time which inheres in Soul. Putting forth its energy in act after act, in a constant progress of novelty, the Soul produces succession as well as act; taking up new purposes added to the old it brings thus into being what had not existed in that former period when its purpose was still dormant and its life was not as it since became: the life is changed and that change carries with it a change of Time. Time, then, is contained in differentiation of Life; the ceaseless forward movement of Life brings with it unending Time; and Life as it achieves its stages constitutes past Time. . . . Eternity, we have said, is Life in Repose, unchanging, self-identical, always endlessly complete; and there is to be an image of Eternity—Time—such an image as this lower All presents of the Higher Sphere. Therefore over against that higher life there must be another life, known by the same name as the more veritable life of the Soul; over against that movement of the Intellectual Soul there must be the movement of some partial phase; over against that identity, unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not constant in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts over against that oneness without extent or interval; there must be an image of oneness, a unity of link and succession; over against the immediately infinite and all-comprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to a perpetual futurity; over against the Whole in concentration, there must be that which is to be a Whole by stages never final. The lesser must always be working toward the increase of its Being, this will be its imitation of what is immediately complete, self-realized, endless without stage: only thus can its Being reproduce that of the Higher. (Ennead 3.7.11)

In one important respect, Plotinus’s view of the relation between eternity and time is implausible to the modern mind, namely, in its easy use of the anthropomorphic language of desire for the eternal. In our time, the supposition is that

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desire, almost by definition, means a longing for what is not yet and therefore the desirer needs to be temporal. Most theologians, for instance, who maintain what they take to be a literal sense of divine purpose, argue that God is radically temporal. Process theology is an obvious case in point. Let us therefore set aside, at least temporarily, the language of desire and focus rather on the more general point in Plotinus’s account of eternity and time, namely, that eternity is life in its fullness and temporal existence is life striving after an infinite fullness it cannot comprehend in any finite sequence of moments. There is a defensible contemporary way of putting this point, although Plotinus might not like its use of creationist rather than emanationist ideas. Suppose by hypothesis that the temporal order is created ex nihilo. Suppose also that time and its temporal modes of past, present, and future are not containers but characteristics of temporal things; Plotinus and Whitehead would agree with this point over against Newton and Einstein. On these suppositions, the temporal order thus includes every dateable thing in each of its states in all of its temporal modes, as argued in chapter 1. Obviously, each thing is included in its state of dateable present realization or happening; but it is also included as a far distant unimaginable possibility, as a remote possibility, as a proximate possibility, and as a virtually imminent nearly immediate future. Rather, in the temporal order, each dateable thing is included in all its shifts of future structure, each shift occasioned in the temporal order by some antecedent present decision affecting the future. As contained within the temporal order each thing’s future is an immense array of continuously shifting possibility structures. The past is what is fixed, achieved, and definite. But each thing’s past states in the temporal order accrue meaning as more things happen, and this meaning shifts as continuously with the passage of time as the shifts in its future states. So the things whose date is January 1, 2000, had one structure in the year 1, another in the year 1000, another on June 1, 1999, another on December 31, 1999; those things have a decisive presence on January 1, 2000, and having occurred will have one meaning on January 2, 2000, another on June 2, 2000, another in 3000, and another in 4000. All those states of all dateable things are contained within the temporal order, all together, though obviously not all at the same time. The temporal order itself is eternal, not temporal. Temporal things, things within time, are temporal, and their dates are related to one another as past, present, and future. But the togetherness of past, present, and future is not temporal. And the togetherness of all the temporal moments of a dateable thing’s reality is eternal, not temporal. The temporality of a dateable thing consists in its relations to other things as relative to its past, present, and future. The dynamism of the temporal order springs from the shifting date of the present. But

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the dynamism of the eternal quality of the temporal order includes not only the changes that take place in present happenings but all the shifts made in future possibilities and accrued actual meanings occasioned by decisive happenings. Chapter 1 argued at length that the only way by which temporally distinct things can be together in such a way as to be temporally related is by being created together ex nihilo. The creative act is eternal and has as its end product the temporal order, which is also eternal in the sense explained. Therefore, we can agree with Plotinus that the creating of the temporal order is a vast eternal life, fully dynamic as containing all dateable things in all their temporal modes and as in constant dynamic shifting. This is life in the fullest sense. Divine life contains the whole temporal order, not at once but in completeness, including all things in all their shifts of future, present, and past characters, all as connected together in ways as determined by those shifting characters. Whereas the life of a temporal being has a kind of external relation to elements of its future and past, focused in present existence, the life of eternity encompasses all that at no time and in fullness. In theistic language, the divine eternal life, creating the whole of the temporal order, is infinite in its dynamism and creativity, and this is imitated by finite lives that are dynamic successively, moment by moment.

The Transformation of Soul to Engage Eternity Interesting as the metaphysics of eternity might be to some, especially to Neoplatonists and conversely to anti-eternalists such as process philosophers, the purpose here is not to address the notional dialectic but rather the spiritual capacities of late-modern people to engage the eternal dimensions of reality. The metaphysical dialectic itself is a powerful symbolism for engaging eternity, and it is effectively influential in at least some personal cases to a high degree. But recall the problem of spiritual formation: it is to transform the soul so that symbols of divine eternity such as those Neoplatonic ones just discussed can be used to engage the divine. With those robust symbols we are limited to the degenerate symbols of eternity representing it as space or static form. The doubled reference of symbols requires the state of soul in the secondary referent to be appropriate for the reality in the primary referent as determined by the symbol. The state of soul of most modern people is so temporalized as to preclude deep engagement of reality with symbols of divine eternity. Temporalistic late-modern philosophers might follow the dialectic of Plotinus’s symbols of divine eternity, or those of chapter 1, and might even agree notionally; but they would not engage reality with those symbols, and hence cannot experientially test them without a transformation of soul.

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The transformation of soul required involves a transformation of the sense of personal location or perspective point that includes more than the present. A person must have some kind of self-identification with at least some past and future dates as being equally real and determinative of the self as the affairs and states of the present. The experiential breakthrough comes in appreciating the eternal divine life as a real dynamic togetherness of temporally distinct things. This can hardly happen until the sense of personal self is expanded to include together the young self whose life is still mainly future opportunities, the middle-aged person whose life is defined mainly by responsibilities bound by the past and binding the future, and the old person whose life is mainly past deeds the ongoing meaning of which is slipping out of one’s control. The personal standpoint required is one that experiences the world not just from some present date but from a sense of personal location that includes all the person’s dates in all their states of future, past, and present temporality. Of course, we can get these senses of the eternal identity of our temporal lives only fleetingly, and often through many levels of symbolic direction. As Aristotle said, one swallow does not make a summer. If we were continuously absorbed in a full-life sense of personal location, it would be disastrous to drive a car. Moreover, the intensity of present experience would be dissipated and hence the interesting character of finite freedom would be diminished. Finite life would be greatly impoverished by a continuous substitution of the perspective of our eternal identity for today’s identity. At best, we should strive for a kind of bifocal vision, with the capacity to see within eternity always coupled with the capacity to see from within time where the finite action is. Plotinus might not be as happy with this defense of the special importance of the finite as an incarnationalist Christian is. But in our time, that problem is not serious. Our problem is to find a sparrow or two. To develop even fleeting glimpses of a self-identity inclusive of all the temporal modes, and thence to glimpse the eternity of the world and the divine life, would be a great achievement. The Neoplatonic contribution to the spiritual process of reading oneself to engage eternity is important to recover.8 Recall its bare outlines. We finite temporal souls need to learn to identify with the World Soul. And then in a flight of transformative symbolization we can come to feel the repose of the World Soul through the Nous in the One. Plotinus and his tradition, coming in this instance from Plato, is clear that the flight of the soul is not a movement from one object to another, nor a learning of first one subject and then another. Rather, it is a transformation of the soul’s own nature to attain to engaged appreciation of its true eternal reality in the World Soul, Nous, and the One. In the final vision, there is only one thing, God or the One, and in that are all other things in true eternal perspective.

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Now the next topic, or the completion of this one, would be a discussion of practical techniques of spiritual formation that might effect the requisite transformation of soul. Fundamentally, these techniques are ways of enlarging the imagination so that the data of life are synthesized in images that include a personal sense of eternal location.9 The enlargement of the imagination comes through habituating it through symbol systems whose meanings involve a reconstitution of the sense of self in the secondary referents, step by step. The secondary reference of a symbol or symbol system needs to make contact with the sense of self, but also to nudge it to more nearly eternal proportions. The language of “ascent” has been important in the Neoplatonic tradition, moving upward to higher and higher ways of engaging the world through ever more nearly eternal symbol systems. Bonaventure’s “Mind’s Road to God” is a classic example. In our time, Tillich has inverted the metaphor of the path to depths, not heights. Other traditions have other metaphors for the path of moving from one symbol system for engaging reality to another, approaching a properly eternal standpoint. Daoists like to cast aside the conventional for the purely natural. Tibetan Buddhists conceive excessive temporality as a kind of selfishness that can be scared away by fierce goddesses. Advaita Vedantins take the path to be a lifetime of study of commentaries on ritual. Philosophers are likely to view the path toward spiritual readiness to engage eternity to be a matter of dialectic. Surely Neoplatonism has often been comfortable with this, and it is indeed powerful. But the far richer symbol systems of religious communities are also helpful and perhaps far more efficacious for the practical purposes of transforming the imagination. Jesus’ parable (Matthew 22:1–14) of the king who invites people to his son’s wedding banquet, and casts the improperly dressed guest into the outer darkness, is surely as “decentering” as any Tibetan goddess. The visualization practices of Ignatian spirituality and the hymns of Charles Wesley are far more helpful to most people than Plotinus’s philosophical dialectic or that adduced in chapter 1.

The Engagement of Eternity Spiritual insight into eternity is controversial for many reasons, not the least of which is doubt about the reality of eternity in the first place. A second reason for controversy is the wide acceptance of the Kantian claim that eternity and suchlike alleged transcendent realities are beyond experience and therefore beyond knowledge. Yet because of the overwhelming mass of mystical experience of many kinds in many religious and cultural traditions that seem plainly to

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engage eternity, these modern objections to spiritual insight into eternity do not easily win the day. The approach to the topic here is neither skeptical nor Kantian. Rather, it takes its rise from late-modern pragmatism.10 The pragmatic approach is apparent in three general theses. The first thesis is that insight is acquired through engagement. This is the central point of pragmatism, and its discussion will allow for a brief explication of that position. The second thesis is that eternity is engaged through the temporal. The discussion of this thesis will take a new look at the metaphysical argument concerning the nature of eternity and its relation to temporality. The third thesis is that the appearance of eternity in time is real, but illusory when limited to its temporal manifestations. Regarding this thesis a theory of mystical experience will be sketched. Finally the question of immortality shall be raised, regarding religious practice particularly in popular religion, and shall be compared with the far more sophisticated background for understanding eternity in several theological traditions. R The heart of the pragmatic theory is the thesis that cognition is the habit of representing things so as to shape human enjoyments, responses, purposes, and actions. Representations or signs themselves are habits of construing things a certain way. The construal of signs involves semiotic systems, the particularization of those systems in the specific contexts and acts of construal, the idiosyncratic modification of the systems in the personal history of the construer and the construer’s various publics, and the actual engagements of life within which the habits of representation are exercized. In contrast to semiotic theories more popular in Europe, pragmatic semiotics, as initiated by Charles S.Peirce (1931–35; 1958, especially volumes 2 and 8) and developed by John Dewey ([1925] 1981; 1938); and George Herbert Mead (1938), takes the paradigmatic case of interpretation to be the construal of nature rather than the construal of texts. Therefore, the pragmatic theory treats all cognition as a matter of engagement. Because representations are contrued as habits, the problems of knowledge are understood to be those of the correction of habits, that is, of learning. The orientation to learning in epistemology differs from the more common theory in Western modernity that the problem of knowledge is that of being able to represent the external world with mentally internal signs. In the case of eternity, the customary problem is the supposed lack of evidence that there is any real eternal dimension to things apart from the temporal and, if there is, the difficulty in representing this with signs drawn exclusively from temporal life. The pragmatic theory construes nearly all causal interactions to have the form

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of reactions shaped by the generality of what, in mental terms, are signs. Therefore, for pragmatism there is no general problem of signs representing objects internal or external to mind, only specific problems of representing them well. Sometimes we have to learn how to represent things in the first instance, as when in maturing we discover that the world contains things of which we had never dreamt. Other times we need to correct previously formed habits of representation. The pragmatic theory stresses the fact that correcting ideas is really a matter of correcting habits of representation. Thus we must be careful with the abstract signs we use to construe representations themselves. Only in certain contexts is it appropriate to think of a habit of representing as a word; words can easily be reduced either to mere particular tokens, missing the generality of habit, or to the universality of extremely abstract representations, missing the active character of habit as exercised in particular engagements. Nor should we easily identify habits of representation with propositions or assertions. The propositional character of representations emphasizes semantic and syntactical elements internal to semiotic systems, obscuring the use of those systems in engaging reality with habitual formation. The assertive character of representations does indeed emphasise engagement, but it is misleadingly abstract on two grounds. First, the assertive character of representations often obscures the cognitive elements in the context of assertion, neglecting the distinctions of background and foreground and distracting philosophic attention from the great mass of other habits that must be in play for any one focal interpretation to take place.11 Second, the assertive element of representations ignores the performative or illocutionary elements of cognitive habits (Searle 1969). In actual life, we are construing the world in a vast number of directions and ways whenever we focus on even a small point of purpose, intention, or even conscious attention. For the pragmatic theory, learning is a matter of correcting habits of representation. Every experience has the effect of reinforcing or modifying the habits exercised in the occasion, not only those at the focal point of attention but also all those required to be operative below, alongside, and outside consciousness. The reinforcements or corrections come as the multiple realities engaged fit, allow, or rub contrarily against the expectations implicit in the habits representing them. Thus we learn constantly, whether we want to or not. Yet intelligent learning is the art of putting ourselves in the position to be corrected sooner rather than later, more consistently than haphazardly, and with theoretical attention that allows us to trace out the implications of small learning for the large range of habits that might receive implied corrections. The issue for spiritual insight into eternity, pragmatically phrased, is how to position ourselves to learn about eternity. Or, to put the question more

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modestly, how do we position ourselves to learn whether there is anything to the claims about eternity that have characterized various religious and philosophical traditions?

Eternity Engaged through the Temporal The first task in learning about eternity is correcting the ways in which we represent it philosophically. Eternity has often been thought to be mere static form, as mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, whatever one’s account of form, the kind of eternity to which religion makes reference is something far richer. Eternity is sometimes thought to be a great Now that encompasses past, present, and future in a vast specious present. As human beings can be conscious of the emergence of anticipated things and the slipping away of things soon to be only remembered, so the divine eternity might be a consciousness of all dates in a kind of superpresent attention. The Eternal Now, or Totum Simul, theory of eternity was popularized by Augustine in the Confessions and is persuasive to many who identify human subjectivity and cognition with consciousness. Nevertheless, the Eternal Now theory generalizes about eternity from the present mode of time alone, and this is too partial. Eternity must relate to past and future time as well (Neville 1989, chapters 9–10). To understand eternity requires a proper construal of all three modes of time, present, past, and future. The following reprise of chapter 1 sketches the hypothesis about temporal modes and eternity from a new angle. In order not to be reductive about time by representing its whole character in terms derived from only the present—the typical form of temporal reductionism in the twentieth century—it is helpful to recall the distinction between the essential and conditional features of each of the temporal modes. The essential features are those characteristics unique to each mode. The conditional features are those each mode has by virtue of its connections with the other modes. Conditional features as well as essential ones are necessary for anything, such as a temporal mode, which has identity both in itself and in reference to other things. Together, all three modes, with both essential and conditional features, constitute time’s flow. The essential features of the present are those having to do with change, with decision among possible outcomes, and the actualization of novelty. Both existentialism and process philosophy have elaborated themes of decisive creativity as essential to the present. The conditional features of the present derive from both the past and future. From the past present time receives the previously actualized realities that form its raw data to reactualize, to reconfigure, to

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change, and with which to create. What had become actual in its own present moment of becoming functions as a potential for subsequent moments of becoming. As conditional features, the raw data from the past, the potentials, set determinate limitations with respect to what the creative present can do with them. The present is not sheer indeterminate creativity (although it might be that if it had only essential features) but must work with the specific characters of its data determined in the past. From the future the present receives formed possibilities determining its options. The future is a field of possibilities to which all present activities must conform. What could happen here, based on the data and limitations of this past, must be compatible with what could happen there, with the data and limitations of the past for there. Whereas the present is conditioned by potentialities from the past, it is conditioned by the possibilities set by the future. Considering the future as a temporal mode, its essential features are those having to do with pure formal possibility. If the future were unrelated to the present or past, it would be pure subjunctivity, nothing but what would unify a context of actual things if there were any context of actual things. The conditional features the future receives from the past is precisely the set of actual things it is to form as their possibilities. The future is structured by schematizing pure formal unity to the actual world. If there were no actual world, the future would be wholly indefinite. If there were no essential features of possible unity, the actual world would have no possibility of being other than it has already been actualized. From the present, the future receives the creative changes, constantly actualizing new things, that give the future its steadily shifting character. Because the present actualizes new things, the structure of the future shifts with every shift in present date. The future ought not be thought to be a mere form, but rather a kaleidoscopic web of possibilities, always changing and varying in layers of depth toward the more remote future dates. The past essentially is fixed and actual. It is also essentially the achievement of value. As such the past does not change. If the present is the temporal mode of actualization of existence, the past is the simple existence of what is actualized. Some philosophers say that only the present exists and that the past ceases to exist. But the past cannot change. The past is what actual existence is, whereas the present is the actualizing of existence and the future its possibility. Whatever value is actualized in the present remains actual in the past, though of course in the mode of being past. From the future the past derives the conditional features of its form, as these have been actualized in a present moment, including its value. From the present the past derives the existential character of its actuality, that is, that the past is this way rather than another, here rather than there. The past is continually subject to addition by subsequent moments

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of present activity. Its form changes meaning and value as these possible futures develop and are actualized. Time’s flow is not merely the appearance of change in the specious present but is rather the nontemporal togetherness of the three modes of time as the dates of the present change successively. Within time’s flow, each present moment actualizes itself as a creative unit of change. In doing so, it adds to the past, with its own actualization, having fully become, then being past. The actualization of the present also alters the web of future possibilities. The dynamic of time’s flow is thus not merely activity within the present but rather the continuous set of changes wrought across all past, present, and future. The whole of time, past, present, and future, pulses with each present creative act. To say that the togetherness of the modes of time necessary for time’s flow is atemporal is to narrow down on eternity. Temporal togetherness consists in things being simultaneous or earlier and later than one another. Regarding the temporal togetherness of the temporal modes, a date that is present is later than one that is past relative to the first, and earlier than one in the future relative to the first. But the ontological togetherness of the modes such that they can provide one another with conditional features is not a temporal togetherness, as has been argued throughout. Indeed, all the forms of temporal togetherness presuppose the ontological togetherness by virtue of which the modes condition one another. Without the ontological togetherness the present would be indeterminate creativity, the future pure and empty formal unity, and the past undetermined unchangingness. All temporal dating regarding earlier and later and simultaneity is a function of the more basic ontological togetherness of the temporal modes in time’s flow Eternity is precisely the atemporal togetherness of the modes of time. Eternity embraces past, present, and future, but as internally dynamic as Plotinus saw, with the date of the present always changing, the past always growing, and the future shifting with a kaleidoscope of possibilities. The internal richness of eternity is what sets it apart from mere static form as religiously interesting. Its positionless embrace of past, present, and future sets it apart from the model of the Eternal Now which privileges present consciousness and reduces time’s real flow to the mere appearance of change. With this abstract hypothesis about time and eternity before us, it is possible now to comment on learning about eternity.

Eternity in Time: Real and Illusory Time’s flow has two dimensions for analysis, the temporal and the eternal. The temporal dimension identifies things with respect to some one date being taken

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as the present. Relative to that date, other things are temporally earlier, later, or contemporary. Within a temporal analysis, the date taken to be present can be changed, but then the other temporal relations are shifted accordingly. A temporal analysis involves a univocal temporal mode for each date, with the provision that the analysis can proceed through time by changing the date of the present. Thus, at any one time in the analysis, with a fixed point of the present, any date will be either present, past, or future. The eternal dimension for the analysis of time requires the analysis of each date as future, as present, and as past. The future analysis is vastly complicated because the date’s structure constantly shifts as it gets closer to the present. The analysis of the date as present needs to take into account its assorted conditions deriving from past and future. The eternal analysis of the past includes noting its potential, actual, and possible consequences. Perhaps it is misleading to speak of analyzing dates in all the three modes, for there are no dates except as relative to temporal things. Consider the identity of a person. In analyzing the person’s temporal dimension, the present reference date can be set before the person’s birth; from this point, various genetic and environmental factors are determined, but the person’s own self-caused identity is yet almost wholly undetermined. From the reference point of childhood, the person indeed has some character and fixed circumstances, but still has a largely open future. From the standpoint of middle age, the person bears a weight of past actions, with all sorts of moral determinants, and is hedged around by responsibilities. Those responsibilities presuppose an appropriate scale of freedom within which they might be fulfilled, yet the range of options is smaller though more determinate than the person had in youth. Personal identity depends far more on decisions at this stage of life than it does in childhood or old age. In old age, the person’s future options are extremely narrow, and personal identity consists mainly in what has been done. The eternal identity of a person is not limited to a linear temporal fix but is inclusive of each moment as it is future (thus shifting as it approaches the present), each moment in the person’s life as it is present and a matter of decision, and each moment as it is past. Many of the most important aspects of human identity pertain to the eternal rather than the temporal dimension. Consider the moral identity of a thief at trial. The temporal identity of the thief may be such as to connect the person on trial with the person who in the past committed the crime. But for the person to be held morally responsible for the crime, it must be the case that at the time of the crime, the potential thief could have done otherwise. After the crime, of course, the thief no longer could have done otherwise than he or she did: the past is fixed and actual. But at the time of the trial, it still must be the case that the thief could have done otherwise

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when facing the possibility of committing the crime if the thief is to be held responsible at trial. In a strict temporal sense, the thief at the trial is no longer the one who could have chosen not to commit the crime. But in the eternal sense, in which the thief ’s moral identity consists, the thief at the trial, and ever after, throughout all eternity, is the one who could have chosen otherwise than he or she did. An analogous point could be made about being responsible in the present for future actions, as required for making a promise, for instance. Moral identity reflects the eternal dimension of time’s flow more than the temporal alone. Our knowledge of eternity, our spiritual insight, is always framed within the modes of time. Whether we are contemplating our own eternal identity or that of the cosmos, we always do so from a temporal position. Even if we had complete knowledge of what is actual and possible, we could not in principle know the dates now future as if they were actual because now they remain partly undecided. Even our knowledge of things now past is extremely limited with regard to considering them as they were once future and present. From a standpoint within time we only imagine the past and future as if regarding the characters of those past and future dates to be in their other temporal modes. We can know that the thief was free not to commit the crime and can imagine by speculative inference what that must have been like, but we cannot know the thief committing the crime as we can understand the thief now standing trial. Eternity does, of course, appear within time. We know people are sometimes morally responsible, for instance, and we hold them to account for that. Eternity is also being engaged when we relate to people in a religious sense, that is, construing them with respect to the ontological fact of their existence. Whether thinking about oneself or about others, one’s base religious identity, celebrated and represented in various religious symbols and communal behaviors, has to do with the fact that the person is. The person’s “thatness” intrinsically includes each moment of life as future, as present, and as past. The cosmos too, as imagined by our ecological or natural historical vision, can be regarded in its eternal dimension. Perhaps the most typical engagement of eternity, now and throughout the period of the axial age, is in the quest for meaning.12 Human meaning is not merely a question of inventory, of discerning what has happened to frame things up to now and what might happen in the future. It includes also the questions of justification, of “might have beens” and “maybe shouldn’t wes?” The questions of human meaning have to do with whether we have identified and related to the ultimately important structures and values. Most of all, they relate to the question of what is real, why there is a world, and what value there is in it. In classical religious terms, the questions of human

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meaning relate to God as creator, judge, and bestower of ultimate felicity, all traits, or at least alleged traits, that address the world in its eternity, with each thing in the world regarded in its eternal identity as having all its dates together in all their temporal modes. All aspects of eternity are engaged, addressed, and construed in temporal terms. These terms can be limited to their temporal dimension alone. In this, for instance, eternal life seems like an infinitely long past that is not forgotten but constantly recalled into a divine present, and like an infinite future extending something like this life on into ever new futures. Yet eternity construed this way is an illusion, genuinely engaged but construed like something else. More past and more future is only more time, not eternity. Eternity is the mutual relatedness of past, present, and future so as to provide an identity for temporal persons, indeed for the temporal world, in which no one date contains the whole identity. A thing’s eternal identity includes not only what remains of its past in the present and what might be implied for its future, but in addition its past which is presently gone and its future which is presently not actual. A thing’s eternity is the togetherness of all its moments, each as past, present, and future. From any present standpoint this eternal identity in which the present is eternally together with the past and future is only adumbrated. But it is adumbrated with real engagement when those aspects of human life defined by eternity, such as moral responsibility, religion, and ultimate meaning are engaged.

Eternity and Immortality Comment has already been made about how immortality is a temporal illusion of eternity. The religious quest for authentic life, for meaning, for true judgment on oneself and one’s culture, and for redemption from evil and evilcausing suffering is often cast in terms of an earlier life of purity, or more life beyond death with the conditions removed of alienation, hopelessness, meaninglessness, and injustice, as well as all forms of suffering. But there are other illusory construals of the eternal in temporal terms. The eternity in moral life can be construed only temporally, for instance. From believing that the causal lines of the past are completely set, as indeed they are from the standpoint of the present regarding the past, it follows that a person cannot be held responsible in the present for past actions because the person was determined with no option to do otherwise. The medical model of deviant behavior holds this in arguing that moral and legal responsibility are inapplicable and that causal analyses alone are relevant to judgment. The eternal dimension of moral identity, by

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contrast, recognizes the togetherness of the moral agent’s past action with the choices the person had when the action’s date was future and the freedom exercised when the date was present. The modern period in European philosophy has given peculiar stress to time. Eternity is almost an illegitimate topic except insofar as it means logical forms, as in Whitehead’s (1929, chapter 2) category of “eternal objects.” We do not need to approve the ancients’ cosmologies of aeons within aeons to see that they had serious intuitions of the complex intermixtures of time and eternity within life. Not only the ancients of the Near East and Mediterranean but also those of India and China knew that people were not merely temporal in a linear sense of time but were also eternal in their very temporality. If the hypothesis about eternity sketched above is close to the mark, then time’s flow itself is not temporal but eternal. Eternity contains the dynamism of real change. Temporality has to do with location within that flow. Temporality is the creature of eternity, and the true identity of dynamic and changing temporal things is eternal. Moral life and the faithful practice of religion engage the eternal in their very assumptions. Clarifying these topic somewhat has been the strategy here for a pragmatic correction of perhaps unconscious or misconstrued representations involving spiritual insight into eternity. The mystics in all traditions are the ones who thematize engagement of the eternal. There are moral mystics and nature mystics, mystics of beauty and mystics of engagement, mystics of love and mystics of the mysterium tremendum. Serious mystical cultivation, of any and all of these sorts, especially as blessed with distance on itself won by philosophic correction, is the disciplined pragmatic path toward better spiritual insight into eternity.

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CHAPTER 6

Religion and Scholarship

mong the contemporary forms of spirituality is the life of inquiry practised by some scholars of religion in which they cultivate a peculiar combination of distance from and engagement with the religious matters under study. The academic objectivity sought is a critical engagement that renders scholarship vulnerable to correction where it is off the mark. The discipline involved in this kind of scholarly piety or spiritual cultivation derives from the demands of scholarship in religion. It is distinguishable and even separable from the kinds of piety involved in practising an organized religion. Some scholars with deep attainments in this spiritual discipline are alienated from and perhaps hostile to organized religion, although others live traditional religious lives while also cultivating the peculiar piety of scholarship. The distinguishing mark of this scholarly piety is its combination of distance and engagement. On the one hand scholarship requires critical distance for its objectivity. This was a revolutionary idea originating in ancient Greece and well symbolized by Socrates’ daimon who warned him when to back off.1 The scholarly implications of critical distance have been drawn out at length in the last two hundred years in the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, objectivity requires engagement with the material to be studied; not so to engage allows the results of inquiry to be merely the projections of the categories and assumptions in the theories and methods of inquiry. In religion, engagement is particularly problematic because some aspects of religion are accessible only to experience trained through years of what Hindus and Buddhists call “yogic practice”; in the West it has been said that the important religious truths are accessible only to faith seeking understanding. Therefore somehow religious scholars must penetrate the dao of religious faith and practice in order to gain access to that from which they can develop critical distance.

A

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Scholars now know that two kinds of potential subjectivism bedevil religious understanding. One is the blindness of uncritical participation in some religious path to which the distancing disciplines of Socratic inquiry are the antidote.2 The other is the projections of one’s methodological, theoretical, and more broadly cultural assumptions onto the religious path being studied, for which engaged participation in that dao is the antidote. Objectivity requires, therefore, the disciplines of both the dao and the daimon together. How this dao-daimon discipline of the academic study of religion constitutes a spiritual discipline of its own for some scholars is the topic of this chapter.3

Recent History of the Study of Religions The study of religions was one of the earliest areas of culture within which historical consciousness arose in the West. In his influential Theologico-Political Treatise, published in 1670, Baruch Spinoza sharply distinguished the religion of ancient Israel from the Judaism of his own time. They are distant from one another because of differences in imagination, he argued, and yet the earlier can be known from the perspective of the later because they have logical reason in common. Earlier renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and the Protestant reformers had brought elementary historical consciousness into religion by critiques of the religion of their own time from the perspective of ancient biblical and classical sources. The nineteenth century, however, was the time of the great flowering of historical consciousness in Europe, North America, India, and China, and of its focus on the understanding of religion. The story is complicated but worth sketching in its bold outlines for the insights this provides into the professional identity of contemporary scholars of religion, which in some cases is also a spiritual identity. The sudden popularization of historical consciousness and development of historically conscious academic disciplines in the nineteenth century was stimulated by two major European philosophers. The first was Hegel, who completed a brilliant and comprehensive philosophical system, inclusive of metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, political theory, philosophy of culture, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of history, all in historical categories. Being itself was interpreted in historical terms, or their analogues, and so was logic. Part of the brilliance of Hegel’s system was that it attempted to place all other philosophies, including those critical of Hegel’s system, in positions of partial understanding within the system. To this day philosophers have difficulty escaping Hegel’s implied criticisms of their positions as merely partial. Included

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within Hegel’s system was an interpretation of the world’s major religions in their historical development and comparative placing. Although Hegel was biased to see all religions as partial and leading up to Christianity (understood in his way), and although knowledge of Asian, African, and Native American religions was scant in European scholarship of his day, Hegel’s interpretations were surprizingly insightful. His discussion of “Lamaism,” for instance (1984), is a truly profound philosophical understanding of Mahayana Buddhism for a person who knew so little about Buddhism’s texts and practices. After Hegel, thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche undermined the primacy Hegel had given to consciousness in history and developed what has become known as the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Nevertheless, after Hegel no Western scholar, nor any scholar from Asia who had acquired some Western learning, could fail to think of religions historically. Only Islamic scholars have resisted the historical approach to religion until recently. The other important philosopher for the development of the nineteenth century historical consciousness was Immanuel Kant. His importance lies not in his critical philosophy or ethics, which preceded Hegel’s system and were put in place there. Rather his importance lies in the very idea of a categoreal scheme or worldview. He had argued in his critical philosophy that we experience the world in terms of categories that mind brings to experience a priori; what he meant were categories that are universal in all experience in which objective truth is possible. But in the nineteenth century that idea was radically relativized so that scholars thought of every culture as being determined by the categories making up its worldview. Different cultures and different religions, because of differences in the categories of their worldviews, experience the world differently.4 The objective study of religion then is neither the defense of one’s own religion against criticisms (although that is possible) nor the investigation of deep truths embodied more or less fully in various religions (as Hegel had attempted). The objective study of religions is the investigation of the various worldviews fostered and inhabited by different religions and cultures. Although personal and cultural biases are difficult to guard against, in principle this study of religions is empirical, investigating what various worldviews are and how they work. August Comte (1798–1857) invented sociology as a positivist discipline that is supposed to be value free, reporting only the positive facts. This derives from the popularization (and misunderstanding) of Kant’s ideas of categories that human beings bring to experience to which experience must conform. Our contemporary, Peter Berger, has developed the study of religion through the sociology of knowledge with a far more sophisticated understanding than Comte’s of the historical values and biases an investigator brings to the study

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of a religious worldview. Berger (1967) interprets religious cultures as embodying a dialectic of subjective categories about the religious nature of things which are projected into social realities and institutionalized, then to be reappropriated in personal and social experience so as to form what he calls a “sacred canopy” defining the religious dimensions of the world for a religion. Meanwhile, the Christian and Jewish religious communities in Europe were encountering the historical consciousness in their studies of the Bible. Some Christian Biblical scholars from even before the beginning of the nineteenth century began to use historical critical methods to look at the Bible. David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined burst upon the German intellectual scene like a bombshell in 1835–36, costing him his academic position because it asked what could really be known of Jesus if the biblical sources were treated simply as historical documents. For various reason, many Christian theologians in Germany had come to believe that historical study, rather than appeals to revelation, were to be the justification of Christianity; history justified far too little, it seemed. For different but related reasons having to do with the Emancipation and other cultural conditions, some Jewish thinkers in the “Science of Judaism” movement in the 1820s began a reform of their tradition that included looking at its texts and practices through the methods of the historical sciences; Reform Judaism was the outgrowth of this. Within liberal Christianity the historical method in Biblical interpretation gave rise to the movement called, and finished off, by Albert Schweitzer’s title, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1950).5 Schweitzer’s quest found fewer than a dozen quotations in the New Testament that can reasonably be attributed to Jesus. Biblical historians found the New Testament worldview itself to be primitive and bizarre from the standpoint of modern science. In response to this Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) initiated a new school of interpretation that demythologized the Bible, distinguishing its truths as reinforced in existential philosophy from the mythic or what Spinoza called “imaginative elements.” Like Spinoza, Bultmann (1951, 1955) took the clue to religious truth from his contemporary philosophy and science and therefore was freed to examine the worldview of the Bible with historical curiosity. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) revived the problems Spinoza had broached about the difficulties of understanding cultures from which we are distant. Schleiermacher was especially aware of the subtle interactions of our own self-consciousness with the consciousness of others, particularly those of the authors of the Bible. For him, hermeneutics (1977) was the disciplined strategy of avoiding misunderstanding and it consists in ways of becoming cognizant of differences and commonalities among worldviews, and also in noting how individuals and groups subjectively relate to those worldviews.

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Hermeneutical theory developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among its major theoreticians with a special impact on religious studies have been Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833– 1911), Max Weber (1864–1920), Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Martin Heidegger (1989–1976), Hans Georg Gadamer (1900–), and Paul Ricoeur (1913–). Now hermeneutics is understood as a circle of inquiry, moving from attempts to understand an ancient or foreign text or culture back to understand the peculiarities of our own perspective. Then it backs around to distinguishing our worldview from the worldview being studied. It moves from attempts to sketch the whole of the worldview to interpretations of local data in terms of the whole, and then to revisions of the vision of the whole in light of local discoveries, on and around without end. In hermeneutics, the scholar attempts to control for distortions in the interpretation of what is alien that would come from the interpreter’s cultural assumptions, and also to identify those assumptions by comparison with the alternate worldview of the other. Although there is no ending or certainty to the hermeneutical circle, it can approach in any instance Schleiermacher’s ideal of avoiding or overcoming misinterpretation. Hermeneutics builds upon but also is a corrective to the positivistic historicist social science of the nineteenth century. In contrast to simple positivism it understands the intrusive and value-laden character of inquiry itself and seeks to accomplish the needed participation in the religion to be studied by its moves through the hermeneutical circle. Two further developments decisively influenced the development of religious scholarship toward the objectivity of the dao-daimon contrast during the nineteenth century. One was the practical development of the social sciences to gather masses of data about religions other than those of Western Europe. These studies made possible the great conceptual syntheses of the sociologists Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Max Weber and anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), Branislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948), and Claude Levi-Strauss. In turn these gave rise to the great compendia of religious material by comparative scholars such as G. Van Der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). The result of this massive collection of empirical studies, sorted according to various theories, is a background awareness of religious diversity that every scholar of religion needs now to take into account. The other nineteenth-century development was the systematic translation into European languages of the basic texts of non-Western religions. One thinks of Max Müller’s editing of the multivolume series, Sacred Books of the East (1879f), and James Legge’s translation of the classic texts of China. Although philologically trained scholars are still at work on critical editions and

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good translations of texts, it is possible now for scholars working only in English or other European languages to have a sophisticated and responsible knowledge of the religions of Asia for comparative purposes. The great nineteenth century advances in developing disciplines for studying religions with historical consciousness took place mainly in Europe. Nevertheless, thinkers from both India and East Asia learned from this and instituted at least the beginnings of academic scholarship in the educational traditions of their countries. In India, among the many modernizing movements of that century, the Ramakrishna Mission as led by Swami Vivekananda both made his version of ancient Hinduism popularly known across the world and brought the tools of Western scholarship to India. Sri Aurobindo carried on the reconstruction of ancient Indian religions for the modern world. In China, Korea, and Japan, the nineteenth century saw the first major onslaught of Western imperialism, not the reappropriation of ancient indigenous cultures in the face of earlier imperialism, as in India. The Meiji Restoration in Japan from the late 1860s on brought Western scholarship to that country along with many other things Western. Japanese scholars of religion are now full members of the larger community of religious studies inclusive of North Atlantic scholarly organizations. China resisted Westernization longer than Japan, and when in the 1920s it adopted much of Western culture, it was in a Marxist version that paid little but hostile attention to religion; the attention that was paid in the Marxist universities, however, was Western in its scholarly traditions. In the late nineteenth century Korea welcomed Christian missionaries who founded Westernoriented universities; its relatively enthusiastic embrace of Christianity as a major religion involved as well the embrace of Western modes of scholarship. As a result of all these movements, and many other conditions besides, the ideals and disciplines of academic scholarship seeking the objectivity of the dao-daimon connection have been established around the world.6 The study of religion now is an academic field comprising many disciplines of the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and examining religions of all sorts. Its objectivity consists in the vulnerability of its assertions and findings to be corrected, and that in turn is a function of the different disciplines involved and their interactions, as argued in chapter 11. The academic study of religion has defended its objectivity by sharply separating itself from the activities of professing and proselytizing for some religion. This separation has sometimes expressed itself as hostility to a scholar’s practising religion, although academic objectivity only requires a scholar to separate scholarly inquiry from religious practice and insist that scholarship be tested by the same standards applied to the work of others who are not religious. As a result of the separation of objective academic scholarship in religion from reli-

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gious practice, it would seem unlikely that research in religion per se would be a candidate for a spiritual path. Nevertheless, the study of religion has indeed given rise to a dimension of spirituality that stands alongside and supplements those of the world’s great religions. A scholar can pursue that path through study while having no other spiritual path or while also participating actively in an organized religious tradition. The next section of this chapter shall analyze academic objectivity in religious studies in greater detail so as to make plain the spiritual path of the taodaimon connection.

Participation and Distance in a Typology of the Study of Religions Whereas the previous section rehearsed some of the many historical strands that have contributed to the rich texture of the contemporary academic study of religion, this section shall present a typology of the analysis of religions. The typology is only one of several that could be used, each of which has its strengths. The strength of this one is that it displays the contrast between distance and engagement from many angles and in many contexts. Clifford Geertz’s phrase “thick description” is commonly used to characterize an ideal analysis of a religious culture or community. Thick description means combining “knowing about” religious practices and ideas with a participant-observer’s understanding of how people existentially relate to those practices and ideas. Thick description reveals not only what religion people have but also how they have it. It combines reductive forms of analysis with narrative and other existential forms so that the people whose religion is the subject can recognize themselves in the description.7 The discussion here shall lay out some of the topic areas of thick description. The general topic, of course, is religion as it is manifested in people being religious. This is a narrowly circular definition, but appropriate for the point at hand. Religions can be studied demographically, for instance, determining how many people in a given area profess a certain faith; but this is not to study religions in their religiousness. Similarly religions can be studied for their economic impact, their influence on world politics, and for their functions within psychopathology. All of these and related studies are interesting but do not as such pick up what is religious about religions. No one set of terms can list what is religious about religions, and the whole idea is the subject of intense debate. But in general what is religious in religions has to do with articulating and relating to fundamental issues of the human condition and place in the cosmos, with ultimate sources and characters of obligation, with emotive and self-definitional issues

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occasioned by glimpses of the limits of one’s cultural world as manifested in contrasts between the sacred and the profane, with addressing the fundamental tasks, problems or flaws in human life, and with calling upon nonordinary resources to address all these issues so as to approach perfection or fulfillment. Western religions tend to articulate these things in terms of a moral relation people have with one another and God that historically or regularly is ruinously denied and that must be repaired by a combination of divine effort and human response. Many of the religions of India see the human condition to be one of souls or centers of consciousness that regularly become confused with or attached to the material world, resulting in a fundamental ignorance of what is real and calling for enlightenment. The religions of China tend to see the human situation as one of a delicate balance of vast natural and social processes; typically people become disattuned to this harmony (for reasons about which the Chinese religions differ greatly) and need to be brought back to a harmony that, with proper human participation, is greater than nature would be alone. The sense of the academic study of religion that cultivates the daodaimon contrast of investigation and can be a spiritual path of its own deals with religious as religious. The typology to be used here distinguishes four dimensions of religion, each of which requires investigation with both distance and participation. These are imaginative structures and practices, assertions about what is religiously important, cosmic visions, and the personal and social pursuit of the religious path. These are obviously connected and overlapping in ways some of which will be spelled out here.

Imaginative Structures

Religious imaginative structures and practices include all ideas and symbols, as well as all rituals, music, festivals, domestic religious practices and public forms of reflection and action that serve to shape and reinforce people’s religious imagination. It is not to the point of imagination whether the imaginative elements are true or false (which is the problem for assertions) nor whether they are directly effective in accomplishing a goal such as victory over enemies, bringing rain, or giving up addictive habits. The point is rather that imagination shapes the way people take in the world and orient their responses. The religious parts of imagination shape the way people take the human condition, its obligations, flaws, cosmic limits and ultimate remedies. Certain imaginative elements in religions, such as frequently repeated rituals, postures of prayer, and so forth are often directly intended to shape individual and community character.

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For instance, the Christian eucharist is intended to fix in disciples’ souls the conviction and expectation that daily life lived faithfully will be filled with analogues of crucifixion, and that this, paradoxically, is the way of resurrected life. Each religion shapes its reflective and social life with meanings that arise from imagination in particular ways. Imagination is not distinguished from assertion by its pictorial or graphic quality in contrast to more refined intellectual abstractions; abstractions are just as imaginative as brute gestures.8 The imaginative dimension consists rather in a distinctive function. Religion behaves imaginatively so as to shape social and personal life by the images involved. George Lindbeck (1984) picks up this dimension of religion in what he calls the cultural-linguistic method of theology.9 Philosophical theologians writing in and for a religious community are just as much performing the imaginative shaping function as musicians, liturgists, or cooks at church dinners. Scholarship concerning the imaginative dimension of religions requires the connected work of distancing and participation in at least the following ways. Imaginative structures (and structured processes) bear two senses of meaning that can be distinguished as network meaning and content meaning. This distinction develops the notion of semiotic systems introduced in chapter 3. Network meaning has to do with the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic ways in which one part of an imaginative structure relates to other parts. A language, for instance, can be viewed in its imaginative dimension, and its network meanings have to do with grammar, vocabulary, and usage. But language is not the only form of imagination. Imagination in some religions visualizes heaven as up and hell as down. There is an imaginative network logic to time and central space, as explored by Eliade (1959) in his discussions of “in that time” and the World Tree. Postures for prayer, rhythms for singing, expectations for transformative life stages such as puberty, marriage, childbirth, and so forth all have imaginative structures with a network logic. There are also imaginative logics to highly reflective elements of religion such as sutra recitation, commentarial learning, theological argument, and theory. The distancing part of the scholarly investigation of religious imagination focuses on laying out the logics of network meaning. Many scholarly approaches work at this: the formation of typologies, comparative discriminations, reductive analyses to psychological or social factors, semiotic analyses, logical analysis in the ordinary sense, and various forms of symbolic interpretation. Many religious people are unconscious of the imaginative logic of some of their most important symbols. Christians, for instance, are often surprized to learn that the eucharist has a layer of cannibalistic logical symbolism, despite the fact they have heard many times the phrase, “This is my body; take and

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eat.” Most of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century analyses of religions in comparative perspective, including reductive analyses such as Marx’s and Freud’s, worked by laying out network meanings. The empirical objectivity to network analysis of imaginative structures lies in the ability to see from various angles whether the logic is as the analyst describes. Content meaning, by contrast, consists in the fact that there is an internal logical structure to any imaginative part as well as the structures connecting that part with others; these are obviously related. The internal logical part, however, is not merely a form of connection but also the real togetherness of the internal components. This is to say, the content meaning is the real experiential content of the imaginative structure. Persons quite possibly can learn the network meanings of their imaginative acts without any of the content, or with very little. They thus can behave and speak correctly, but hollowly. For instance, a young Confucian can learn the rituals honoring ancestors and perform them correctly, without feeling the reverence and piety those rituals are supposed to contain. A Buddhist monk can successfully go begging but without the feelings of humility and selflessness the act of begging is supposed to shape. A new Christian can take communion in the prescribed manner, and explain to a catechist what it is supposed to mean, without any sense of participation in the life and death of Christ. The content meaning of an imaginative structure or act of course consists of other imaginative structures whose own components are imaginative structures, and so on down. In any ritual such as the Christian eucharist there are many levels of meaning compacted together by the ways the imaginative structures work. For any individual, some of those meanings will be truly present as experientially filled content and others only by means of imaginative tokens supplied by network meaning. A person, for instance, might know about and acknowledge the cannibalistic level of meaning in the eucharist without having the real sense of taking in and taking over the eaten person’s power and genius. When the content meanings of an imaginative structure are present only in network forms, they obscure or impede the experiencing of yet other content meanings. One aspect of the Indian practice of cultivating unitary vision or samadhi is not to blur or confuse things but to be able to enjoy things harmoniously through one another. Although imagination functions in religion far beyond spiritual practices and rituals, in those areas repetition serves to cultivate the relevant content meanings. Whereas one-pointed meditative focus is difficult to achieve on one’s first attempt, long and frequent sessions of quiet sitting help pull into place the relevant contents and to exclude the distractions. Much of spiritual

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direction, although not all, has to do with testing the imaginative structures of devotional life for the authenticity of their content meanings. Obviously for the scholar to study a religion’s content meanings it is necessary to participate to the degree required to attain to the contents. Given the vast range of different forms and functions of imaginative structures, many kinds of participation are involved. Not all are esoteric or would require abandoning oneself to the perspective and feeling world of the religion. But some do. Where it is impossible to enter the feeling world, as in the case of lost innocence, participation, and thereby objective scholarship, are truncated. The spiritual discipline of scholarship with regard to the study of the imaginative structures of religions’ practices and expressions consists in the cultivation of investigative methods and personal integrity required to balance network meanings and content meanings. For scholars to whom the religion is alien, the temptation is to rely too heavily on network meaning, which of course is the initial entry into the alien imaginative structure. For scholars already participant in the religion and perhaps committed to it, the temptation is to express and affirm the authority of the content meanings without the distancing analysis of the network meanings. With respect to spiritual discipline in the dao-daimon contrast, the balance of network and content meaning in the study of imaginative structures is central.

Assertion

Although scholarly appreciation of imaginative structures is presupposed in every other kind of analysis of religions in their religiousness, the other dimensions go beyond imaginative concerns. The assertoric dimension, for instance, deals with religions’ assertions about the nature of reality. An assertion is true if reality has the nature or position the assertion attributes to it, taking into account all the qualifications of the various respects in which assertions interpret reality and the various symbolic systems employed for the assertions. Religious assertions have many forms, from abstract metaphysical and theological propositions explicitly asserted to ways of the world and gods assumed in activities whose explicit purposes are something else. Especially important are what might be called “devotional assertions,” couched in metaphors that few take literally but that are intended to assert or ask about the nature of the real. Such assertions (or questions) are supposed to refer to their objects, but the referential path cannot be understood without an elaborate interpretation of what is implied in the imaginative structure. To assert, for instance, that the

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Buddha-mind is infinite compassion is not to assert that it is a big mind, though it seems to say that. To assert the Christian doctrine of the atonement is to claim to explain how God saves people, not to assert that God is a divine child abuser, although atonement imagery takes that form. Scholarly grasp of religious assertions, particularly devotional and liturgical ones, is highly complicated. A partial form of inquiry into religious assertions is to describe and interpret what assertions a religion makes or assumes. This can be done by sociological, anthropological, psychological, and historical studies, as well as by the analysis of texts, dialogues with religious spokespersons, and so forth. The analysis of the assertions is not the same as inquiry into whether those assertions are true and in what respects. Only the latter is full-blooded understanding of religious assertions. The former, a descriptive enterprise, is closer to an analysis of the imaginative structure of a religion than it is to an analysis of the truth of its assertions. From the standpoint of the religion, the concern is with whether its assertions are true. Perhaps only professional religious thinkers are concerned about formulaic theological assertions. But every Buddhist is concerned to identify true nonattachment, true enlightenment, and the truth about compassion; perhaps it is safer to say that every Buddhist is concerned about whether a particular state is true nonattachment, enlightenment, and so forth. Christians are concerned about whether God really does save, whether God’s love applies to oneself and one’s group. Confucians are concerned about whether this or that path is their true destiny. No descriptive statement that this is what Buddhists, Christians, or Confucians believe answers the question of truth, although appeals to community or traditional authority are some ways of answering the question of truth. Scholarship regarding truth in religious matters pursues the daimon of distancing by asking the question of truth from as many perspectives as possible. The notorious difficulty religions have in focusing questions of truth lies in the fact they are so easily confused with authorities, the weight of tradition, habits of practice, and other elements of imaginative structure. That something follows as true within an imaginative structure, as a kind of entailment of the imaginative logic, does not mean it really is true. Insofar as the religions or religious people assert it as true, they mean it as referring to reality. They mean that their imaginative structure makes reference to reality even when it is being used for the cultivation of character in line with the religion’s ideals. Therefore, part of the analysis of the truth of assertions is the study of how and whether assertions framed in an imaginative structure relate to reality. This is a matter of distance because the imaginative structure itself must be lifted up and objectified. The other side of the analysis of the truth of assertions is to get inside the imaginative structure to the content meanings involved and to ask whether

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those meanings can be used to make true assertions. This is a difficult point because many of the things about which religions make assertions are not objects in the ordinary sense. Reference to them does not mean comparing them to statements, nor an isomorphism of the objects’ structures to things in the representations of them. Rather the deep religious assertions are matters of the heart that have been reinforced or corrected by millennia of engagement with life at its limits. Articulate representations of this heart knowledge are always far more arbitrary than the heart’s evolved lessons. Specific levels of imagination attempt to shape basic imaginative engagement so that tests can be made, but they always say too much. Therefore it is best to recognize that the proper locus of basic religious assertions is in the long slow process of their correction through history and the changes of imaginative structures. There are few clear directions. For instance, all religions of which we know assert that human beings live under some kind of obligation, to the gods, to purity, to ritual cleanliness, to nature, to other people. Some religions, however, moved further to assert that the universe itself, or its ultimate God or principle, is moral: the good shall prosper and the evil shall be punished; other religions rejected this as empirically false. The other side of the analysis of the truth of religious assertions is to enter into the long dialectic of the correction of the assertions. The American pragmatists learned from Hegel that knowledge never has a beginning point but is always underway, hopefully being corrected rather than corrupted. They put this at the center of their epistemology and treated all knowledge as learning. So, with the scholarly discipline of judging the truth of religious assertions, the scholar must come to find a place within the stream of corrections. All the distancing moves, all the typologies, comparisons, and dialogues, need to be embraced as internal to the process of ascertaining religious truths. Whereas an imaginative structure might be private to a religion, so that to enter it for its content meanings requires entering into the religion, judgment of the truth of religious assertions is essentially public. It transcends any imaginative structure in order to get a hermeneutical grasp of the assertion and the conditions for its truth. Because there is no thought at all without imaginative structures, it is impossible, indeed undesirable, to transcend all. But the structures are used to triangulate in on one another in the attempt at putting the whole assertion in position to be corrected if it is wrong. Though public, the scholarly study of the truth of religious assertions requires participating in the traditions of habits in which those assertions lie. Here is one instance in the academic study of religion in which the scholar must indeed have a spiritual discipline. In order to ascertain the truth of the important religious assertions it is necessary to incorporate religious life, lived

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with its habits encountering reality so as to be corrected. The scholar might not be committed to any one imaginative structure, and thus refuse to be identified with any organized religion or tradition. Nevertheless, the scholar fails at scholarly discipline by standing back from the engagement of reality with the assertions of its nature ready to be corrected. Some scholars legitimately refuse the dao-daimon spiritual path at this point by declining to ask the questions of truth about religious assertions. The refusal of the truth questions is explicitly a deliberate setting aside of the most existentially gripping content of religious life. Such scholarship can be only partial with regard to understanding what religions are and do.

Cosmic Vision

Cosmic vision is a dimension of religions that combines both assertions and imaginative structures to provide a sense of the whole of things and of people’s places in that. The stuff of vision is imaginative structures, of course, and most religious are selfconscious enough to treat their candidate visions as assertions. But the function of cosmic vision is not so much imaginative formation of character and community nor the concern for truth as it is to provide orientation in the world in a crucial sense discussed in chapter 2. Myths of creation, time and eternity, cosmic position, and reality versus illusion all provide pivots for cosmic visions that orient life in its most fundamental elements. The importance of cosmic vision is perhaps best appreciated in our day by noting its destruction, or at least deep shaking, in all traditional religions by modernization. Modern science does not genuinely threaten our imaginative structures; indeed, it helps us see how subtle and expressive such structures are. Nor does science threaten many specific assertions of religious truth, especially when these can be hermeneutically reinterpreted in light of our understanding of the workings of symbolism. What science threatens is the sense of how the world hangs together as religions have construed this for the sake of orientation. Traditional visions have a hard time now distinguishing between ultimate things and conditions, affirming obligatedness in the face of sheer relativism, expressing what, if anything, is important and valuable for individual and social life. All the traditional cosmic visions are undergoing serious modification by the impacts of modernization and modern science, and it is difficult to predict how those modifications will come out for modern Buddhists, Christians, Confucians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Daoists. Perhaps the most pertinent point about a religion’s cosmic vision, at least in the modern world, is that it articulates how that religion with its imaginative

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structure relates to other religions and to the nonreligious secular world. Cosmic vision requires categories that explicitly transcend the core imaginative structure of a religion to embrace its alternatives, while at the same time in some sense remaining faithful to that core. The problem in this respect for academic scholarship is to understand two things. The first is how a religion’s cosmic vision represents other religions within its orienting world. The second is to assess how true this representation is, and in what sense of truth. Thus, as with assertions of truth taken in small scale, cosmic visions can be understood in their comprehensiveness and worth with the means of both distance and participation. Although questions of truth and imaginative structure are involved in understanding cosmic visions, the unique issue to this dimension of religion is understanding how and with what validity the vision provides religious orientation. As with questions of truth, it is possible merely to describe what a religion’s cosmic visions are and how they orient people, without assessing the validity of the orientation. But that is to stand back from understanding what is most vital and interesting in the issues of cosmic vision: how ought people be oriented within the cosmos? If a scholar presses that last normative question, then as with questions of truth the means to its answer involves a participation in the corrective process of orientation. This is not to say that the scholar needs to adopt any religion’s cosmic vision, nor to work out an idiosyncratic cosmic vision. Yet it is to say that academic objectivity requires the scholar to place analytical or speculative hypotheses about cosmic vision in the way of being vulnerable to correction in experience. When scholars embrace this scholarly discipline directly, it is likely to give rise to extraordinarily sophisticated approaches to cosmic vision, combining the perspectives of many religions and showing facility with vision on many levels. One thinks of the spiritual power in this respect of scholars such as Mircea Eliade, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Thomas Berry, Huston Smith, and Ninian Smart. Although none of these is particularly alienated from a native organized religion, what is special about their spiritual power derives from their scholarship regarding the cosmic visions of world religions.

Religion as Quest

The fourth dimension of religions as religious to which academic scholars have paid much fruitful attention is the process of pursuing the religious life as such, the religious quest. The pursuit of the Dao, as it may be called in light of the usage above, is eminently practical, though shaped by religious imagination, guided by religious assertions, and oriented by cosmic vision. Religious quests

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or practical religious ways have many forms. Most involve any one of several complicated dialectics of individual versus social life; some are consciously intentional and others are more like inherited habits of religious living. The practical side of religious living is guided by some sense of human life as being under obligation. In part, being under obligation defines people as human regardless of the contents of the obligations. The religious problem—ignorance, illusion, sin, disharmony—in some sense results from failing the task of living under obligation (and also failing specific obligations). But different religions define the fundamental obligatedness in various ways. The term “obligation” reflects the moral orientation of Western theisms, although it has analogues in other traditions. Four fundamental senses of obligatedness are to be found in most religions: righteousness, natural piety, existential engagement, and being on the religious path. The first, which supplies the metaphors for the others, is righteousness or the obligation to justice. Justice here means an order that is imposed on an otherwise fluid and destructive situation by a god, king, people, or individual. The point is that righteousness or justice requires the imposition of a form that “gives everyone his or her due” (to quote Plato’s phrase). Perhaps the sense of justice arose when a king was needed to depersonalize citizenship and impose order on a society too large to tolerate mere kinship authorities with their blood feuds. Sky gods impose order. A second fundamental sense of obligatedness is to respect, honor, and defer to the various parts of the world each in its own place with its own value. Such deference is a kind of natural piety, and most religions cultivate it as an essential part of humanity. Sometimes appreciation of things onto which order needs justly to be imposed leads to a conflict between righteousness and natural piety. Late-twentieth-century concerns for ecological balance and respect for species thus sometimes has come into conflict with the pursuit of justice for persons whose livelihood threatens the ecology. Deference to nature and natural passions has sometimes been associated with the Earth Mother. The third sense of obligatedness is the existential requirement of engaging one’s situation. This has been a principal focus of religions that emphasize the distinction between illusion and ignorance on the one hand and enlightenment on the other. The illusion and ignorance are never entirely innocent but have some form of denial, overidentification, or attachment. Twentiethcentury Jewish and Christian theology has emphasized existentialist concerns about authenticity and faith. The obligation to be true, to be authentically engaged and unselfdeceived, is not the same as moral obligation or natural piety. Yet religions take it to be part of the human condition.

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The fourth fundamental sense of obligatedness is the individual orientation to the religious path itself. Obligatedness to be religious is inclusive and integrative of all the other fundamental senses of obligatedness. The dao of religious practice has many forms and imaginative structures: finding God, becoming God, becoming enlightened, empty, attuned, individuated, released, freed; it might mean being faithful to a people and its destiny, or dying the great death to a culture in order to be empty or reborn. Most religions have multiple representations of the steps of the path and their meaning. Whereas any of the senses of fundamental obligatedness can be attended to, represented in a religion, and pursued by itself, most religions valorize them all and suggest that if any is missing the religiousness of the religion is compromised. The religious life is something more concrete than morality, natural piety, enlightenment, or existential commitment, and even the explicit career of being religious. All of these together add up to religiousness. The scholar of religion in its practical pursuit can attend to any one or all of these fundamental senses of obligatedness, or to a part or aspect of one or several. The scholar can look to the imaginative structures, assertions, and visions in any or all of these. Regardless of narrowness or breadth of focus, academic objectivity requires both distance and participation. The distance comes through all the ways practice can be represented through methods of inquiry. The participation comes through taking on the various senses of obligatedness in order to understand specific forms of religiousness. To take them on, of course, is to accept the obligatedness. Scholars who opt for this way to objectivity, as with those who enter into the spiritual discipline of coordinating cosmic visions, are likely to be extraordinarily sophisticated, participating in more than one religion’s approaches to obligatedness. To sum up this section, scholars of religion need to combine distance with participation in order to obtain academic objectivity in at least four dimensions of religious studies. They need distancing disciplines for the analysis of network meaning in imaginative structures, and participatory disciplines for the analysis of content meaning. They need logical testing disciplines to get distance on truth claims in religion, and participatory techniques to embody religions’ deepest claims and engage them where they might be corrected. They need descriptive distancing analytical tools to understand the ways cosmic visions orient people, and they need participatory techniques to engage in the creation and correction of orientations. They need distancing disciplines to understand and criticize the nature of the four senses of obligatedness as various religions represent these, and they need participatory disciplines to understand just how and why the obligations are obligatory.

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Models of Spirituality among Historically Conscious Scholars The previous section spelled out at some length a typology for understanding what goes into the study of religions and how disciplines provide both distancing and participatory functions. It was apparent how in each of the major categories a scholar, in the pursuit of academic objectivity, might undertake part of the scholarship as a spiritual discipline. In this section these observations about a scholar’s potential spiritual discipline will be integrated and four models will be presented of how the spirituality of the inquiring role might be related to organized religions’ modes of spiritual development. It would be a mistake to believe that all good scholars of religion are engaged in the secular spirituality of the dao-daimon contrast. Few if any scholars actively study a religion or several religions in all the dimensions mentioned above (or in all the dimensions that might be articulated by other typologies). Most scholars limit their serious research to what one or a very few disciplines can understand about religions’ many dimensions, and few scholars have the rare combination of intellectual generosity and speculative wit for affinities easily to embrace studies coming from other approaches than their own. Tensions between descriptive and normative approaches, both of which have been shown above to be necessary for taking religion seriously in its religiousness, are especially high. But even if there were a scholar who studied religions in all their dimensions, with all the appropriate disciplines stretched to the utmost to meet the demands of both distance and participation, that would not necessarily mean that the scholar herself or himself is engaged in the dao-daimon spiritual path. For the scholar properly to be said to be exercising that spiritual path, the scholarly life would have to be organized self-referentially with the harmonious integrity of the four dimensions of religion. That organization takes place in the scholar’s own practical religious pursuits as illustrated in the fourth dimension. Although the scholar would not have to be at all self-conscious about this secular spiritual path—and indeed could be conscious of following a different spiritual path of some organized religion—in practice there would have to be (1) an integration of the imaginative structure of dao-daimon scholarship with (2) assertions the scholar defends as true about religiously important topics and with (3) the scholar’s own composite cosmic vision, all (4) as a practical shaping and orientation of the scholar’s pursuit of righteousness, natural piety, authentic engagement of reality, and spiritual destiny. These categories for integration are peculiar to the typology used in the previous section and surely allow of alternatives. The distinguishing mark of the imaginative structure of the scholar’s spirituality, in contrast to the imaginative structures of traditional religions, is that it

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takes its specific images from the historical development of and debates about the various methodological procedures to attaining proper distance and engaged participation for the achievement of academic objectivity. The scholarly imagery would be filled with traditional religious images, but as objectified and hermeneutically understood. Because the field of religious studies is a congeries of disciplines, each at its own stage of internal self-criticism, there is little unity to the religious imagery of the spiritual scholar. Rather, such imagination requires vast erudition to acquire sensitivity to the many issues involved in attaining proper distance and participation so as to make study of this or that problem vulnerable to correction. A spiritually disciplined scholar’s religiously important assertions, shaped by the imaginative structures reflective of the disiplines of critical inquiry, would have to be informed by critical assessments of the ways religions have made such assertions. Perhaps the scholar’s conclusions would not be congruent with any organized religion’s assertions; surely they would reflect a level of abstraction involved in comparative judgments. However related to traditional religious assertions, the spiritually disciplined scholar would have assertions about how reality stands with regard to the human condition and ultimate things. The spiritually disciplined scholar’s cosmic vision would not only reflect criticisms and reconstructions of traditions’ religious visions but also would envision how scholarship can relate these visions and the scholar’s own vision to the modern world. Perhaps unlike practitioners of traditional religions, the scholar’s spiritual discipline does have to envision a place for the scholar’s religious practice in a world of modern science where economic development often oppresses and where the cosmic geography is vaster than any traditional religion imagined, even Hua-yen Buddhism with its worlds within worlds. The cosmic vision of the spiritual scholar might be the first place where religions can solve the problem of relating to modernity, and traditional religions can learn from this. The spiritual scholar’s own practical pursuit of religious practice, shaped by scholarly imagination, guided by scholarly religious assertions, and oriented by a scholarly cosmic vision, must be made specific. The first three dimensions can be notoriously abstract in a scholar’s hands, and perhaps some scholars are selfdeceived to believe they are being seriously religious with only their scholarly imagination, assertions, and vision. The easiest way to be specific and concrete in the practice of religion is to devote oneself to the cultus of an organized religion. But the specific practices in a given organized religion might not indeed be reflective of or reflectable in the religious imagination, assertions, and vision of a responsible scholar. From the standpoint of the organized religion, of course, it might be good strategy indeed for coping with the problems of modern culture

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to reach out to and include the spirituality of good religious scholarship; this likely would entail altering traditional religious practice and incorporating distancing structures as well as processes of reengagement. From the standpoint of spiritual scholarship, however, the scholar would have to ascertain what requirements for righteousness, natural piety, authentic spiritual realism, and the pursuit of spiritual destiny would follow from the scholarship. The first model of how spiritual scholarship might relate to the practice of organized religion is that of multiple religious identity. Scholars have long recognized that in some cultures, for instance precommunist China, individuals and families could compartmentalize and reintegrate their lives so as to practice several religions, each with its imaginative structure, assertions, vision, and practices more or less distinct and intact. Ezekiel took a dim view of this in ancient Israel, but in many modern societies the children of parents who represent different religions are often raised to take part in the cultus of both. How different religions, respecting their differences, can be made compatible within one life and social setting is a difficult matter; but it has been resolved many times. In the case of the spiritual scholar, the spirituality of the scholarship itself is one religion that can be integrated with full participation in an organized religion. Indeed, with multiple religious identity, a scholar can have a rich cultic life in several religious traditions.10 John Berthrong’s All under Heaven (1994) is an unusually sensitive study of multiple religious identity. This solution to the problem of relating scholarly spiritual discipline to traditional religion recognizes the full weight of participation. The second model is that of deconstruction and it recognizes the weight of distancing. Deconstruction privileges deference to and acknowledgement of the Other. While cultivating respect for any organized religion studied, encountered, or inherited, it fosters self-alienation from the slightest naivete of participation in any religion. Turned on scholarship itself, deconstruction might acknowledge that it provides a genuine spiritual discipline but would move immediately to deconstruct any rendering, such as in the typology above, of what that might be. Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism (1990) is a brilliant study of the issues involved in this model.11 The third model is appreciative abstraction and syncretism on secular terms. Perhaps the majority of North Atlantic scholars with spiritual discipline exemplify this model. While not identifying seriously with any religious traditions except for props and helps, scholars can abstract elements out of one or more religions and reconfigure them to provide for a concrete spirituality congruent with and informed by scholarship. The strength of this model is its integrity with regard to the results of sophisticated scholarship. The weakness is its difficulty in developing a concrete cultus or practice beyond scholars talking about

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spiritual practice, and a tendency either to remain in abstraction deconstructing concrete practice or to leap to multiple religious identities. Peter H. Van Ness’s Spirituality, Diversion, and Decadence (1992) is a brilliant argument for this model. The final model is that of the scholarly first encounter with religion. Many scholars, from both nations long influenced by Marxism and North Atlantic modernized countries, have been raised in wholly secular ways, with virtually no religion in their families of origin. They have neither an inherited religion nor one against which to rebel; no religious organizations in their neighborhood offer serious challenges. When such people enter into scholarship about religion, they encounter religiously important issues for the first significant time, and then the spiritual disciplines of scholarship can become the most concrete and enriching path for them, with no competitors. Of course, in the participatory elements of their scholarship they might develop deep respect and affinities for one or more traditional religions, but they might not find membership in the traditional community attractive; if they do they can move to the multiple religious identity model. The concrete practical elements of scholarly spirituality on the first encounter model might not look at all like those in any traditional organized religion. What public forms the practice of pure scholarly spirituality might take are not yet apparent because this model seems so new. Surely they will throw light on the other models. This chapter has described a peculiar secular spirituality of religious scholarship, both historically, from the nineteenth century, and conceptually, from a structural analysis of the field of religious studies based on a typology. Historically conscious scholarship requires methods that produce both critical distance from the subject matter of religion and also a participation or engagement in the subject. Because academic objectivity requires comparison and critical assessment, scholarship in religion cannot be mere faith seeking understanding. Because academic objectivity needs to engage the subject matter directly so as to correct the biases and projections of the methods and theories assumed in study, scholarship in religion cannot be mere detached description. Vulnerability and readiness to correction by the realities of its subject matter as well as the criticisms of the intellectual community give objective scholarship in religion its standing in the academic community. The need for participation in religion can be symbolized as participation in some religious dao, the need for distance as obeying Socrates’ daimon. Thus religious scholarship requires methods honoring the dao-daimon combination. According to the typology of religious elements to be studied by various appropriate disciplines, four dimensions of religion have forms of the dao-daimon contrast: imaginative religious structures, assertions about what religions take

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to be important religious truths, orienting cosmic visions, and the practical pursuit of the religious life. The last dimension has at least four traditionally distinguished aspects: the pursuit of righteousness, of natural piety, of engaged faithfulness or authenticity about reality, and of one’s own (or one’s group’s) religious destiny or fulfillment. Attaining both distance and engagement in these various dimensions requires of scholars various elements of spiritual accomplishment. These can be integrated into a genuine spiritual life for scholars when cultivated so as to flesh out the dimensions of religion mentioned. Finally, a few common models relating the secular spiritual disciplines of scholarship to organized religions were sketched. A final comment is in order. The emphasis on critical distance in objectivity may be a peculiar contribution of the West. In scholarship it takes its rise from ancient Greek science and philosophy, as symbolized in Socrates’ daimon. But human identity in the Mesopotamian city-states was defined in terms of otherness with respect to the other city-states, and the otherness of one’s god to the gods of the other cities; this sense of “us and the others” was taken up in Hebrew religion and the religious cultures derivative from that. For all of the hostility and warfare engendered by self-definition relative to otherness, it has also engendered an attitude of recognizing and honoring others as other, not to be reduced to some form of one’s own cultural identity nor to be denied status as a culture. The antidote to the violence to which we/they thinking is prone may well be the participation in the religious and cultural world of the other that is required if one is to be corrected even about differences. Learning through yogic participation and cultivation of experience has been an emphasis of Asian cultures for whom distancing has been less important for objectivity. Perhaps the spirituality of the scholar of religion, combining distance and participation, can be a helpful model for the spiritual dimensions of a world society in which many cultures must live in harmony. Religious scholarship will not save the world. But its dao-daimon disciplines, so hard won for the sake of academic objectivity, might show the way to solving larger issues where the divergencies of the spiritual practices of organized religions block the path.

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CHAPTER 7

Religion and Society

his chapter addresses the theme of world community and religion from four angles. First, it draws some careful distinctions between world society, world culture, and world community, indicating how different those social phenomena are from one another. Second, it discusses how the world religions relate to each of these. World religions means those religions that have spread well beyond the cultures of their origin to inform other cultures, so that they can be said to have many cultural embodiments while remaining the same in significant senses. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam qualify as world religions in the richest sense. Confucianism and Daoism are more restricted in their influences to East and Southeast Asian cultures, though they do indeed inform diverse cultures and are achieving some institutionalization in Europe and North America in our generation. Judaism is perhaps the most widespread of religions, with communities of observant Jews in nearly every country of the globe; but it has tended less to inform its host culture than to provide continuity for the Jewish community. For purposes of illustration, discussion of world religions shall be restricted here to Buddhism and Christianity. Third, the chapter shall argue that the force that has created a world society, namely modernization, has also undermined the authority of the world religious traditions. Therefore, if those traditions are to contribute to the building of a world community, they shall have to do so by means that do not depend on their traditional authority. The immediate consequence of this point is that dialogue among world religions is not fruitful as a mere sharing of meanings and borrowing of practices and ideas. All of the world religious traditions are in trouble in the modern world, and jointly they face the difficult prospect of bringing a saving dao to a new world. Fourth, the chapter shall introduce seven of what late-modern Buddhists might call “Maitreyan strategies” for world religions to employ to contribute to

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the establishment of world community. Much of the discussion, of course, has to do with the reorganization of social structures. Indeed, much of our understanding of the problems of religion and modernization arise from the investigations of social scientists. Yet religions are not mere social forces like economic systems or government. They are human ways of catching and responding to a transformative power that comes from an ultimate source. Although there are many important differences among the world religions, they are alike in having a double message. On the one hand, they show that ordinary life is not what it seems: the things that ordinarily appear to be important often are really trivial and distracting, and the important things are ordinarily missed. On the other hand, the transcendent truth is that the ordinary life is the life that has to be lived with a transcendent consciousness: salvation is not escape from this world but a commitment to engage it. Therefore, in a late-modern age that many interpret to be intensely secular, seemingly proof against transcendent criticisms of materialistic attachments, we must wait upon a new revelation of the transcendent, or new appropriations of the old. Christians call this a “longing for divine grace,” and in frustration cry, “How long, O Lord, how long?” When Buddhists see the Dharma in decline they wait for Maitreya, the Coming Buddha who shall give the Dharma with new vigor. Neither Buddhists nor Christians expect a wholly new spiritual invention; rather, they wait for the old message to be renewed. The novelty is in the particular occasion of the power of the transcendent to break open the intransigent blindness of the secular age so that enlightenment and salvation are possible. In all that follows, even when the topic seems to be strategies for social reform, we should understand that the question is how best to wait for Maitreya.

World Society, World Culture, World Community Society means the relations among people as defined by common patterns of causation. People are in the same society when they participate in important common patterns of causation. Sociologists, anthropologists, economists, psychologists, jurists, political scientists, and students of religion are among those who identify and describe the common patterns of causation. Each of these disciplines has many schools, which are not necessary to be distinguised here. Furthermore, each of the schools recognizes elements that might not fall under the characterization of “patterns of causation” to be given here. But whatever else they do, the disciplines mentioned do attempt to identify and describe patterns of causation, participation in which brings people into a common society. Five features of social patterns need to be lifted up for consideration.

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First and most important, society is constituted by causal patterns. That is, what some people are or do influences what other people can be or do, and this is the basis of social relations. Society has to do with how people affect one another. The stress on patterns of causation stands in contrast with thinkers who stress patterns of meaning. A stress on patterns of meaning to define society leads to a confusion of society with culture. It is better to construe society as a function of patterns of causation in which meanings are a qualification of the causal patterns. Second, therefore, the understanding of society takes the form of theories about the organization of causation. Where people affect one another in certain kinds of patterned ways, there is society. Although hermeneutic and semiotic theories may be required to understand the specific kinds of causal patterns involved, overall framing social theories apply to how things are caused to be different from what they would be otherwise. In principle, therefore, social theory should be continuous with scientific theories about nature, although of course they are not at the present time.1 Third, the causal influences are patterned so that crucial variables have common meaning to the participants in the society. Insofar as there is common meaning, there is common culture, for culture has to do with meaning as society has to do with causation (there will be more about culture later). In an economic system, for instance, the medium of exchange is understood in common. Even if it is only a barter between two alien tribes, a barter in which each side disagrees with the value the other side places on the commodities, still each side knows what the other side values. An item has social meaning when one group responds to it as having meaning for another group. In a developed economic system a vast array of items constitutes an interconnected set of meanings. Not only is it the case that different groups in the same social relation can give different meanings to items so long as they understand what the other group means by it, but a social pattern of causation can include important causal elements that are obscured by the common meanings. Marxists and Freudians, and the other “critics of suspicion” (for example, Foucault 1978) have shown that in at least some instances the most important lines of causation carried by a system are not those about which there is common recognition of meaning. Rather, the underlying causal patterns might have to do with class interest rather than expressions of merit or equality. Often enough, our theories of social causation simply leave out important causal patterns. In light of recent history, it seems fair to say now that the positive Marxist economic theory, however sympathetic to the plight of the poor and to the justice of economic distribution, neglects the causal elements that lead its policies to diminish wealth and thus increase the centralized power needed to distribute ever

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scarcer goods. Marxist societies have gotten poorer and more tyrannical until in most instances their people have overthrown their regimes. Whereas a theory might articulate an interacting system of meanings that distribute causal consequences, it still might not articulate the full range of important causal factors. Some may be hidden and others simply overlooked. Fourth, social causal patterns define repeatable activities. The repetitions need not be exact, but the subsequent instances take their meaning in part from being variants on the earlier activities. Thus within an economic system, the price of exchange might vary over time, but the system of exchanges takes meaning from the repeatable activity. Even if an activity is never in fact repeated, it still is an instance of a system if conditions are present that make its repetition possible. Social patterns can be patterns of change, that is, patterns of changing patterns as in a fluid economic situation. Fifth, the patterns of social causation do not imply harmony but in fact might be patterns of conflict (Simmel 1955). If a migrating tribe happens upon a settled group and attacks blindly, there may be little or no social interaction, only brute force. But if the invaders camp on the settled perimeter and attack every spring, if the leaders send threatening messages back and forth, if provisions are made for common respect for the dead and the clearing of battlefields, if each develops a saga in which the other group is the Enemy, then their warfare itself is a social pattern. The economic aspects of a society do not have to exhibit a singular pattern of economic interpretation. The capitalist system is one system, the Marxist another; yet for over seventy years they have interacted in a common economy. The language used here to make these distinctions arises from the European and American traditions of social analysis. Plato (for example, The Republic, The Statesman) and Aristotle (Politics) studied social structures from the standpoint of the ways different constitutions distribute responsibilities affecting social outcomes. Thomas Hobbes (The Leviathan), at the beginning of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, asked how social analysis could be a science, and answered with his theory of social contract. That is, he suggested that we suppose society to be ordered at the most primitive level as if it were a rational construction arising from the elementary motive of controlling aggression; society’s patterns then could be understood as causal arrangments designed to promote peace. Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) analyzed society in terms of how its organizations produce wealth, and Karl Marx (Capital) provided an alternate analysis. Because of his serious comparative studies of different cultures, Max Weber (1946, 1951, 1958) stressed the importance of systems of meaning for providing rational definitions of different ideal types of persons in society, distinguished according to class as well as culture. By means of his

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theory of ideal types, Weber was able to conceive of society as ordered in causal relations of means to ends to achieve a kind of rational order. The approach developed in this chapter owes most to John Dewey, who stressed a causal analysis of interacting systems without presupposing much rational motivation; he also set aesthetic appreciation on a par with intentional action.2 The points made about social causation are not limited to the Western tradition, however. They are all to be found in ancient Confucianism and have been developed across East Asia in the countries learning from that tradition.3 Understanding society in terms of causal patterns, for instance, is fixed in Confucian thinking by the theme of “roots and branches,” as in the Great Learning; causation is also central to the Daodejing. Although early Confucian social thought was expressed in terms of the ritualized structures of relationships, not in the language of scientific theories of causation, these relationships were given a causal interpretation. According to the Confucian emphasis on li, or ritual propriety, most socially significant causes were effective because of their commonly understood meanings or significations, the third point above.4 The Confucian stress on ritual is but one of the many factors emphasizing the repeatability of causal social patterns; other factors include the nonnarrative theory of time and the practices of deference to stations in life.5 These traditions of social analysis recognizing the importance of patterns of causality are not cited in order to defend one particular theory but to call attention simply to the definition of society through causal factors. From this considerations it is apparent that a world society now exists. Except perhaps for a few isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle, every social group in the world is caught up in a global economy. That economy is closely tied to technological developments, which in turn are functions of engineering research and education. Related to the economy is an international diplomatic and military system whose internal patterns are constantly shifting but whose parts hold to fairly constant activities of mutual adjustment. Following in the train of both economics and politics is a world system of communication; communication is easiest in a mathematical language, and for those who understand that language. There is also a growing system of communication about human needs and wants, based on economic interests, and at least a dialogue has begun among the artistic, philosophic, and religious elements of the world’s major cultures. The fundamental problem with our world’s society is that it is not civilized. It is not a true or good community, but just a set of powerful systematic causal interactions that produces benefits and harms far in excess of the cultural intentions of any of the parties. One of the chief functions of the great world religions in our day is to help turn the world society of blind forces into a civilized community.

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The most obvious avenue to a world community is through a common world culture, and it is equally obvious that there is no such common culture. In contrast to society, which is a matter of causal interactions, culture is a matter of meanings that can be learned and that apply to natural things, to artifacts, to institutions, and to semiotic systems that are developed principally for their communicative functions and ability to express representations of things that people value. Cultures are invariably historical and particular, because meanings develop historically. Several of these points are worth expanding to understand the roles of religion. A cultural meaning is really a complex of things including three parts: a thing putatively worth representing, a representation of it, and an interpretation that takes the representation to represent the thing in some respect.6 To represent something is already to single it out as worth representing. Thus, meaning is a kind of elementary valuation. Things represented include natural objects that are given meaning in the representing, and artifacts that already have meaning because they are representations of other things, or have representative elements. A representation by itself is not a meaning, nor is it meaningful, unless it is capable of being taken as representing something. Therefore, meanings both refer to their objects and suppose their interpretability in a larger context. A culture is not one meaning but a loose system of systems of meanings. The great systems of causal social interaction—the economic, the political, the religious, and so forth—each determine pockets of systematic inteconnections of meanings, and they relate to one another more or less. A culture is not the systems considered in the abstract, as if existing shaped by the moment. Rather, a culture is the living activity of shaping meanings and systems of meanings as those systems interact with each other, with historical changes, with shifts in climate and geography, and with adventitious events. Although some scholars believe that cultures are to be understood in terms of semiotic codes, rather they are to be understood as historical processes of the evolution and devolution of codes.7 Cultures are always changing, growing, or shrinking. Their historically old meanings acquire new elements and lose old ones; they swing round to their opposites, join with alien systems, or come undone. The identity of a literate culture consists in large part in the historical development of variations on founding motifs.8 Religious motifs in the West include divine creation of the world, the conquering of chaos, the establishment of ordered rule by gods and kings, covenantal elements, and sin. Religious motifs of Buddhism, by contrast, focus on ignorance and enlightenment, the mean between asceticism and profligacy, the relation between the relative and the unconditioned, and, instead of sin, suffering and its relief. There are many

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points of apparent parallel between East Asian Buddhist and Western Christian cultures. For instance, both believe in self-emptying or kenosis. But the meaning of emptying is very different in the two traditions, and the parallel is misleading.9 Even where the traditions appear to be congruent, they in fact are often not commensurate with one another. Furthermore, although the religious motifs are extremely important in the formation of cultures, religions are not the only systems that provide meaning in societies. In our own time it is necessary to acknowledge that changed social conditions have given rise to new quests for cultural meaning. In particular, the social patterns of late modernity partially have broken the effectiveness of traditional cultures to provide meaning for life. This has happened in several respects. The scientific style of handling information has overturned most traditional forms of authority. Persons adept at experimentation are respected rather than persons steeped in a lifetime of disciplined experience.10 Social station is determined in late-modern societies by skill and merit rather than by birth. Geographical mobility rather than rootedness is required. Late-modern medical and agricultural technologies increase population and extend lifespans, changing the proportions of the population in each age category. We could extend indefinitely the list of social patterns caused to be different by the social conditions of late modernity that require changes in the cultures that give those societies meaning. Although every traditional culture has been thrown into disarray by worldwide social patterns of modernity and late modernity, each traditional culture has its own way of responding. Modernity in the West gave rise to individualism. Will it do the same in East Asia? That is not clear. Will cultures whose writings are in ideograms respond to the social conditions of modernity the same way as those whose writings are alphabetical? As the West develops latemodern versions of cultural Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, will there be latemodern versions of cultural Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Daoism? Many people in the West look to East Asian religions as a way around the failures of the traditional Western religions, not realizing that the Asian religions are also premodern. Do East Asians look to Christianity and other Western religions as answers to modernity when their own traditional cultures have fallen on hard times? It is tempting to think that one’s neighbor’s religion will solve the problems that baffle one’s own, even when the neighbor’s is in trouble too. In summary of this section, the world’s great religious cultures are confused by fragmentation in two directions. In one direction, the great religions relate to one another with perplexing uncertainty. Although there have been centuries of dialogue, it is still not clear how Buddhism and Christianity agree, disagree, complement, or inhibit one another. In another direction, as cultures or

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systems of meaning, the great religions fail to address adequately the causal patterns of late-modern society. The patterns of social causation they had previously civilized are no longer fully operative. The patterns of late-modernity, with its economic, scientific, technological, political, military, and informational systems, have not been given civilized meaning by the cultures of the traditional religions. The religions are all in process of significant transformation and adaptation. Given the diversity of cultures, and their own inadequacy with regard to civilizing modernity, the world community is highly problematic. By community is meant the interactions of persons in a group that represents itself as having a definite and discrete identity. The communal representation of identity looks in two directions at once. It represents the group as different from other groups, actual or possible, and it represents the groups as unified by certain bonding mechanisms. Because we have a world society determined by the sphere of causal patterns, the scale of our community must be worldwide. What happens in Asia affects the meaning of life in America, and vice versa. Yet the meaning of life is limited to each culture, and each culture has trouble expressing life’s meaning for its own version of late-modern society. So we have a plurality of cultures defining the meaning of life, each somewhat inadequate to its own situation. Each is being causally influenced by the interactions of late-modernity coming from around the world. The simplest way to have a world community is to have a common world culture. That culture would be the bond that knits the community together, and that distinguishes the world community from other potential communities with different cultures. Yet the pluralism of world cultures, and the internal struggles of each, prohibit a unified world culture in the near future. The best we can hope for, then, seems to be a community of cultures in which each recognizes the meanings of the others and is respectful to the extent it exercizes critical control over its own social consequences. This is not a happy consequence, and we must step back to look more closely at the assumptions that have directed this argument.

The Causal Effectiveness of Religions We may ask how religions affect cultural, social, and community structures. It is appropriate to begin with the cultural issues because religions are usually regarded as cultural entities. The hypothesis is that religions are identified culturally by three traits: (1) public and private ritual; (2) mythic and philosophic depictions of the world;

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and (3) spiritual practices aimed at improvement or perfection.11 These shall be discussed in turn with illustrative reference to Buddhism and Christianity. Rituals are activities performed publically or privately that epitomize some part of fundamental human relations to the world and to ultimate things. By taking part in the rituals, people come to shape their own fundamental relations in imitation of the epitomized ritual. This is a difficult understanding of ritual, and it needs to be explained both historically and by means of contemporary illustration. True rituals have many layers of meaning, some suppressed but all laid down like strata of sedimented rock. In the earliest cultures of which we know, the fundamental human problem was the procurement of food through hunting and gathering. Ritual during this period epitomized issues of the hunt, the finding of animals, conquering and incorporating their spirits, discerning edible plants, and so forth; blood sacrifices to the hunt seem to have been common. As the hunting and gathering cultures gave way to farming and herding cultures, fertility rituals were developed for bountiful harvests and abundant flocks. As neolithic agricultural societies learned to control rivers and produce more food than was required for subsistence living, cities arose and the population that could be supported within a given territory increased vastly. With large towns and cities, the fundamental problem of human orientation was politics or the establishment of order. Rituals in the time of the early cities had to do with establishing divine legitimacy for the rulers, and the gods were conceived as kings and warriors.12 Both Buddhism and Christianity arose in social conditions subsequent to the city-states, in times when many cities had been bound together in empires, when people had to communicate with those who spoke different languages, and when there was social mobility and travel. Even in the Buddhist and Christian rituals, however, the archeological layers of the earlier times remain. Both Buddha and Christ are depicted as “Lords” of their realms, even though both explicitly rejected the ordinary role of political lordship: Prince Gautama declined to be king, and Jesus was put to death by the political rulers, saying his kingdom was not of this world. The central human problems addressed by the rituals of both Buddhism and Christianity are suffering, death, and meaninglessness as set in the context of societies with broken traditions and uprootedness. The central ritual of Buddhism is the celebration of the Buddha’s enlightenment and the appropriation of this through public and private practice of meditation. Ritual variants celebrate the enlightenment of bodhisattvas or others, the blessings of enlightenment, or the coming enlightenment or awakening. Like Christianity, Buddhism has many variations, and it is hard to make any generalization that

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applies to all. Buddhist rituals generally, however, celebrate the Enlightened One, and often center around a representation of the enlightened Buddha or a bodhisattva meditating, teaching, or healing. By participating in the rituals of the Enlightened One, Buddhists make enlightenment the epitomizing center of their lives. Suffering, death, and dislocation are to be faced and overcome by means of enlightenment. The primary Christian ritual of the eucharist approaches the same fundamental problems of suffering, death, and dislocation in a quite different way. The bread and wine of the eucharist symbolize the broken body of Jesus in the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus into new life in God. By participating in the eucharist, Christians come to interpret themselves and their world in terms of the motif of crucifixion/resurrection. The life of love and service to others is cut short and betrayed by the world, as happened to Jesus; but this is the way to participate in the infinite abundance of the divine life. The eucharist orients people to accept the fragmentariness of life aimed at love as the proper participation in the divine life. The eucharistic ritual contains layers of older rituals, acknowledging Jesus as King and even employing the hunting ritual motif of cannibalism. Although both Buddhist and Christian rituals address the conditions of individuals, as rituals they bind people together in community. Everyone participating in the rituals is identified as Buddhist or Christian in some way. Of course, only a few people are genuinely serious about the rituals and the vast majority are bored or have only temporary enthusiasm. Yet the ritual does provide a public identity for the persons as Buddhist or Christian. In addition to rituals, religions have ways of understanding and representing the world in its most basic structures. Like rituals, religious representations or concepts have many historical layers of meaning. Among the most elementary are myths and parts of myths. Myths become embodied in songs and legends, and in the liturgies expressing rituals. These in turn become reexpressed in philosophical or theological language, and thinkers attempt to reconcile the various mythic and ritual elements with the conditions of life in sophisticated ways. By the time of Nagarjuna in Buddhist thought, and the Cappadocian fathers in early Christianity, both traditions had theological or philosophical categories for representing their religious faith to the larger world. That is, Buddhist and Christian theologians could interpret the faith not only to their own people but to the rest of the world. At the center of religious representation, of course, is the understanding of the ritual. Therefore, Buddhist philosophy focuses on enlightenment and Christian on the imitation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. More than this, however, religious representations show what reality must be if

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the ritual centers are meaningful. Buddhist thought, therefore, provides an interpretation of space, time, and causation, encapsuling them in the doctrine of pratitya-samutpada. The majestic categories of emptiness and form, and their identity according to the Mahayana faith, provide instruments for understanding the whole of life and for explaining the Buddhist path to those outside it. Similarly, Christianity represents the world as the vast creation of God, and it represents God as the loving creator who redeems suffering and sin by becoming incarnate in the brief and fragmented life of Jesus and by empowering people to live similarly. The third element that constitutes a religious tradition is its set of spiritual practices. Both traditions have practices of meditation and prayer, singing and chanting, spiritual reflection in the midst of daily life, private devotions, and periodic retreats. These practices are too varied and particularized to individual groups to summarize here, except to point out that they address two conditions of life. Some are oriented to bringing people to enlightenment or to accepting salvation in the life of Christ. Others are for the guidance of people who have attained some enlightenment or who are committed Christians and who then have to live in the world. Often the practices, such as sitting in meditation or chanting, are the same for both conditions. When they are, however, their meaning as spiritual practices is different according to whether they are preparatory or involved with perfecting sanctification. Spiritual practices are easily borrowed by one tradition from another. Christians in the United States often practice meditation in the Buddhist style of quiet sitting, and some Korean Buddhists sing hymns that sound very Christian, even Protestant. These borrowings are always reinterpreted in the new context. The hymns are not about Jesus but about the Buddhist life, and the meditation is given meaning by its context in Christian discipleship. Nevertheless, the archaic roots of the practices, the earlier rituals and cosmic representations with which they were associated, carry over in the borrowing. Something of the spirit of Christianity is carried over in hymn singing, and something of Buddhism in strict meditation. Perhaps it is by virtue of engaging one another’s spiritual practices, even more than reading one another’s texts, that deep understanding of other traditions is possible. Religious traditions thus are cultures that affect the larger cultures within which they exist. They affect the artistic and literary cultures of their societies by providing basic images and orientations to life. They affect the political and economic elements of culture by defining fundamental cultural values. It must be acknowledged as well that those other cultural enterprises affect religion. When actual religious institutions become abstract and moribund, when their symbols fail to speak to the fundamental human problems of life, often

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the artistic or political community will challenge the religious establishment and recall it to its task. Religious institutions are a few among many other institutions of culture.13 The discussion so far in this section has been about religions as cultural entities affecting the rest of culture. How do religions as cultural entities affect society? How do religions affect the causal systems and patterns of society? This question is an empirical one, in answer to which there is a vast literature. A few comments are called for here. First, it should be noted that both Buddhism and Christianity arose as reform movements in their societies of origin. They presented ways of life for their followers to be able to live in a society in which the questions of suffering, death, and meaninglessness were not being addressed by older religious cultures. By the time of Asoka in India and Constantine in the Roman Empire, Buddhism and Christianity had become state religions. This was a mixed blessing. In India, the political success of Buddhism stimulated a further reformation of the earlier religions, which then emerged as the family of faiths we now know as Hinduism. Similarly, the Hellenistic Hebrew religion from which Christianity grew reorganized itself as diaspora rabbinic Judaism in the century after the founding of Christianity. The establishment of individual religious cultures as state religions often had the effect of corrupting the religions. Both the Buddhist emphasis on enlightenment and the Christian emphasis on leading the life of crucifixion/resurrection easily became transformed to a political pursuit of power. Perhaps Byzantine Christianity was the experiment that came closest to establishing a state religion, lasting over a thousand years; yet it had many hard times when both the religion and the state lost their direction. In China, Korea, and Japan, Buddhism had brief periods of political dominance, and European countries have often claimed that they were Christian. Nevertheless, the typical place of religious cultures within socities is at the margins. This does not mean that religion is not central to social life. But religions function and work at the margins of the society’s self-understanding. There are at least two senses to this. In the first sense, religions function at the margins of daily life; they give meaning to birth and death, to extreme suffering and ecstatic joy, to transitions such as puberty and marriage. These margins are reached when the society’s ordinary ways of thinking are pushed to their limit (Berger 1967, J. E. Smith 1968). In the second sense of marginality, religions are social critics. They question the moral stances of society and the justice of social institutions. They question whether the patterns of social causation are allowing for proper respect and piety toward the components of the society. They question whether the social representations of what it is to be a person

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properly engage people with life or instead lead people to delusion and denial. They question whether the social habits of life include a proper pursuit of a religious path. Because of both of these senses of marginality, religions such as Buddhism and Christianity are cultural entities that are both in their societies and also outside. By virtue of their ability to alter the causal social patterns, the religions can superimpose their senses of meaning and goals for life on social patterns, at least to some degree. Yet this also means that the most powerful causal patterns in a society, for instance the economic, communications, military, and political patterns, might be able to exclude religious influences and push religions away from any effective interaction. This is particularly true when the cultural symbols of the religion become disoriented to and incommensurate with the symbols of the other cultural systems within the society. Both Buddhism and Christianity today are experiencing the shock of being pushed outside the societies they inhabit by the antitraditional cultures of modernization. Both are seeking new forms to engage their societies. How do religious cultures affect communities? That is a different question from how they affect other cultures and how they affect societies. Let us recall the difference that distinguishes a community from a society and from a culture. Societies are groups of people bound together by causal patterns of interaction. Cultures are sets of meanings that can be handed down and that give significance to the things involved in social action. Religious cultures are those that provide ritual, mythophilosophic, and practical spiritual meanings for fundamental orientations to the world and ultimate things. A community is a group of people with common patterns of social interaction who relate at least in part because of a common representation of themselves as bound together in a group. That representation distinguishes them from other actual or potential groups, and it also shows how they are bound together despite differences. Religious cultures, when they are effectively engaged with their society, provide excellent representations for turning their societies into genuine communities. Religions provide the common bonds, loyalty to which knits people together culturally; those religious representations also serve to distinguish the community from other communities. If there were a socially effective world religion, accepted and practised by everyone, that would provide a universal basic cultural element that would lay the groundwork for a world community. But there is no such religion. The traditional religions are deeply problematic with respect to their social effectiveness, and there are many religions. Therefore, religion cannot provide the common cultural element needed for a world community at the present time.

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Global Modernization and Religious Traditions This again is bad news, and we need to reexamine the presuppositions, this time starting with modernity and modernization. By modernity is meant the culture that began in the European Renaissance and developed up through the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century in Europe and into the second industrial or electronic revolution of the twentieth. Late modernity is the period characterized by European modernism and its pragmatic commonsense alternatives, and by the interaction of European and other cultures on more or less of a mutual common ground; electronic communication now characterizes and unifies the late-modern period.14 Modernization is the transformation of societies by the adoption of the culture of modernity, or part of it. The characterization of a period such as modernity is extremely complicated because it is controlled by what is important from the perspective from which the characterization is made. Characterizing a period in the distant past allows for more self-consciousness about bias than characterizing a period of which we are still a part. This is especially so according to the following conception. European modernity can be conceived of as a mighty cultural stream that was unified at first but has branched into many streams in its history. Some of those streams separate and rejoin. Others go relatively separate ways, often in dialectical opposition to others. Perhaps the main stream has been that which moves from the scientific and humanistic inspiration of the Renaissance through Descartes and Kant to modernism and its negation, postmodernism. This is the stream that will be described below. Other streams within the European and North American societies include romanticism and the cultures associated with process philosophies and pragmatism; these have interacted strongly with non-European cultures and thus have more roots than the Renaissance alone. Late modernism includes modernism/postmodernism, romanticism, process thinking, and pragmatic culture all insofar as they interact with cultures outside the North Atlantic sphere, especially as all are connected through electronic communications. From the pragmatic late-modern perspective defended here, the dominant modernist/postmodernist stream of late modernism is a serious mistake. But there is no mistake in its dominance. Therefore, the characterization below of modernity will follow that stream. Yet the perspective from which that is criticized is itself a form of late modernism. All the world is caught in late modernism now, with the modernist/postmodern heritage, but also with the resources of other streams of late modernism. Among those streams are the interactions of world religions and the intellectual dialogue that has arisen among them. The argument of this section, therefore, is a criticism of one form of late modernism from the perspective of another form drawing from the

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original stream but drawing also from the other world cultures as modernism/postmodernism cannot. Although of course one could not give a capsule summary of the culture of modernity, certain features can be mentioned. First, modern culture rejects or questions knowledge that comes by the authority of someone else. Rather, modern knowledge is what could be inspected and approved by each individual if the effort were to be made. Therefore, both sense experience and mathematical formulations are important, and the concept of experience itself becomes the focus of modern culture. Sense experience is important because it is what moves each individual and provides undeniable testimony of reality. Mathematical form is emphasized because everyone, in principle, could see how the mathematics is true; furthermore, mathematics can be communicated to others without equivocation, and it can be used to point other people to the right sense experience. Second, modern culture defines the world as what can be measured. The earliest Renaissance measurements were fairly crude measurements of distance, speed, mass, and so forth. We now measure according to definitions of time and place that would have seemed incomprehensible to Galileo or Newton; quantum mechanics and relativity theory, theories of quarks and black holes, would be paradoxical to the early modern mind. Yet they present merely greater sophistication in measurement. The social sciences arose with the intent to identify their subject matters in measurable terms. Even if the social sciences have not been entirely successful in mathematizing themselves, they still aspire to the ideal of mathematical measure. The modern cultural assumption about the world is that it consists in only that which can be measured. There is a kind of closure about the world so conceived, closure in the mathematical sense. Anything that can be measured, in principle, is in the world; anything that is not susceptible to measure is outside, and thus irrelevant to most concerns. Third, because we know the world through experiencing it as measured or measurable, we can manipulate it technologically, or aim to do so. There are actually two steps to the development of technology. The first is the invention of the idea of the controlled experiment. A controlled experiment is where all conditions but one are held steady while a measured difference is made in the remaining condition when some operation is performed on it. By observing the consequences of the experiment, we can determine just what that one condition does to the results. This assumes that it is indeed possible to isolate measurable elements in the world and change them while not changing anything else. Thus the world is believed to be not only measurable but filled with discrete elements related to each other externally. The second step in technology is then to control experiments so as to produce results we want. The results include the invention of new instruments of technology, and finally of the habits

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of mind of invention itself. Heidegger (1977) and Dewey (1910) have analyzed the consequences of thinking of the world as a machine, as available for technological exploitation; Edith Wyschogrod (1985) has given a telling critique. Fourth, human persons are conceived to be part of the world, and hence machines like the rest of measurable matter. If there is anything about human beings left over, such as consciousness or subtle feelings, it has to be disconnected from the machinelike elements of people. So modern culture insists on a rather sharp mind/body split. Descartes was very clear that body could be understood without any reference to mind, and vice versa. Subsequent philosophers of modernity have defended one or another of those elements of the human person, but have rarely integrated them. In defense of the nonmechanical elements of soul, romanticism has developed within modernity as a kind of reactive antidote to the mechanization of nature and human life. Fifth, because of its conception of the world and people as machines, modern culture tends to see social and personal arrangements in terms of power. Power is a technical term in physics, but expands as a metaphor to characterize the actions of social classes and individuals on each other. Structure is often understood to be the organization of vectors of forces or powers. Sixth, as part of the romantic reaction against the mechanization of human life, modernity places great weight on defining individuals in terms of their personal story. The early English Puritan thinkers construed individuals according to their stories, but the stories were interlocked with other individuals and social institutions. As the culture of modernity transformed Puritanism into Liberalism, individual stories were construed more and more individualistically, making the interlocking connections with other people and institutions less and less important. Individuals came to see themselves as over against their group rather than as parts of it. Seventh, because of the mechanical conception of persons and nature, and because of the individualism in the conception of persons, modern culture fosters a conception of social systems as machines in which people play roles. Public identity derives from the social roles one plays, and most of the roles can be played by any number of people. In good times, a person can find roles that are fulfilling and that bring out the person’s best. In hard times, one tries to find a social machine in which one can be a cog. It is extremely difficult to separate the culture of modernity from modernization and its effects on society. The distinction is at best an abstraction in the case of Europe. But the culture of modernity travels with technology and modern economics, and we can observe how it affects societies that were modernized after Europe. We can correlate elements of social modernization with each of the points above.

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First, the rejection of external authority and the insistence on the authority of each person’s immediate experience is fatal for the traditional religions. This is not to say that the traditional religions do not appeal to experience. Indeed they do. Zen (Chinese Chan, Korean Son) Buddhism in particular has seemed to many to be an ideal religion for modernization because it focuses everything on immediate experience, rejecting all external authority. Yet the Zen rejection of authority is only apparent, for it depends on that authority to interpret the meaning of the experience of enlightenment, to develop the concept of satori, to understand emptiness and form, and all the rest. Most of all, it depends on the authority of the enlightened leaders to organize the Sangha and other institutions so as to lead people to enlightenment. Similarly, Christianity has developed experiential forms of religiosity and articulated depths of Christian experience that had not been recognized before the modern period; yet the Christian interpretation of those experiences in terms of the Bible and Christian tradition supposes a sense of communal continuity and authority undermined by modernity. In general, modern culture causes modernized societies to neglect the interpretations traditional religions have placed on experience, and with that to neglect the values those traditions have borne. Second, in defining the world to consist in the measurable, modernity delegitimates any cultural system, such as a religion, that represents the world as having something beyond the apparent, some mystery, some meaning that is not on the face of it when understood scientifically. Thus Buddhism is quite compatible with modernization so long as it emphasizes form. But when it says the form is empty, and that this is important, it talks nonsense. Christianity suffers a similar fate when it tries to say the world is created. Thus the basic representations by which traditional religions characterize the world are delegitimated by science, and the secular representations take over. Third, the technological orientation of modern culture suggests that only those personal changes that can be wrought by technological means are real, and that those which depend upon waiting for the light to come are illusory. Some people again have looked to Buddhism as a thoroughly modern religion because of its emphasis on expedient means, or upaya. Yet expedient means are not instruments for the creating of enlightenment; they are instruments for destroying illusions and the powers of the ego. Enlightenment is something more than that. However suddenly enlightenment might come when it does come, the path toward it might be very long (Park 1983). Technological culture is similarly dismissive of Christian doctrines of grace. Fourth, the mind/body split of modern culture nudges modernizing societies to develop separate structures for dealing with the parts of a person. Modern athletics and medicine, for instance, deal with the person as body. The

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improvement of health is one of the greatest blessings of modernization. On the other side modernized cultures invent entertainments, psychotherapies, and educational systems that treat people as disembodied minds. Modern cultures foster a kind of narcissism in which people swing from thinking themselves to be mere objective machines without worth to thinking of themselves as grandiosly able to make their own world (Cahoone 1988). The older cultures that insisted upon a unity of mind and body are not effective in the face of the new social structures that address mind and body separately. Fifth, the modern emphasis on power sets up social groups to be in conflict with one another over control of power. Instead of cooperation, people come to see their systems as in competition. Cooperation itself is seen to be a mask covering over the conflict of interests of the different individuals and groups interacting. There are many very real and overt power struggles. But the theme of power conflict has been generalized in modern culture so as to create social conflicts where the interactions are really of a different sort. Sixth, the modern emphasis on the individualized story of a person’s life leads to the breakdown of family, ethnic, and religious structures that are larger than the individual. In a modernized society one’s ancestors and distant neighbors are not important for one’s identity. Modernization kills off the sense that one’s life is meaningful as part of a larger group or institution. Hence there is a pressure for extended families to fall away in favor of nuclear families. Furthermore, one’s participation in organizations and institutions is conceived to be a matter of voluntary will rather than inherited identity. Voluntary organizations flourish in modernized societies and inherited ones do not. Seventh, because so much of one’s identity in a modernized society comes from the roles one plays in machinelike structures, one moves from role to role as a way of advancement. In American society this leads to a social mobility with families leaving their roots and trekking across the country for a better job. In Japan there is greater loyalty to a single company but still a pattern of mobility from role to role within the company. Modern culture causes modernized societies to reward persons who think of themselves mainly in terms of what they can do. These generalizations about modern culture and modernized societies are very tentative and must be accepted only with acknowledgment of many exceptions. It is to be recognized that the process of modernization is a combination of the modern culture of the technological world meeting with the traditional cultures of the societies it enters. The modernization of late-modern India will be very different from that of China, Korea, and Japan. The modernization of countries deeply influenced by Confucianism, with its work ethic so like the Puritan, is different from the modernization of those Asian countries

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with little Confucian influence, such as the Philippines. Furthermore, latemodern culture and modernized societies are not the final stage of civilization, we must hope. For all that modernization has done to relieve suffering and bring hope to people by means of its mobility and technologies of social change, modernization has its critics. Some of those critics speak from the platform of premodernized societies, wishing to bring back the earlier times. But others speak from the standpoint of the future. We are now in a better position to see why modernized societies seem so ill fitted for the religions that might provide a culture for a world community. Modernized societies are not receptive to the authority of sources and teachers that traditional religions suppose. They are not receptive to a religious view of the world that sees something beyond the measurable surface. Modern societies tend to reject all goals that cannot be attained by technological means. They believe the care of the body is one thing, the mind another, and distort the religious traditions into one or the other when they have been both together. Traditional religions see the ideal relations between individuals and groups to be peace and harmony, whereas modern society supposes that the relations are organizations of power to pursue disparate interests. Modern society emphasizes the individual life story to the point that belonging to a larger religious community can only be a voluntary matter to be taken or left, not a matter defining individual identity. Finally, the great religions that arose during the time of empires balance out individual and group identity by relating both to ultimate things, for instance to the Dharma or the Word of God; the modern reduction of identity to a set of roles in social systems cannot register the identity that comes from relations to the ultimate. For these and other reasons, the traditional religions such as Buddhism and Christianity are struggling very hard to engage the modernized world. The difficulty in their struggle should not be exaggerated: social conditions have changed before, and the religious traditions have adapted and found new relevance. The transition of Buddhism from Indian to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures is a case in point, and an instructive one: the new developments of those traditions involved changes from and additions to the past. Furthermore, the need to change is not all on the side of the religions. The religions even now are critics of modernized culture, and have been effective to some degree in bringing about changes in the course of modernization. Still, we have to admit that the religious traditions are struggling to relate to the modernized society. And therefore they do not offer an easy promise of principles for a common world community. Furthermore, even if the religions were truly engaged with modernized society, there is no single religion that incorporates the others. Perhaps the similarities

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have been emphasized here too much. Much dialogue needs to take place to determine just where the great traditions are congruent and where they are contradictory. From the fact of the plurality of the great religions, however, we may draw a principle for world community, namely the Principle of Unity with Otherness. “Otherness” means that we relate to people deeply unlike ourselves. Many things constitute human differences: skin color and other ethnic characteristics, age, gender, language, and most particularly, different histories that may have involved conflict. But the greatest of differences is in religion, those rituals, beliefs, and practices that define the most important elements in ourselves. Fortunately for the prospect of world community, the great religious traditions already acknowledge otherness and the religious obligation to respect it. When the bodhisattva takes the vow to achieve the liberation or enlightenment of all sentient beings, he or she is not limiting that effort to family members, or even to Buddhists. When the Christian accepts the Great Commandment to love the neighbor as oneself, the example of the neighbor is the hated and hateful Samaritan. There have been times when social conditions were such that the great religious traditions could ignore the others who were very different. But these are not such times. The very existence of the world society means that we interact with everyone else, even those who are enemies in their difference. To accept the other with love is the fundamental condition for a world community, and fortunately the great religions already know that.

Maitreyan Strategies With the intention of bringing the truths of religion to the building of a world community, seven Maitreyan strategies can be considered. Each of these begins as something we can do, but each requires completion by circumstances we cannot control. Christians would say we must wait for divine grace, Buddhists that we wait for the coming Buddha. The strategies are diverse in kind, yet their connections are obvious. First, the great religions should reach out to engage the modernized latemodern world in all its complexity. That religions should do this is obvious, hardly worth mentioning. But the performance is more difficult than the intention. The great world religions touch most if not all the societies of the globe, and those societies are very different. Even though the forces of modernization are affecting everyone, there are still premodern societies, modernizing societies, long modernized societies, and societies seeking to become postmodern. Religions cannot have solely the agenda of modernization as they reach out to the world, even though that affects everything they could touch.

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To engage a culture that a religion has not engaged before, such as a modern culture, requires learning to think, feel, and react in the terms of that new culture. The old Dharma, the old gospel, cannot be merely applied to the new situation. In order to develop a Buddhist way of interpreting a late-modern culture, Buddhism must learn that culture from the inside. Of course, the conclusion might be a powerful criticism of the culture. But it must be a criticism worked out from a thorough study of what Buddhism has to say from within the culture. Without engaging the culture on its own terms, Buddhism could say only what it had previously said about cultures it had previously inhabited. The religion thus becomes transformed by the process of engagement. Buddhism has a long history of self-transformation in the engagement with new cultures. The adoption of Daoist terminology, for instance, was crucial for the early Buddhist missions to China, and Buddhism became a truly Chinese religion. The early Christian missionaries to China were very successful in numbers; it has been said that there were more Christians in Tang Dynasty China than in Europe at that time (the population of Europe was very low in general); but the Christians were successful only with the foreign merchants in China, not with the Chinese, because they did not think through the Christian gospel in Chinese terms. In our own time, there is an important difference between Buddhists and Christians with regard to engagement. Christianity has grown up along with modernization in its early European phases, and the last three hundred years of North Atlantic Christianity have also been the history of modernity. Christianity has to learn how to engage cultures that are themselves just beginning to be affected by modernization. It has been too easy for Christians to believe that they were offering both the gospel and modernization together; the effect of that, however, has been to cut people off from their roots. Korea is a case in point. Korean Christians realize that they should not accept American-style Christianity and modernization on exclusively Western terms. Rather, they must think through what Christianity might mean in the context of a deep Korean culture profoundly affected by Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and shamanism. Similarly, the culture of modernization will be something different when brought to Korean culture than when it overtook European culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; its late-modern forms are not European ones. Many Christian theologians now are sensitive to the global character of their religion. The gospel does not have just one cultural embodiment, a European one. It has many different cultural embodiments, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. Buddhism, by contrast, does not have a long history of development within modernized cultures. Many American Buddhists—not East Asians who have

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moved to America but American-born Buddhist converts—look to Buddhism as a romantic premodern religion, an escape from the modern world. Buddhism needs to incorporate the various modernizing cultures into its vocabulary in order to engage the changed world. Its history indicates a great flexibility. Islam is the world religion that has the greatest difficulty at the present time with engaging modern life. Second, while engaging modern cultures, the religions have to reestablish connections with their founding documents and institutions, and reconstruct the history of their traditions to include the developments toward modernization. There is a great risk in engaging a new culture: its terms might be so discontinuous with the self-understanding of the religion that the religion loses itself. This tragic point is illustrated by the history of some strands of liberal Protestantism in the United States. In the late nineteenth century and down to the present time, certain liberal Protestants, desiring to accommodate Christianity to the scientific world view, stressed the importance of contemporary experience to the detriment of scripture, tradition, and rational theology. In that experience, they saw that science describes reality, and accepted that; they saw that the world was unjust and that religion should be devoted to establishing justice; and they saw that persons are in psychological pain and need healing. But they did not find the language of Christianity in that experience, except perhaps in hypocritical or fundamentalist ways. Their conclusion for Christianity was to hand it over to modern culture and redefine it in terms of projects of social justice and psychotherapy. The religious Christian center dropped out and, when people found they could achieve more justice through politics and greater mental health through clinical psychotherapy, they abandoned the Christian community. Fortunately there have been countervailing movements within Christianity so that this kind of liberalism no longer defines the face of the Christian movement. But the incident reveals what can happen when a religion engages a new culture with too much innocence. The important point is to make continuous reconnections with the religious language and institutions of the past. Christianity must be able to interpret the modern world on the world’s own terms, reinterpret its own tradition in those terms, criticize the modern world in the reaffirmed language of the tradition, and build institutions that reflect a genuine new embodiment of the gospel. Buddhism will be particularly benefitted in this task of reconnection by its encounter with the modern world. Part of modernity is the historical consciousness, the interpretation of traditions as having different times and contexts for their classic persons and documents, so that these can be understood in historical context. Like Christianity, Buddhism has developed and changed greatly in

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its long history. Its encounter with modernity needs to be understood as one more episode in a long history of changes. The reciprocal movement to reach out to modern culture to engage it, and then to look back to recover connections with one’s tradition, must be reflected in the rituals, representations, and spiritual practices of a living religion. This brings me to the next cluster of Maitreyan strategies. Third, religions should develop rituals, building on those of their traditions, that epitomize the central orienting problems of our day. At least two such central problems need to inform the rituals of all the world’s religions, and do so very imperfectly now. The first ritual element should be the celebration of the demands of distributive justice. In times past, perhaps there was so little to go around that we dared not ask whether everyone of every class in every country was receiving what was due them as children of the earth. Perhaps also there were no global mechanisms to regulate distribution, only the power of local governments. In our time, however, with a global economy and global communications systems, and with such abundance as to be able to feed, clothe, and educate everyone well, there is no denying the demands for distributive justice. One cannot be holy without blessing justice for everyone. There are roots of this in the idea of the compassion of the bodhisattvas and in the Christian doctrine of charity. The shoots from those roots must be brought to flower now if the great religions are to address the needs of the contemporary world. The second ritual element should be celebrations of the care of the earth itself. Perhaps this was not important when technologies were primitive and ineffectual. Perhaps it was thought that we could not damage the earth much anyway, and even if we did do damage it was believed we could not do anything about that. Modern technologies, however, are extremely efficacious, for both harm and repair. One of the chief functions of religious ritual is to orient people to their environment, including the natural environment; now that orientation has a deep imperative in it. The roots of caring for the earth lie in all the major religious traditions; now is the time to nourish them and bring them to the center of ritual. Fourth, our theologies should be developed so as to embrace the diverse categories and perspectives of the modern world, including those of science and its critics. Our theologies employ categories that arise from the historical development of our traditions. They will always have the flavor of reflecting their particular origins and the particular twists given them in history. But now they need to be expanded so as to be able to represent what is true in the modern world and integrate that with the ancient truths. This understanding of theological truth is itself part of modernity: ideas can be generalized to include more

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than their earlier expressions allowed. At the same time, theological ideas need to be critical. Not everything in modernity is true and valuable. Nor is everything in the religious tradition as true as it once seemed. As theological concepts grow and shift, they reveal nuances missed earlier, and also expose error and meanness of spirit. The theological task is enormous now because we seem to be bifurcated in our lives between the language of our religious tradition and the very different language of the late-modern world. Religion will never make an effective engagement with the late-modern world unless it unites its bifurcated sensibility. The modern world will dismiss us if we cannot do what Christians call “apologetics,” namely, the presentation of the truths of religion to an alien culture in terms that culture can understand. Furthermore, our own people will not take us seriously as religious thinkers if our theology does not address the world in which they live and work. Fifth, the spiritual practices of the world religions need to be advanced to deal with the realities of the modern world with its several local societies in various stages of modernization. This means at least two things. On the one hand, it means that the traditions of spirituality should learn and take advantage of the relevant knowledge gained through modern science, such as psychology and sociology, and through the modern literary and artistic movements. On the other hand it means that the spiritual traditions need to address the specific spiritual needs of people in the various conditions of the modern world. Some people suffer from isolation, others from absorption in totalistic societies; some suffer from anonymity, others from being named too much by others. All people need to be able to understand and will a full and rich life, and the content of this means different things in different societies. All people need to relate to the ultimate relative to their conditioned existence, and they need to feel the ultimate in their very conditions. Spiritual practice invariably involves some rhythm of retreat from the world and return. It is easy for the traditional religions to articulate the retreat, hard for them to insist that the return is itself part of spiritual practice. If the religious traditions are to reform themselves spiritually so as to engage the world, they need to be clear about the reciprocal movement toward and away. Sixth, although the great religious traditions face the world autonomously, it should also be said that they need to face it in dialogue with one another. Indeed, there is a dialogical imperative for the vitality of any religion these days, and particularly in reference to the role of religions in building a world culture. There are several things that should not be presupposed about dialogue. It should not be presupposed that all religions agree when they get down to fundamentals. Perhaps they do, but we do not know that until the religions

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know thoroughly how to understand themselves in the eyes of the others. Nor should we suppose that the religions are merely relative to their own culture and cannot be made commensurate with one another enough for mutual understanding. In contrast to this there are several things that should be presupposed. It should be presupposed that there is a universe with structures that get reflected in all cultures and religions. The reflections might be quite different, picking up different parts of the structure, coming at it from different angles, perhaps disagreeing about what the structure is. It is impossible to say that religions disagree unless it is supposed that they are making assertions or assumptions about the same thing. The context for religious expressions is always historical and specific to some part of a particular tradition, yet the universal structures are to be found in all the particularities. It should also be presupposed that those who enter into dialogue have both deep spiritual knowledge of their tradition and good faith to express that in dialogue. We should not underestimate the difficulty of this. No one knows enough about his or her own tradition, let alone how to express this to others. Religious people who enter into dialogue often have the uncanny experience of learning more about their own tradition in trying to express it to others than they do about the others’ tradition. Dialogue usually begins with what Christians call “theology,” that is, the explanation of the tradition’s understanding of its beliefs and practices, often focused around a document. With regard to theological dialogue, the form of progress is for each side to be able to represent the other’s position in the representer’s language so that the represented tradition will be able to recognize itself and affirm the understanding. For this reason, there needs to be a Christian theology interpreting all world religions, a Buddhist theology interpreting all religions, and so forth. Theological scholarship in the West is at this stage of development for Christianity, Judaism, Confucianism, and perhaps Buddhism. In addition to dialogical theology, dialogue needs to take place in the sharing of the rituals. There are many levels of sharing rituals. At the simplest, one can invite representatives of other religions to observe one’s rituals. At more complicated levels, others can be invited to participate. Because rituals usually involve identifying oneself with the ritual community, however, there are subtle questions concerning the initiation of others into one’s community. Religions differ on whether their members can have dual (or more) identities. Scholars such as Raimundo Panikkar (1989), however, have been initiated into several religions—Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism in his case. The dialogical sharing of spiritual practices such as techiques of prayer and meditation, also important, does not necessarily involve the identity problems of initiation. Some practices can be taken out of the context of one tradition

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and implanted in another. Yet dialogue should be alert to the new meanings those techniques take on. The intent of Buddhist meditation is to empty the ego, to efface it so that the person simply sees things as they are. The intent of Christian meditation, even when using the same techniques, is not to empty the ego but to humble it so that God can come in to it in a life that mirrors crucifixion and resurrection. These two goals may in the end turn out to be similar; but not in the organization of spiritual formation. Dialogue needs to bring out the differences as well as similarities. The result of dialogue is to transform all the dialogue partners and to build a new language and new kind of spirituality. The history of dialogue itself is a spiritual entity. There is a vocabulary developed in dialogue that plays back to reinterpret each of the religious traditions. Although perhaps only the elite leaders of religious traditions would engage in formal dialogue, their experience is brought back to their communities of faith. And because people at all levels encounter people of other communities of faith through the universal causal patterns of our global society, informal dialogue takes place across the world daily, hopefully informed by the best experiences of dialogue. Perhaps most important, dialogue develops a special community of those experienced in dialogue. This is not to say that Buddhists and Christians in dialogue cease to be Buddhists and Christians. On the contrary, it often happens that each becomes more aware and affirming of their own traditions. Yet the dialogue is itself a community-building experience. It is sometimes said that the profound practitioners of particular faiths find that they have more in common with dialogue partners from other traditions who are also profound practitioners than they do with the common and superficial representatives of their own faith. The community of world religious dialogue is one of the greatest hopes for a religious contribution to the building of a world community. Religion touches the deepest parts of people’s lives, and in religion lie their deepest cultural differences. The community of dialogue models how Buddhists, Christians, and others can accept one another in their deepest differences. The language developing through dialogue, even the documents expressing the dialogues, are beginning to provide a core common culture that might make possible a world community of others with others.15 The dialogue of world religions is the activity that best waits for the Maitreya Buddha. Seventh, perhaps the most effective Maitreyan strategy is to fix our hope for a world community in the readiness of the world religions to sacrifice their current forms in order to engage the modern world society with their deepest message. If the great religions can sacrifice their current forms for the sake of effectiveness, then we will exist in a condition where each lives for the benefit of all. Although abstract, that principle is an ideal supposition for a world community.

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We hope that our efforts toward building a world community anchored in the truths of the great spiritual traditions will be rewarded with success. That hope is like waiting for Maitreya. Of course, we have enough experience of our own foolishness to expect that we might not recognize success when it comes. No religion promises a perfect life on earth, but only that life’s fragmentariness is part of a richer and non-fragmented absolute reality. Yet because even our fragmented lives are engaged with the world, we must strive for justice and universal care. Our hope is that this will be nourished to bear fruit.

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CHAPTER 8

Religion and Politics: Spheres of Tolerance

his brief chapter speaks to five theses concerning political tolerance of diverse religions. First, the widespread renewal of religious warfare in our time refutes the modern secular belief that religion is only private and can be marginalized in public life. That belief is empirically false. Second, to improve upon the modern secular approach to religion we need to look at religion’s positive contribution to culture, its function as civil religion, which has to do with demonstrating that the human condition is to be under obligation; religion’s special obligation to culture consists in both culture-building and culture-criticizing institutions regarding obligation. Third, religion’s essential character (bearing in mind the distinction between essential and conditional features in chapter 1) is not its contribution to culture, important and necessary as that is, but its orientation of people to the ultimate, which itself is the ground of culture’s obligations. Religion’s essential character cannot be reduced to social roles but indicates that people in some respects transcend their society. This transcendent orientation is one of the important factors that provokes the passions that might lead to religious wars. Fourth, a principle of tolerance of diverse religions needs to respect both the rights of religions to flourish, with qualifications, and religions’ responsibilities to the culture. These rights, qualifications, and responsibilities can be specified. Fifth, a public theology is needed that can adjudicate issues of conflict regarding both the tolerance of religions in their diversity and the social demands that they fulfill their own responsibilities regarding obligation.

T

Religious Wars and the Alleged Privacy of Religion We live in an age of renewed religious warfare. In Europe during the 1990s there was the hot/cold war between Roman Catholic Croats, Christian

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Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims in Bosnia; the simmering conflict between Catholics and Orthodox in Croatia; the barely tamed war between Orthodox and Muslims in Kosovo; the ongoing battles between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; the intermittant violence in Germany between rightwing Christian Germans and the Muslims and Orthodox from Bulgaria, Romania, the Balkans, and Turkey; the conflicts in Romania of the Orthodox with the Catholic ethnic Hungarians and the Gypsies; the conflicts in Russia between the Orthodox and the Muslims in Chechnya and Ingushetia, and the conflicts throughout Russia between the Orthodox and the secular heirs of communism; and the continued fighting in Georgia between Muslims and Orthodox. In Africa, the Muslim government of Mauritania was violently suppressing groups protesting the expulsion and oppression of black Christians and traditionalists; in Senegal also the Muslims were in violent struggle with Christians and traditionalists; in Nigeria, the Muslim Hausas were in constant struggle, often violent, with the Christian Yorubas. Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere were in violent struggles with nonfundamentalist or secular governments. In Asia, the Communist military in Tajikistan killed 25,000 Tajik Muslims and displaced 500,000 since 1991 to suppress Islamic power. Both Pakistan and India are caught up in conflicts between Muslims and Hindus. In Sri Lanka the Hindu Tamils are at war with the Buddhist Sinhalese. In Bangladesh the Muslim majority was threatened by the insurgency of the Buddhist Chakmas. Muslims fled Myanmar claiming that they were harrassed by the Buddhist majority. The Buddhist Tibetans struggle for independence from Communist China. Muslims of Turkish descent in China’s Xinjiang province have been suppressed with violence. One to two hundred thousand Roman Catholics in East Timor have been killed by the Muslim government of Indonesia since East Timor was taken over by Indonesia in 1975. Fiji was on the brink of violence between the Christian native Fijians and the Hindu Indians who have dominated the government. The present book was in production September 11, 2001 when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and Americans began bombing Kabul the day copyediting was completed. In the Middle East the tensions between the Sunni’s and the Shi’ites have often been violent. The struggle between the Israelis and the Arabs of Muslim and Christian faiths has had an important dimension of religious conflict. In addition, there are many conflicts based on tribal or clan disputes that are classed as ethnic conflicts but where religion also plays a role in defining ethnic identity. These include the barely settled conflict in Cambodia; the revolt of ethnic Nepalese in Bhutan; the tribal conflicts in Afganistan,

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Angola, Zaire, Kenya, Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Togo, Liberia, Chad, and Mali; Moldova; the Basque independence movement in Spain; and of course Somalia. The New York Times, in reporting on these conflicts, usually does not describe these conflicts as religious wars, but rather as ethnic conflicts. The reason is the resolutely modern secular character of the Times and most other Western media which insist that religious matters must be private and not publically important. Ethnicity is the closest notion to religion acceptable to the modern secular worldview, and conflicts thus must either be ethnic or economic. Ethnicity is extremely difficult to define in any sweeping way; surely religion plays important roles in nearly all ethnic definitions, and in the self-definitions of people in ethnic terms. The actions of the Serbs to drive Muslims out of Bosnia and Kosovar have been called “ethnic cleansing.” But the Bosnians and the Kosovars are all of the same ethnic stock in terms of race and genes: it is the religion that makes the difference, and the identification of contemporaries with long-past military- religious conflicts between the Ottoman Muslims and European Christians. There is usually an economic dimension to most conflicts as well. But the focal point of the conflicts mentioned above is not so much economic nor even ethnic in the sense of racial membership; the focal point is defined by religious differences. Modern secular inability to appreciate the public force of religion is perhaps an unconscious but willful policy lying in the origins of modernity. The modern nation-state was a polity developed in the seventeenth century in Western European lands to end the devastating wars of religion. The Thirty Years War was concluded by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Cromwell assumed power in Britain in 1649, Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, and England seemed finally to have suppressed the religious question in the Glorious Revolution with the accession of William and Mary in 1689. Events in Englishspeaking North America spanned the European struggles over religion. Jamestown was founded in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. Struggles in North America between Catholics and Protestants, between establishmentarians and freechurch proponents, mirrored the European conflicts, although deeply modified by the vicissitudes of wilderness and the resistance of earlier immigrants. The Salem witch trials of 1692 were a final and desperately embarrassing paroxysm of the attempt to dictate law and public policy from the authority of church requirements. The posture toward religion in the modern nation state was to privatize it, establishing rules of minimal religious tolerance, and causing policy and the shape of public life to turn on other, mainly economic, concerns. Religion is supposed, in secular modernity, to be a private matter, to be tolerated so long as

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others are not hurt. And as private, it is supposed not to be important for determining public matters such as insurrections and wars. The secular solution to the problem of religious wars in the form that eventually became known as the nation-state did not eliminate religion from influence. Indeed, in many secular nation-states religion is practiced widely and fervently, the United States throughout all its history being an example. Nor did the institutionalization of secular nations happen immediately. Churches and religious movements have often attempted to influence law and policy and have often been effective. Nevertheless, religion has been increasingly marginalized and privatized in secular nations. In the United States the separation between church and state has been institutionalized in some extreme ways. For instance, most history and social studies textbooks for grade school and high school deliberately suppress information about religion and its influences; where such information is not suppressed it is often presented in the terms of extremely reductive secular ideologies. Political arguments are nearly always couched in secular terms that are deeply contorted to avoid religious elements. Even where political factions directly represent religious points of view, as in the Moral Majority or in elements of the Roman Catholic Church with respect to selected issues, the terms of the discussion are most often secular and rarely resonate with the deep religious symbols available. The secular nation state supposes that religious practice and religious thinking can be eschewed from consequential public life, and should be. Public figures may be religious if they choose, and we can even appreciate acts of piety such as church attendance as indicative of strong character. But religions should not be allowed to be determinative with regard to law and policy in secular nations. The secular nation-state is not without its critics in our time. While suppressing, at least temporarily, the power of religions to cause violence, the secular nation-states in their turn give rise to economic wars. The economic wars of the twentieth century have been as devastating as the religious ones of the seventeenth, indeed far more so because of the perfection of what Edith Wyschogrod (1985) calls the “instruments of mass death.” But more to the point, the very occurence of the religious wars in our time, even in Europe, proves the secular assumption that religion is private to be mistaken. Religious concerns do shape public life to the point of violence and war. For secular modernity to assume or urge that religion is or ought to be private does not to make it so, at least not for very long. If there is to be tolerance of religious differences in our time, it cannot be on the assumption that religions are treated as private matters. This is the first thesis. We must therefore look to amend the modern secular approach to religion.

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Obligation and Civil Religion The first step toward a better approach to religion is to ask about the cultural function of religions as such. Of course it is not obvious to modern secularists that religions have a positive cultural function. They might argue that the tolerance of religion as such needs to be challenged. Given the social evils of religion, their oppressions, dogmatisms, and restrictions of liberty, not to speak of their wars, perhaps even one religion is too many and the question of religious diversity is misplaced. This was an understandable reaction in the seventeenth century and the privatizing of religion was a compromise to allow for the continuance of religion as a kind of detoxified virus. But as renewed religious warfare shows, religion cannot be detoxified by the modern secular means. The answer to this objection to taking political tolerance of religious diversity seriously has to do with religions’ positive contributions to culture, what Robert Bellah (1975, 1985, 1991) and others have characterized as civil religion. Although there are many dimensions to civil religion, attention needs to be called here to the religious functions regarding obligation in society. Every religion depicts the human condition as lying under obligation (see chapter 2). To be human is to be obligated in important ways, says religion. The obligatedness of human life is a part of the universal religious dimension. There is no universal religion, of course, only particular religions. The claim that religion as such presents human life as obligated is therefore on one level an empirical generalization. A rough survey can indicate its plausibility. The religions of India, Hinduism and Buddhism, depict human life as such that people ought to be enlightened and from enlightenment gain freedom. Where people lack enlightenment they fail at something obligatory for humanity, which is different from failing to have good health, lots of money, or victory in battle. The religions of China, Confucianism and Daoism, depict human life as such that people ought to be in attunement with reality, primarily with persons and institutions in the case of Confucianism and with nature in the case of Daoism. The religions of Near Eastern origin, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, depict human life as such that persons are obligated to justice in the social order. Failure to be righteous is not merely to have worked the particular evil at hand but is to be in contradiction to one’s essential nature. This rough sampling of major religions lacks nuance and distinction, but more detailed study would reinforce rather than dilute the point (Neville 1995, chapters 5–6, 2001b). The language of “obligation” here betrays the Western origin of the metaphors of the present argument. In any of these religions, or in religiousness generally, human life is depicted as standing under norms. What we are, actually and concretely, is normatively

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measured by what we ought to be, with regard to enlightenment, attunement, justice or a host of alternative prescriptions. Different religions have different metaphoric systems for expressing this, and cultures differ in many details as to the content of the basic human obligations. With respect to the general religious dimension, however, the fact that religions present humanity as lying under obligation should be seen as performing at least two related cultural functions. The first is to awaken and habituate people to living in a state of obligation, and to provide the symbols for grasping what it means to be obligated. All of the various norms that might be relevant in a society, norms for moral, political and economic life, for physical and psychological health, for arts and literature, take their content from their particular circumstances and traditions but take their obligatoriness from the religious dimension of life. Religion builds the habits of taking obligation seriously as it affects language, social practices, imagination, and institutions, as well as its own practices and conceptualities. When secularism marginalizes or privatizes religion, it undermines the obligatoriness of all the other norms. As the residual cultural effects of powerful civil religion diminish, cultural sensibilities turn to relativism. Despite the passionate intensities of particular groups for their causes, the obligatoriness of the good in those causes fades into mere interest and the pursuit of power. Because the first cultural function of religion is to institute obligatoriness in culture, without religion, or with only its fading detritus, cultural life lacks a bonemarrow recognition of norms and lapses into relativism. Such is a frequent complaint about contemporary Western culture. The point suggests indeed that secularism itself cannot function as a viable civil religion and that some one or several “real” religions are needed. The second cultural function of religion is to serve as a watchdog critic of how well a given society lives up to its obligations. Religion is not alone in being a moral critic, but it is the major institution articulating and sponsoring such criticism. Not only does religion establish social obligatoriness, the culture-building function, it also assesses social performance. Whereas the first function of religion indicates that religion is a fundamental constitutive component of human culture as such, the second function tips religion over against any particular positive culture. Religions cannot let themselves become too identified with a culture, or to be defined too much in cultural terms, if they are to perform their critical or prophetic function. No religion can be wholly outside culture, of course. For that reason, this second function of religion needs to be aimed self-referentially at each religion’s own cultural expressions. In its critical mode, a religion strains for distance from its culture, for objectivity, for appeals to higher norms, for a looseness of cultural embodiment. Religion’s critical moment is at least potentially subversive, and insofar as religions can

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partially institutionalize the critical function in the persons and offices of prophets and jestors, religions are always slightly subversive. The culture-criticizing function of civil religion is as important as the culture-building function. When secularity marginalizes or privatizes religion, fundamental criticism is easily diminished to the shrill cries of self-interest of particular groups, again a kind of relativism evading obligation. Needless to say, any religion has a devil of a time balancing its culturebuilding and culture-critical functions (pun intended). One of the most frequent and understandable corruptions of religion is when it forgets that it is supposed to be “in the world but not of it,” to use the Christian language. In our time, some religions have become radicalized in devotion to the critical function and forget the more conservative culture-founding function. But surely the most frequent corruption is when the critical function fades into a solid identification with a particular culture, blessing its interests and wars. Nearly all religious wars are fought under the guidance of corrupt religions that have allowed themselves to become simply identified with some national, ethnic, or political interest. While we must admit that many of the current conflicts in the world are motivated primarily by genuine religious counterclaims, we do not need to say that the religions involved are faithful to their own principles. When the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, whose religion is supposed to be that of quiet enlightenment, battle with the Hindus, whose slogan is “Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!,” they both are making profound mistakes about the implications of their own religions. When Christians, whose God is love, bomb and snipe at one another in Northern Ireland, the operant forms of Christianity at hand are corrupt. If it is true that human life does indeed lie under obligation, so that being human as such means that we have obligations to one another, to nature, and to the institutions that shape our habits and relations with one another and nature, then religions need to be performing both of their cultural functions. These two cultural functions regarding obligation are among religions’ own obligations to human culture. This is the second thesis.

Ultimacy and Religions’ Essential Features An approach to religion that improves upon that of modern secularity cannot rest with appreciating religions’ contribution to the wider culture. It must also attend to what is essential to religions as such. Most religious leaders and theologians indeed would be dismayed at the depiction of religion primarily in its civil functions. Religions rather define themselves in relation to what they take

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to be ultimate, to the source of the obligations, to the transcendent relative to which it is possible to stand in a partially external critical stance toward society. This abstract way of putting the point is perhaps alien to every particular religion. The theistic religions make the point in popularly understandable terms: religions are essentially defined by the God who acts to found them, who commands their practices and in turn judges the religions and their roles in society, by the God who creates the world with its obligations (see chapter 4 on personifying God). With appropriate shifts in metaphors away from agency, similar points could be made about the transcendent normative reality of the Dao, Brahman, the Original Buddha Nature, and other religious candidates for ultimacy. Without understanding the orientation to ultimacy, it is impossible to grasp religions in their depth, or to see how they can function with regard to obligation in the human condition. While acknowledging the essential and primary orientation of every religion to what it takes to be ultimate, we should also note the historical specificity of each religion. Not only are all interpretations and expressions of the ultimate historically conditioned, the religious practices that effect the civil functions of religions have specific histories. Sometimes these histories are associated with racial, national, or ethnic groups. Other instances of religion encompass diverse cultural communities worldwide. In each particular instance of a living religion, however, there is a particular historical connection with the society at hand, and with the history of the religion’s development from its founding to its practice in this place. There is a deep connection between the essential orientations of religions to the ultimate and their civil contributions to society as culture builders and culture criticizers regarding obligation. From the religions’ standpoint, their civil functions are mere consequences of the primary religious orientation, which is to the ultimate or transcendent whence derives the obligatoriness of the human condition. From the religions’ standpoint, the historical expressions of the ultimate and the historical religious and social practices embodying those expressions are normative ways to salvation and social life. Some religions conceive their way of salvation and life to be transferable from one culture to another, changing so as to be appropriate to different cultural and social conditions but maintaining historical continuity with the normative source of obligation. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are great missionary religions, Hinduism only slightly less so, and Confucianism, Judaism, and Daoism have adapted themselves to many different cultural forms outside the places and times of origin. So from the side of the religions, each requires political tolerance to flourish and to have a chance to determine the civil functions of religion in the society in which it finds itself, at least for the people to whose history it is

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appropriate if not for the whole to which it can adapt. Some religions demand the right to exclusive tolerance in both respects. The conception of religions advocated here attempts to harmonize two points in one approach. On the one hand, religions are to be understood in terms of their obligatory contributions to culture, their civil functions. On the other hand they are to be understood in terms of their essential character, which is an orientation to the ultimate that transcends the particularities of history however particular and historical that orientation is expressed. Both the essential nature of religion and its contributory nature are necessary. The essential orientation toward the ultimate is necessary for the authority to define obligatedness and engage in fundamental criticism. The cultural engagement of civil religion is necessary if the essential orientation to the ultimate is to find historical expression. The modern secular approach privatizes the contributions of civil religion and hence undermines the sense of obligatedness necessary for social life, leading to relativism. The modern secular approach also simply fails to register the orientation to the ultimate because it has no way of acknowledging ultimacy, divinity, infinity, or any of the fundamental symbols that point to the source of reality and its obligations. An improved approach to religion deals with both sides. Acknowledging the essential orientations of religions to the ultimate allows us to appreciate the passions of religion, which Kierkegaard characterized as infinite. It is easy to see how these passions might easily lead to war if some historical culture or goal is confused with the ultimate. It is also easy to see how historically different particular religions might come into conflict concerning the framing of the obligatoriness of the human condition and assessing how societies measure up to various obligations. Because there are many religions, each with a claim to represent the ultimate and each with implicit if not explicit programs for culture, the question of political tolerance of religion, indeed religious diversity, is urgent. This is the third thesis.

Political Tolerance of Religions If the above characterizations of religions are generally on the mark, then consideration of political tolerance for a diversity of religions needs two sides. On the one hand, there needs to be a principle expressing the conditions under which religions have a right to flourish, a right to be protected politically. On the other hand the political order itself has the right to call religions to account regarding their civil functions. Let us consider first the conditions under which religions have a right to flourish.

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Suppose, as a principle of political tolerance, that individuals and groups have a prima facie right to the practice of a religion of their own embrace wherever they live. This principle is far too complicated to defend in detail here and in some respects it is so customary and banal as to be offensive if it were argued at length. But certain explanatory comments can be made. The words “prima facie” signal some qualifications that will be mentioned shortly. The phrase “their own embrace” is used rather than “their own choice” to indicate that people hold to their religions by many forms of identification other than and in addition to personal choice, which might be peculiar to only certain cultural conditions. Individuals and groups are both mentioned in order to indicate that religions are practiced in communities such that the tolerance of religious practice by a lone individual is a rare abstraction; most of the time, questions of tolerance deal with individuals as members of religious communities. The language of rights is used to indicate that freedom of religion is a subclass of human rights. To appeal to human rights is not necessarily to suppose that rights are “natural” in any of the senses defended by natural rights theorists. The appeal can also rest upon arguments that the contents of the rights have been shown to be so valuable that political structures ought to guarantee that all people be able to enjoy those contents. In respect of the prima facie right of people to practice the religion of their embrace wherever they live, the relevant values include the following considerations. 1. Although always historically particular in expression and practice, as argued above religions involve the orientation of people to the ultimate, which transcends historical particularity and grounds the obligations that define cultures as such. Part of human reality consists in this relation to the ultimate or transcendent, however particularly embodied. Therefore, even though the political structures of a society often legitimately might have to regulate religious practice, the political dimension lacks the comprehensive authority to define people’s relation to the ultimate. For a political agency, then, to deny or prohibit a religion, within the limits of the prima facie right, is for it to overstep its scope into a dimension of the human to which it is not relevant. For people who are attentive to the ultimate, there is a point at which goverment is simply irrelevant. Good public theology urges that this be respected, for otherwise something importantly human is denied. 2. Although it might seem paradoxical, the very political vitality of a society depends on religion functioning precisely with reference to the ultimate source of obligation, both in culture-building and culture-criticizing functions. Therefore the political dimension undermines itself if it fails to respect the rights of a religion to live out its relation with the ultimate.

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3. The political realm now recognizes the fact that peoples are culturally different and yet live together. Without suggesting that all cultures are of equal value or that moral and political judgments should not be made, different cultures, including different religions, should be respected within the same body politic. The costs and pains of tolerance are outweighed by the sufferings of ethnic cleansing that attempts to eliminate cultural and religious diversity within the same country. Therefore, good cases can be made for a prima facie right of individuals and groups to practice the religion of their own embrace wherever they live. What are the qualifications contained within the phrase “prima facie”? They stem from the need of the religions themselves to embrace the political right of religious freedom. 1. The first qualification is that individuals and groups need to respect the prima facie right of others to practice different religions. Thus, although a religion might believe that it alone is the true religion, it cannot express or institutionalize that belief in ways that inhibit other religions and still claim its own right to exist in the society. Exclusivism, therefore, must be privatized and those religions that do not do so need not be tolerated; this is the truth in the modern secular perspective.1 2. The second qualification is that where different religions come into conflict with one another over obligation, either as to what habits of obligation need to be instilled or as to what critical judgments to make, the case needs to be argued publically with the recognition that the ultimate source of obligation transcends each religion. This is to say, religions need to recognize their own particular fallibility. They need to be able to present their insights and traditions of argument as historically valuable but vulnerable to correction in the public debates about obligation. Although recognition of fallibility might be difficult, especially for some religious traditions, that fallibility expresses the ancient theme of the condemnation of idolatry. Exclusively to substitute an historically particular religious expression of the ultimate for the ultimate itself is idolatry. The public debate about a matter of obligation is inclusive of religions but larger than any one because it needs to make reference, if only in deference, to the fact that obligation is grounded in that which transcends any and every religion. These two qualifications require, as conditions for tolerance, that religions have a modern historical sense of their own particularity relative to other religions and their own finitude and fallibility. This is not to say that traditional religions, in contrast to those religions modernized, were always exclusivistic and dogmatic in asserting their own authority. Perhaps those attributes characterize the theistic religions originating in the ancient Near East more than

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the religions of Asia or the primal religions. Whatever the historical case, the claim to the right to flourish in the modern world requires of religions that they claim only their own salvific and culture-forming validity, leaving the question of other religions open to discussion, and allowing that their own expressions can themselves be subjected to further religious judgment. The other side of the issue of political tolerance, according to the understanding of religion advocated here, is that the political order can call religions to account regarding their civil functions. Of course, no political order can demand that civil religion be successful. To the extent the theistic rhetoric expresses a basic point, much of the time the human predicament waits upon God. But the political order can indeed test the genuineness of putative religions by asking how they articulate the fundamental obligatedness of the human condition, and how they can stand both within and without a society in order to gain critical purchase. Where religions do not perform, or do not attempt to perform, these civil functions, their case for tolerance is weakened if they come into conflict with other religions or with other cultural projects. The political order cannot judge a religion’s essential orientation to the ultimate; but it can judge whether that orientation yields fruit in civil religion. That individuals and groups have a prima facie right to the practice of a religion of their own embrace wherever they live, and that they also have an obligation to civil religion, constitutes the fourth thesis.

Religion and Public Theology The fifth thesis is that no formal definition of religion or procedure of due process can handle the issues of political tolerance of religious diversity and that continuing assessments of the claims of religion to the rights of tolerance will have to be made. For this purpose it is necessary to revive and develop the discipline of public theology.2 Public theology in this sense is public discourse that is able to make discriminating judgments about both the civil dimensions of religion and their institutionalizations of their essential orientation to the ultimate. These judgments will be necessary to determine whether religions both meet the conditions for tolerance and are addressing their civil obligations. Modern secular culture has tended to say that all theology is private. But theology cannot be private only. That religions become corrupted so as to identify too much with a culture and go to war in its defense is a theological mistake and can be recognized publically as such. That religions can become so enamored of social criticism that they fail to build cultural habits of obligatoriness

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relevant to the conditions of the modern world is a theological mistake and can be recognized publically as such. These judgments are theological in the sense that they have to do with the faithfulness of religious practices to their ultimate commitments. They are public both in the sense that everyone who thinks hard about the issues can understand them, whether or not the thinkers belong to any of the religions involved, and in the sense that they deal with the publically important aspects of religious expressions. Whereas these judgments about religious practices living in contradiction to the ultimate commitments of the religions are easy to make, public theology about matters of political tolerance of religious diversity are more difficult. Whatever the degree of difficulty, the criteria for the validity of the public theology consist in the cases that can be made for the theological judgments. Although there have been in the past many times when public theology flourished as an articulate discipline, especially in Confucian China and medieval Europe, there are few models for public theology in the contemporary context of sharp religious diversity. Therefore the task of theology in the present time requires imagination and innovation. The general form of public theology, like any kind of theology or even plain political discourse, is that of simply making a persuasive case that is vulnerable to correction. Public theology would be easy if it could limit itself to that upon which everyone already agrees. But religions cite obligations that challenge the lowest common denominator of agreement, and rightly so. Public theology would still be easy if it could limit itself to the social and cultural roles of religions; but then it would not engage the passions essential to religions’ orientations to the ultimate. If we are to recognize both the civic dimensions of religions and their essential orientations to the ultimate, as we must if we are to understand religions as public phenomena, then we must enter into public theology that engages religions in their full reality, the fifth and final thesis.

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Religion and the American Experiment

nthusiastic participants in religion as well as observers with more jaded points of view have commented on the importance of religion in American life. Few, however, recognize the diversity of religious expression in America or the many different senses in which it has been important. Religion in America has been called an “experiment” since the nineteenth century, combining two senses of experiment. One is the old sense used by Jonathan Edwards and others meaning “experience.” The other derives from religion’s role in the Puritan effort to experiment with making a new society that leaves behind the inertial sins of Europe. These senses combine, or at least are made continuous, in the nineteenth century scientific ethos that takes deliberate, controlled experimentation to be the best way to experience things cleanly without the confusions of authority and unconscious associations. It would probably be wise to say that there have been many American experiments in religion, given the diversity of religions. Moreover, this notion of “experiment” comes from only one of the many religious traditions, namely Protestant Christianity. With this warning about possible bias in mind, however, it is interesting and important to represent the adventures of religions in America as an experiment with the double-barreled meaning just sketched. To cast the net as widely as possible, it is helpful to begin with a lengthy reminder of the scope of diverse religions in America. In each case the introduction of the religion into this country shall be sketched, and also something of its contemporary expressions, hoping this will bring to mind the extent of its development on this soil. Then an hypothesis will be put forward about just what the American experiment in religion is.

E

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The American Religious Scene To the best of our knowledge the American religious scene began with the first Asian immigration over forty thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers about whose early religion we know little.1 To judge from the descendents of these socalled Native Americans discovered by Europeans in recent centuries and from other remaining hunter-gatherer societies, the earliest American religion celebrated its tribe of birth as a functioning unit within nature, not specially distinct as human above nature, but connected and mirrored in nature through totems and dream images that define paradigmatic identity and spiritual functions. There are some petroglyphs in the Western mountains alleged to be twelve thousand years old; no one now understands their symbolism save that they are images of “dream time,” as the students of Australian Aboriginal religion call it. Native Americans were able to save little of their religious culture intact when the Europeans came. Those visited by the Spanish were often forcibly assimilated to Christianity and intermarried with Europeans, resulting in mixed religion and ethnicity. Those visited by the Northern Europeans were in a few instances offered conversion to Christianity but mostly were pushed aside, infected, annihilated, or herded to places unattractive to European Americans; the religions of the elders barely survived in reservation life. But in the last three decades those religions have been revived or reconstructed and given prominence in North American interfaith dialogues; they are particularly prominent in religious discussions of ecological issues where the huntergatherer heritage is a clear alternative to the Axial Age religious attitudes of all the other religions toward the environment. The Spanish brought the first European religion to America following Columbus’s first visit, establishing Roman Catholic missions across the Southwest up through California; they also established colonies in the Caribbean whose people, mixed in subsequent centuries with native and African peoples, immigrated to North America in our century.2 As mentioned, the guiding ethos of the Spanish missions (and the Portuguese in South America) was to convert the people found in America to Catholicism, producing a religious culture as well as an ethnic group combining Spanish and earlier traditions. Northern Europeans brought their religions to America in the early seventeenth century, English, Scots, and Dutch representing mainly Puritan Protestantism, and the French representing some Huguenot Protestantism but mainly Roman Catholicism like the Irish. The first permanent English settlement, at Jamestown in 1607, included Catholics as well as Protestants, and the Maryland colony of Lord Baltimore was Catholic. The English Catholics often were fleeing persecution at home by Protestants and the bloody seventeenth century

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in England was enough for everyone to feel persecuted and the need to flee at some time or other. The most famous English group seeking religious liberty, of course, was the New England Puritan movement which had a positive motive as well, namely to establish a religious society free of the inherited corruptions of European Christendom. The English experience of bloody religious warfare, with its subsequent resolution, was later decisive in shaping the relation of religion to civil society in America up until the present time, when the Spanish experience is making itself felt. Meanwhile, the imperial adventures of the European powers resulted in decisive British victories over the Dutch, French, and Spanish in what became the United States, and a nearly decisive victory over the French in Canada, with a resultant settlement of religious balances, namely, the dominance of non-Anglican Protestantism with considerable tolerance for the other European religions, including that of the Jewish community first in New Amsterdam. A measure of the Protestant dominance is that the two Great Awakenings, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were almost exclusively affairs of Protestantism, which by the end of the nineteenth century could claim that the United States was a Protestant nation. The fervor of many groups of European American Protestants has cooled in our time, but the Hispanic Americans of both the Southwest heritage and the Caribbean are involved now in Protestant Great Awakenings, thus shifting from their Catholic heritage in large numbers and changing the face of Protestantism. Contemporary Protestantism is also being altered significantly by a large Korean immigration that, in addition to traditional Buddhism, Confucianism, and shamanism, reflects a zealous Protestantism derivative from the mainly 1880s Princeton Presbyterianism of the American missionaries to Korea; Korean churches are now sponsoring missions to save godless America. Meanwhile, contemporary with almost the earliest European Christian immigration to America were the Jewish and African, the former as settlers in New Amsterdam and the latter as slaves. Contemporary American Judaism has been decisively altered by much more massive immigrations from Germany and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as by the vast shifts in Judaism itself effected by the Enlightenment and the dark hours of twenteth-century persecutions. African immigration brought traditional tribal religions to America. In many cases these had been affected earlier by Islam, which had penetrated rather far south in Africa in the seventeenth century before European colonization of that continent. African tribal religions excluding the Islamic element had much in common with the shamanic religions of the Native American hunter-gatherers, both being pre-Axial Age religions. But mutual reinforcement in America was forestalled by the very different treatment those groups

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received at the hands of European Americans, enslavement in the one case and exclusion in the other; moreover, the enthusiasm of the Native Americans for slavery, including African slavery, made cooperation problematic. Whereas Native American religion has had almost no impact on the wider American culture until very recently, African religions were amalgamated into forms of Protestant Christianity that have been extremely influential in American culture and other forms of American Christianity for two centuries. One of the most interesting imaginative presentations of the interaction of traditional African religions and Christianity is in the writings of Charles Johnson, such as his novel, Middle Passage. He is a particularly acute commentator because he is an African American Buddhist, and Middle Passage is a play on both the name of the slave route from Africa and the Buddhist doctrine of the middle way. In addition to the African immigration to the American continent was the immigration to the Caribbean, where a similar process of amalgamation of traditional tribal religions with various forms of Christianity took place. But in the Caribbean the forms of Christianity were Spanish Catholicism, French Catholicism, Huguenot Protestantism, and British Anglicanism, giving rise to distinct amalgams. The immigration of Caribbean Africans to the United States brings quite different forms of African Christianity from the low-church Protestantism of African American Christianity. Eastern Orthodox Christianity was brought by the Russians to America in the eighteenth century with a string of missions through Alaska, perhaps into California. These missions served the Russian trappers and traders but also sought the conversion of the Native Americans, and they lasted with strength until well into the nineteenth century, long after the United States claimed Oregon and Washington State and the Canadians British Columbia; Alaska with its present borders and Orthodox missions was purchased by the United States in 1869. The nineteenth century saw much immigration of Orthodox Christians from Greece and the Balkans, as well as from Russia. Now there are American denominations representing national Orthodox churches from several Orthodox European countries, sometimes two denominations divided over whether Orthodoxy should have cooperated with communist governments in the country of origin. The building of the transcontinental railroads in the mid-nineteenth century stimulated massive Chinese immigration to the United States. The Chinese religion they brought included a profound Confucian culture, Daoist practices, and Chinese Buddhism, as well as a shamanistic underlayment. Though some scholars consider these different religions, in practice Chinese communities as well as individuals often amalgamate them into one complex religion; in Ming China this was officially called “The Three Schools.” For a century this

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Chinese American religious culture was little noticed by other Americans, who paid more attention to those Chinese Americans who became Christians. But with the 1949 revolution in China and a new wave of immigration, often of the best and the brightest from China, the religion of the Chinese-American communities has come to prominence. A similar story is to be told of Japanese immigration, though with less influence. Since the 1960s Buddhism, Daoism, and to a lesser degree Confucianism have had significant missionary impact on non-Asian Americans. Confucianism has been of interest mainly to American intellectuals; Daoism is attractive because of the beauty and accessibility of its classical texts and because it gives content to hungers for New Age religion. Buddhism is probably the fastest growing American religion, and largely as the result of two missionary efforts, those of Japanese Zen Buddhists in California and New York State, and those of Tibetan Buddhists, beginning with the great mission compound in Boulder, Colorado. Both the Zen and Tibetan missions have thoroughly indigenized, with Anglos as heads of the communities for several generations of leadership. In addition, the collapse of French Indochina and the Vietnam War have caused large immigrations of Southeast Asians to the United States with their own forms of Buddhism (and Confucianism). Hinduism came to be represented in America in the nineteenth century, often through patrician or Brahmin immigration. Some of those Brahmin immigrants, such as Ananda K. Coomeraswamy, who acquired most of the Asian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, became Boston Brahmins as well. The electrifying performance of Swami Vivekenanda at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago brought Hinduism to widespread attention in the United States. Heavy immigration of all castes from India since the Second World War brought representatives of other forms of Hinduism, including popular Saivism and sects worshipping Krishna. In the 1960s several of these denominations undertook serious missions to non-Asian Americans; it is hard for some of us to bear in mind that the Hari Krishna movement known to us in airports is a denomination older than Christianity. Islam, as mentioned, first came to America with the African slaves. Although it was rather fully extinguished as a self-conscious religious movement in the African American community, it was revived in this century by the Black Muslims, who within one generation established communities of orthodox connection with the Islamic centers in Saudi Arabia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, in this century there has been massive migration to the United States from many Muslim countries, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Straits of Torres at the eastern end of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. The revolution in Iran brought many of Islam’s leading

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intellectuals to this country and we can expect increased immigration from the Muslim nations that once were part of the Soviet Union. This is a highly simplified and schematic picture of the religious scene in America. Each of the religions mentioned has many subdivisions, and there are many that have not been mentioned. Think of the people named Singh who are Sikhs, or the cab drivers in Washington, so many of whom are Copts. But enough has been said to indicate something of the complexity of the American experiment in religions.

The Experiment: An Hypothesis The “American experiment in religions” can be restated in the form of a proper hypothesis with three clauses, namely (1) that it is possible for different religions to coexist in the same society (2) with effectiveness in public life and (3) without giving up their claims to validity. These clauses shall be developed in turn. (1) Coexistence: The first thing to say about the coexistence of a great diversity of religions in America is that most of them came from parts of the world where coexistence was not the norm, where the religious culture was monolithic, or where the religions were at war with one another. We do not know about religious neighbors in Asia for the early waves of Siberian immigrants who became the Native Americans; but we probably can assume that alternatives to hunter-gatherer shamanistic religion had not yet been invented. The later Russian orthodox missions came from a monolithic orthodox society. The sixteenth century Spaniards and Portuguese were Roman Catholic, the Jews having recently been removed from Spain. Though Britain, France, and Holland had both Protestants and Catholics, they had little peaceful coexistence early in the sixteenth century and for many immigrants from those countries America was hoped to be a place to flourish without religious war and persecution. Three exceptions need to be noted to the claim that these religions came out of societies that did not practice religious coexistence. One, of course, is European Jewry, which had long had to coexist with Christians; although there were periods and places of genuine mutual accommodation and peaceful coexistence, by and large that was not the norm, and the warfare model is not far off the mark. A second is the African migration from a continent in which tribal religions had coexisted with Islam and Christianity, with the result that much practice was eclectic. In this case, however, immigration to America as slaves meant that the religion of the homeland was deeply compromised by its

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transformations with American Christianity. It is hard to say that an African experience of religious pluralism was much help to slaves in America. A third exception already noted is Chinese religion that came to America in the midnineteenth century, itself an amalgam of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, with a shamanistic base. China had been a genuinely pluralistic nation with respect to religion from the Tang Dynasty onward. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism had been synthesized in the Three Schools movement since the Ming. There were more Christians in Tang China than in Europe at the same time (in part, as noted in chapter 6, because there were so few people in Europe and so many in China), and Chinese Muslim and Jewish communities have flourished to this day, though with some rough periods: three million Chinese Muslims are reported to have been slaughtered in a two-week pogrom in 1855 and today Muslims are in ambiguous relations with the communist government in the western provinces, where they are a majority. It is fair, with regard to Chinese immigrants, to say that their home experience of religious pluralism was helpful to their religious life in America. These exceptions noted, the fact that religious pluralism was not the norm in the countries from which most immigrants came means that American religious pluralism is something like a controlled experiment. Here is the only place it has been seriously tried, save China. The situation in China was also decisively different from America in that pluralism worked only in those times when the government was enormously strong and able to enforce toleration, times such as the Tang and the early Ming; when the imperial government was weak, religious factions turned to warfare and minorities suffered, as in the 1855 pogrom against the Muslims. The governments in America have never been as strong or centralized as the Chinese, and religious pluralism has been practiced with plural or democratic governments. We must ask, of course, whether the Americans have really succeeded with religious pluralism, and here the answer can only be “by and large.” Our forebears in the Puritan Plymouth and Boston plantations certainly did not want religious pluralism: they wanted to get it right. When Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams disagreed, they simply walked to Rhode Island, and the pattern of escaping conflict by moving on in this vast relatively unpopulated country was followed in many other instances of coexistence, for instance the case of the Mormons. The Native Americans always lost when this pattern was followed, but the principle of segregating them on reservations rather than forcible conversion as in South America had the effect of maintaining their religions alongside others, even if in greatly attenuated forms. The fortunes of the immigrants’ religions are so closely tied to political, economic, historical, and attitudinal factors such as racism and prejudice that no

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clear assessment of religious pluralism is possible apart from an assessment of many other social elements. Yet the situation is that all those religions came to America as recounted above and nearly all have linear descendents still here. (2) Public life: It surely is fair to say now that Western and much of Eastern Europe is religiously pluralistic, Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia notwithstanding. But tolerant pluralism in the European case was purchased at the price of privatizing religion. The principle that everyone might participate in public life so long as they kept their religion out of it was developed in Holland and Britain but has spread throughout much of the rest of the continent, with some exceptions such as the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and southern Europe. One consequence of this is the general decline of religion and the growth of secularism in Europe. The situation in America has never accepted the privatization of religion to the degree that has developed in Europe, despite the fact the American Constitution is an extraordinary statement of many elements of the principle of privatization, those having to do with government support for religion. There are at least two kinds of causes for the relatively public role for religion in America. One is the evolution of the Puritan conscience about public life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony through the advocacy of tolerance with a moral edge in the politics of John Adams to the consensus of moral principle hammered out by Lincoln. Though the Puritan culture was far smaller and shorter lived than the Hispanic in America, its evolution led to the forms of civil religion that have dominated American political thinking until very recently (Greenstone 1993). Bluntly stated, religious people have an obligation to create a moral society, and a moral society depends upon religion for its legitimation. As argued in chapter 8, far more important for civil religion than any particular moral stand a religion might take is its function to create the cultural conviction that we lie under obligation. An important part of any religion is the conviction that to be human means to lie under obligation; when religion weakens its public influence, relativism rises. When Dwight Eisenhower said that he thought every American ought to have a religion and he didn’t care which one, he expressed a powerful American tradition. The second kind of cause for the public influence of religions in America is the simple impact of voting democracies. Although Protestants had swept to political dominance from Salem to San Diego by the middle of the nineteenth century, the fact that most other people could vote meant that their religious convictions about public matters began to matter by the end of that century. Roman Catholic majorities in certain cities overthrew the Protestant dominance. As African Americans and East Asians gained the rights of citizens, they and their religions became politically influential. Of course the

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degree of religious influence depends on the degree of voting power, and some groups have few votes. But American politicians now have to cultivate the favor of minorities. The disposition of religious influence on public life is extraordinarily complicated to sort out. The Christian Right is not regarded as Christian at all by many New England Christians, but rather as an expression of a kind of culture at odds with Christianity (Hunter 1991). Despite the problems of defining religions’ authentic public policies there is no doubt that religions are influential in American public life from local school boards to the federal government and that religious reasons are employed to justify policies to a degree not found in Europe. (3) Claims to validity: The force of the hypothesis about the American experiment in religions is not merely that they coexist or have influence on public life but that they can be authentic, valid religions. Cynical Europeans believe religions to be whimsical private passions; many cynical Americans believe religions to be covers for political and cultural ideologies. But the hypothesis argues that despite instances that justify both of those views, religions in America can also function healthily as religions, not reduced to private whim or politics. This is a difficult argument to make because of the need to justify a normative account of what makes a religion religious. Therefore the argument shall shift from largely historical observations to a more philosophical mode and sketch a theory of religions as understood from the inside.

What Makes Religions Religious Four notions at least are necessary for understanding religions from the inside: orientation, poise, finite/infinite contrasts, and ritual, all of which have been introduced earlier. By orientation is meant the way in which we comport ourselves to some part or dimension of existence that has its own characteristic nature and rhythms. As noted in chapter 2, the great Chinese philosopher Xunzi distinguished three such dimensions, heavenly bodies, seasonal changes, and surprises. Heavenly bodies in the main are regular and majestic in their indifference to human life; we can’t do much about them and so the proper orientation is awe and celebration of their regularity. Seasonal changes too are regular but they allow for much internal variation and fuzzy boundaries; because the seasons have so much to do with human life our proper orientation is deep involvement with discerning the character and timing of the changes and coping with them practically; peasant culture, handed down from one generation to the next, provides the lore for orienting ourselves to seasonal changes. Surprises include

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floods, droughts, hurricanes, and barbarians appearing suddenly over the hill; proper orientation toward surprises, said Xunzi, requires good government that plans ahead for flood control, keeps emergency granaries, and maintains border guards and an army. Xunzi’s list was far too short. We have different orientations toward our families, our jobs, our neighborhoods, our political situation, various aspects of culture, and many other dimensions of life. The orientations involve emotional attitudes as well as habits of perception and response, and they often are quite different because of differences among the various dimensions of existence that are their objects. A significant part of maturation is learning to discriminate these dimensions and to take up appropriate orientations. The maturation of a civilization includes the discovery of the important dimensions toward which it would be appropriate to have an orientation. Each orientation involves attitudes and habits that are sensitive to the nature and rhythms of their objects, such as meditative awe for the heavens, knowing when to sow and reap for the seasons, and being prepared for surprises. The different orientations to the many dimensions of existence do not easily fit together. Although there well may be systematic connections among various dimensions, our orientations tend to focus on the steady characters and rhythms of the dimensions themselves. Poise, according to the use of the word here, is the virtue of balancing these orientations in practical life while we perceive and respond to various things in constant flux that do not fit neatly together. Obviously, some of us are more poised than others, and each of us has more poise with regard to integrating certain orientations than other orientations. Soul, chapter 2 argued, is the source of poise, the energetic faculty of balance and harmony that acquires individualized character and developed identity through time as we deepen, or perhaps lose, our poise. Among the dimensions of existence toward which we have orientations are finite/infinite contrasts. A finite/infinite contrast (see chapter 3) is some finite thing that a culture construes to be world defining in part or whole. World definition is meant in the sense of the social construction of reality as that has been analyzed by Peter Berger (1967). That a finite/infinite contrast is identified by the symbols of a culture does not mean it is a fiction; no culture could last that is seriously wrong about what defines its world. But the identification of a finite/infinite contrast is indeed a matter of a culture’s symbols. Examples include the totem animal that defines a clan, a sacred kami stone that defines a sacred space, the liberation of the Buddha, or emptiness, or enlightenment, that defines the human possibility for Buddhism. For monotheistic religions examples include the physical existence of the world, extreme phenomena such as storms and earthquakes, the ground for value in experience—whatever gives human life a place in the cosmos, the sources of human meaning; are all world-defining

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boundary conditions that are integrated in the comprehensive symbol of God. The infinite side of a finite/infinite contrast marks the fact that if the finite side were not real, the world would not be real in the sense the contrast defines. The finite side is important not just for itself but for the fact that it is world defining in some respect, and the situation would be infinite without its contingent reality. The infinite need not have the very positive spin that some monotheisms give it in the claim that an infinite source, God, creates the world in its very existence, value, and so forth. How properly to conceive a finite/infinite contrast is a further matter beyond the recognition that cultures identify finite/infinite contrasts. Axial Age religions generally have employed an anti-idolatry dialectic to criticize certain finite/infinite contrasts as not being world defining enough to count and have developed conceptions of world, existence, value, meaning, and so forth with metaphysical generality. Religion has to do with taking up orientations to the finite/infinite contrasts and then developing such poise as to bring the other orientations into line with their world-defining articulation of what is important. Put another and more familiar way, religion has to do with getting us to face up to what is really real and then getting us to behave appropriately in all things relative to that ultimate reality. The difficulty with the more familiar expression is that it smacks too much of Western metaphysics and obscures the cultural diversity in religions. The language of orientation requires that we ask what it is toward which cultures are oriented; the language of poise focuses on the styles and symbols of harmonizing orientations; the language of finite/infinite contrasts requires that we ask what it is that cultures take to be world defining. Taking up an orientation toward one’s finite/infinite contrast requires both discernment of that and a proper response in behavior and attitude; the discernment gives us mythology, philosophy, and theology, whereas the response gives us worship and devotion. Developing poise to bring one’s various orientations into line with the finite/infinite contrasts is spiritual practice and life. Ritual is the fourth conception necessary for understanding religions, and by ritual is meant a broader conception than mere court or church liturgies. Rather, ritual is the symbolically defined patterned behaviors, usually involving several actors if not everyone in the community, the repeated practice of which tends to develop poise with regard to the finite/infinite contrasts, to bring our various orientations into harmony with ultimate reality. Church and court liturgies are paradigms of such ritual. But many Enlightenment communities that disdain church and court liturgies have rituals of their own, often expressed in political or scientific symbols that still serve to move people to that poise that makes every orientation appropriate before what those communities count as ultimate. Rituals are intimately bound to the symbol systems of

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the religious cultures in which they are practiced, and thus differ religion by religion, sect by sect. The diverse religions in American have their distinct historical traditions with different rituals, conceptions of finite/infinite contrasts, spiritual practices for poise, and articulated orientations. Vital religion is when rituals, theologies, spiritual practices, and the taking up of orientations toward the world that include both worship and politics significantly determine personal and community life. More specifically, religion is vital when the public ritual and personal poise of a community integrate the diversity of orientations so that orientations to the finite/infinite contrasts rule the rest. Of course, no religious tradition is vital in all its periods and places; every religion in America has had its ups and downs. But there is nothing in the pluralistic situation in America that suggests a religion cannot be vital and authentic here. Many are. A special qualification must be observed here before turning to the strongest claim in the hypothesis. The qualification has to do with those religions that believe that they are the exclusively valid one and that this must be politically expressed. A religion can be vital if it believes it alone has the religious truth and the other ways lead to perdition if it does not also believe that this must be publically enforced. Islam, on the other hand, and some forms of fundamentalist Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity believe they are frustrated in their vitality if their orientations are not public law. Exclusivist religions that demand political hegemony cannot be fully vital in a religiously pluralistic situation that acknowledges the political rights if not wisdom of other religions. Chapter 8 dealt with this in some detail. The hypothesis that many religions flourish together in America with public force contains a stronger claim than the observation above that they can be vitally faithful to their historical traditions expressed in their orientations, poise, finite/infinite contrasts, and rituals. The theory of religions sketched supposes that orientations are addressed to real dimensions of existence. It opposes those theories of religions that reduce traditions to mere plays of symbols. Rather, it argues that symbols are used to engage reality, discriminating different dimensions of existence and interpreting them in various respects important for human life. Religions differ in their symbol systems and perhaps in the respects in which they interpret reality. But if a tradition’s symbols orient people badly to some dimension of existence, the symbols will have to be altered or they won’t last; if a tradition claims an orientation to a dimension of reality that doesn’t really exist or that is vastly different from what the orientation picks up, the energy to sustain that orientation will be better spent elsewhere. The plausibility conditions for what deserves a human orientation are a function of seri-

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ous interaction between inherited symbols of what is important and the other realities of life, culture, and intellect. Now the punch of the American experiment in religions is that this continent and its cultures constituted a new situation for nearly every immigrating religion. Orientations that seemed important in the old country sometimes receded into oblivion or nostalgia, and new orientations had to be forged here, all of which sometimes called for new orderings of priorities, styles of poise, conceptions of finite/infinite world boundaries, and rituals. Every religion had to change and adapt in order to cope with the American reality. Therefore, the American experiment was an experiential jolt to the immigrant religions, to return to the opening gloss on the meaning of “experimental.” In different ways for each religion, America caused it to look again at the experiential ground for its beliefs and practices. Of course this has happens in every part of the world when the situation changes distinctly. But the complex historical situation of America is a singularity into which each religion tied in its own experiential way. Even when Orthodox Christianity celebrates its rituals in the forms and languages of the old countries, it is with an awareness of the fact the children in America are participating in a wider culture. A final point to turn the screw one more time: There are at least three factors that make our contemporary situation seriously different from the situations from which all of our religions have taken their traditional forms. One is the scientific expansion of our consciousness of the size and age of the cosmos beyond anything imagined in any of the traditional religions save perhaps late medieval Buddhism. A second is that our rapidly growing knowledge of the workings of global social systems such as economies, education, and communication means we can actually do something about human equality and justice on a global scale; no religious tradition has much to say about distributive justice on a global scale. A third is that ecological problems and increased knowledge of environmental causation mean that human beings need to take responsibility for their behavior in the environment, and no religious tradition has much to say about that. So the diverse religions in America all face three common problems for which none is well prepared. They all need new orientations, and new poise for adapting to them. The next phase in the American experiment in religions will be to see how all these traditional ones cope with these new demands for conditions of plausibility and devotion.

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CHAPTER 10

Religion and Vital Engagement

Engagement and Competence wo philosophical observations help to understand the contribution of midnineteenth-century American letters to the vital roles of religious doctrine. The points hold for religious doctrine generally. But they are especially pertinent to understanding Emerson and the Transcendentalists, as well as poets such as Whitman and novelists such as Melville, although the discussion here shall be limited to Emerson. The first point, already introduced in chapter 3, is that a principal function of religious doctrines, indeed of all religious symbols, is to engage people with religious realities. Engagement is the central notion here, and it means people’s interactions with the realities, including their responses, activities, habitual behavior, orientation, and, insofar as they stop to think about and express their engagements, their representations of the religious realities. Engagement is a version of Dewey’s transaction or interaction, and it reflects a developed pragmatic position.1 The point to notice is that engagement supposes that both the people and the things with which they are engaged are real, however those objects, and even the people themselves, might be misinterpreted in the engagement. The metaphors associated with engagement flesh out life as activity and enjoyment, not as mirroring reality in the mind, to use Rorty’s (1979) reductive epitome of the main European epistemological tradition, Philosophy as the Mirror of Nature.2 Moreover, to say that engagement is one of the principal functions of symbols is to note the general pragmatic point that signs and signification shape all interactions and are among the most important things to understand about any of the things with which we engage. The signs encode institutions and organizations, the habits of social interaction as well as all speech and gesture, and

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also the imaginative shape of personal life that gives our causal situation the form of experience.3 Take away the signs and their shaping effects, and there is not much of interest left to say about people and the environing world in which they engage things. That signs shape engagement is a point that holds for engaging natural objects, people, and institutions, as well as religious realities.4 The general thesis about engagement stands at odds with the more usual understanding of religious doctrine as a kind of mental representation of its object, a repetition in mind of the nature of the religious object. Modern science has understood itself this way regarding scientific objects until the present century, and European Enlightenment thought has construed religious doctrines analogously. Needless to say, whereas it is possible and exciting to imagine mapping a three-dimensional body in motion onto a mathematical representation, it is hardly possible and extremely demeaning to map the biblical God, Brahman, or the Confucian’s Heavenly Principle onto a representation of something mental. Representation within engagement, as shaping and guiding interaction, is a quite different model from representation as duplication in mind.5 The second philosophical observation, introduced in chapters 4 and 5, is that one’s personal character or soul needs to be properly developed in order to be competent at engaging religious realities with religious symbols and doctrines. Of course the point is far more general than this. Until made competent at language, gestures, eye contact, and conventions for walking, touching, and participating in social interactions, a child can barely engage the things of its world. Its engagements are brute and crude, and it misses important discriminations. But regardless of the child’s unreadiness to engage with those signs by which its parents make the crucial discriminations, the things in its environment have the natures they have; their parents’ competent use of signs do pick out crucial elements of their nature, and adults of other cultures might pick out those and other crucial elements. Signs allow people to discriminate about things in their engagements; they do not constitute the natures of those things except insofar as the engagements they guide change the things encountered (Weissman 1993, chapter 1). Hence signs are better or worse, good for this purpose but not that, true in certain respects, false in others. Beyond the formation of human character to be culturally competent generally, that is, to be able to use the general culture’s common signs to engage the world, there are specialized areas of cultivated competency. Musicians learn to engage instruments, auditory spaces, and mood so as to produce music most of us cannot produce. Musical connoisseurs have the competence to hear things their novice neighbors miss. Westerners, until trained, cannot hear what ordinary Chinese people hear in traditional Chinese music. In science, even

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though scientific thoughts are supposed to be overt signs that can be represented fully on a page, it takes learned competence to interpret the mathematical and other categories, and even more subtly learned competence to think experimentally with imagination, economy, and elegance. Graduate training in science is one of the few areas left in modern culture where people are brought to competence by long apprenticeship, learning through imitation and association what cannot be said significantly in words. Something of the complexity of developing competence with signs can be drawn out through a distinction between two senses of meaning mentioned earlier, network meaning and content meaning.6 Network meaning is the meaning structure defined by a semiotic code, according to which there is a range of other signs to which a given sign can refer, and a range of yet other signs that can interpret the sign, and a range of respects in which the given sign can be interpreted as referring to certain signs but not others. The network meanings of signs are far more complicated than dictionary definitions or textbook expositions, but knowledge of a specialized sign network might begin that way. A person can learn to manipulate the signs within a code according to their network meanings, and experts such as art historians, certain kinds of literary critics, and other symbol analyzers can spell out network meanings in detail. Content meanings, by contrast, are those by which realities are engaged. Signs have content meaning when a person is able to use them, along with the relevant referents and interpretants in their coded networks, to refer to and interpret realities so as to shape and be shaped through engagement. Novice musicians and scientists might know a lot of network meaning before they can turn that into content meaning and engage the relevant things musically and scientifically. Within the network of the semiotic system, signs have extensional reference and interpretation, which is a function of their coded structures. But the signs with their network connections can also have intentional reference and interpretation as content meanings when they are the medium by which engagement is shaped relative to human interests and purposes and to the nature of the things engaged. Signs set in their network structures have both intentional reference to realities and intentional interpretations in real life when people are competent at their content. Content meaning is what signs have for persons who have mastered their network meanings and internalized them, becoming competent to use them in the intentionality of engagement.7 Religious symbols, including doctrines, are like other sign systems with respect to the fact that sophisticated competence is an achievement.8 In many families, religious symbols are part of the general culture and language with which children are brought up. Greater competence is gained though religious instruction of various sorts, through participation in liturgies, in the activities

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of a religious community, and in specific existential projects of living and working according to certain religious ideals. In many communities, monastic life and the disciplines of prayer, asceticism, and imaginative exercises such as visualizations or the singing of hymns, even prolonged mystic meditation, lead to deeper and deeper competencies at the engagement of reality with religious symbols, including doctrines. Religious symbols are particularly complex with many layers of meaning, some of which are largely unconscious and function mainly by resonance with other layers of meaning. Moreover, symbols are often limited in their gripping pertinence to certain stages of life, certain special life situations, or to certain states of soul. Symbols of death, for instance, are far more gripping for people who have reason to focus on their own death or on that of someone they love than for people for whom death is still an abstraction. Complexities aside, competence at religious symbols is required if the realities addressed in those symbols are to be engaged. If people are not competent with the symbols, or with only childish or superficial aspects of the symbols, the realities will be missed, distorted, or interpreted only in terms of some other symbols. Competence at religious symbols, beyond the common use of certain symbols in culture, requires the formation of special states of soul. Learning to use a symbol in engagement is not merely manipulating a medium, or finding a new reality that can be symbolized, but is also shaping the soul specially to be able to engage with that symbol. People develop competencies at symbols by using them bit by bit and incompetently for a while. An adolescent, suddenly enthused about religion, might master the network meaning of a religious system with brilliance and thoroughness. But the adolescent’s capacity to engage reality with that system is limited to a few focused gripping concerns, with the rest as abstraction. To achieve greater depth requires a soul transformed through many steps, maturation not only through ordinary life experience but also serious spiritual discipline. Even “discipline” is too narrow a word, for often the search for religious realities is a quest in which we wait upon that which we cannot do or command, or the search is forced upon us unwillingly. The point of this is that only serious religious people, religious adepts, persons disciplined somewhat in the ways of holiness, are able to engage religious realities with those genuinely profound symbols, such as fundamental doctrines, that require the cultivation of special qualities of soul. A good scholar can understand the structure of the symbolic networks, but only a person with a soul transformed by the process of becoming adept with the symbols can engage reality with them. This point is as old as shamans, yogis, and priests, and has only been obscured, not falsified, by the modern Enlightenment insistence that meanings and truths be manifest on ordinary, allegedly universal, consciousness.

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With these philosophical points about engagement and appropriate transformation of soul, and recalling to mind the theory of religious symbols in chapter 3, it is interesting now to examine Emerson’s contribution to the culture of religious doctrine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Oversoul Emerson was by no means the first American thinker to treat religious doctrines as semiotic instruments for engaging God and religious matter, nor the first to say that the religious symbols become usable only as the soul is conformed to take advantage of them. Jonathan Edwards had developed those themes a century earlier with a systematic detail that Emerson never achieved. Edwards’ Treatise on Religious Affections (1959; see J. E. Smith 1992b) examined candidate criteria for whether a person is genuinely engaged with God, and developed a theory of “new sight” that the soul attains when it engages God salvifically. Anybody can study and understand the Bible, Edwards said, which is to enter into its network meaning. But only those truly converted with the new sight are able to see the truth of God in the Bible: they add no new propositions to what they previously had understood the Bible to contain, but they only employ the Bible as the content meaning of their engagement with God. Edwards gave detailed accounts of the aesthetic-type criteria employed in the attainment of virtue—“consent to being in general”—and the enjoyment of the Glory of God.9 Nor was Emerson the last to express these points. Charles Peirce, his younger contemporary, formulated the philosophy of pragmatism, which defined human life as sign-driven engagement with the world and argued that the self is no entity in itself that uses signs to represent or connect with the world but rather is the semiotically integrated set of habits, latent and in exercise, that are formed by the signs (see Colapietro 1989, Corrington 1993, Deuser 1993, and Anderson 1995). Without the habits that arise from using the signs, the signs cannot properly engage. The habits themselves are learned as signs are used, at first incompetently, to engage the world, and the transformative learnings of the self come to make real and effective engagement possible. Peirce was a good Episcopalian who understood how the beauty of liturgy, scripture, the prayers of the tradition, and good preaching seduce the heart to habits of serious religious engagement. To look at Emerson, we should acknowledge first that he took himself to be in opposition to many liturgies and official doctrines. As a young man he left the ministry because he had slowly become convinced that the regular celebration

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of the eucharist was not enjoined by Jesus or biblical authors.10 He often derided doctrines as dead words of the past that inhibit a valid contemporary engagement with God,11 and yet he did value doctrines of a certain sort as precisely the things that direct valid engagement. The most outstanding point of Emerson’s transcendentalist philosophy is its consistent emphasis on direct engagement of nature; “nature” is Emerson’s word for reality and it explicitly means God, the environment, and human beings and their institutions. The very first paragraph of his first book, Nature (1836), states many of the themes he pursued the rest of his intellectual life: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. (1940, 3)

John E. Smith (1968, chapter 1) has pointed out the crucial and innovative importance for American thought of the distinction between direct and immediate experience. Immediate experience would be a kind of intuition not mediated by language, mental ideas, or signs. The hope of the British empirical tradition was that objects would inscribe themselves directly on the tabula rasa of the mind, and in those direct inscriptions would be no error. But Hume and other empiricists realized that this means we experience not the objects themselves but our own mental content and thus lose all contact whatsoever with the objects. For there is no device that could check the objects and their inscriptions for correspondence that would itself abide by the rule of examining mental contents alone. The contemporary claim that all thought is a text about texts is one of the recent versions of the empiricists’ point. The classical American tradition, Smith argued, never sought immediacy of experience but insisted on direct experience as mediated by signs deployed for human purposes. Emerson’s phrase for direct engagement in the passage quoted is “an original relation to the universe.” Note that this is not an immediate, pristine, “deep ecological,” grokking of nature but engagements that issue in poetry, philosophy, and revelation. He called for “our own works and laws and worship,”

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presumably as past ages, in their original relation to the universe, had produced works, laws, and worship. Encountering God, for Emerson, could not be passive recording, or inference from someone else’s experience without our own direct contact, but the kind of engagement or interaction that issues in poetry, philosophy, and religion. Put more prosaically, the engagement of the divine produces religious doctrine, with imagery, rational defensible structure, and worship. It was quite appropriate for past ages to produce such doctrine, as it is right for us. But it is a misuse of the doctrine of others idolatrously to substitute, or masquerade as Emerson said, artifacts for the real things to be engaged. Emerson is known for his original doctrine of God as the Oversoul.12 His own talents did not lie in philosophical structure and argument, but in poetic imagery and inspirational language helpful to worship. But he did have an important philosophical idea. Among the many blessings of bad scholarship is that Emerson read Kant, and Coleridge on Kant, and completely misunderstood him. Kant had developed an interpretation of knowledge according to which it is inconceivable that we ever directly engage anything. On the contrary, the very idea of the real world, for Kant, is the order of subjective mental contents that is regular and steady for all people, in contrast to the order of mental contents that is arbitrary and might be changed, which is fantasy.13 For Kant there is a transcendental ego which forms the principles of synthesis and to which we conform when we think well; but it is not a real object, only a superprinciple of potential syntheses. Later Kantians, such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, developed the notion of the transcendental ego into a conception of God as subject; but in all, the mentalistic imagery persisted and the result was idealism, the doctrine that everything is ideas. With his magnificent misunderstanding, Emerson adopted the word transcendental for his own philosophy, transcendentalism, which was in most respects opposite to Kant.14 Emerson always construed nature as real on its own, however spontaneous and creative, and never confused it with the human sciences and arts, with poetry, philosophy, or religion. Where Kant was preoccupied with the nature of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, Emerson was preoccupied with knowing nature through the arts and sciences and through practical activity. Emerson knew that human beings change nature by their activities, and give it human meaning according to their signs. He celebrated human creative transformations of the world. Yet for him, it is real through all that irrespective of whether it is represented in people’s minds. God as Oversoul is often thought to be a pantheistic conception because Emerson associated it with the whole of nature, including the human parts. The conception is not pantheistic, however, for the Oversoul is that which is expressed through everything in nature. Or rather, everything in nature is an

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expression of the Oversoul which has no character of its own, such as being a soul, except in its expressions.15 In fact, despite the Kantian and idealistic language Emerson sometimes uses, his conception of God is in the plain tradition of logos theism: God’s logos is that in and through which every creature exists, and by relating to that logos people attain to the proper relation to God. Emerson is very clear that the Oversoul is never reducible to the sum of nature’s parts, and it is possible for us to look at nature and miss most of the divinity in it. Yet the principle that is in the human soul is the same as that in natural objects and in social intercourse. For Emerson, the diverse human beings are not different parts of a comprehensive spiritual being. Rather, each is a direct and full expression of the Oversoul itself. Each person is a full embodiment of the Oversoul as that can be expressed through the person’s own position. The positions and arrangements of things are not fixed, however, but in process, always “sliding.” Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Circles,” The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only—are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of the atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. (1940, 286)

Whitehead himself found no more poetic expression of process philosophy. One further point needs to be made about Emerson’s doctrine of the Oversoul. He calls it “Soul,” which makes implicit reference to Augustine’s theory of God, and Emerson frequently refers to Augustine. But there is a crucial point of difference. For Augustine, God embraces the past through memory, and the future through perfect anticipation, bringing all into a kind of totum simul specious present.16 Emerson, however, attacks memory as a tempting substitute for direct encounter. Not that memory itself is bad, but seductive. Emerson is very clear that God is eternal, not merely present in some gussied-up sense.17 Of course Augustine too had said that God creates time, and therefore cannot be in time in any obvious way. But his metaphors of mentality for God have led to

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the emphasis in modern philosophy on present consciousness, with the past reduced to memory and the future merely anticipated. Process philosophers, for instance, say the past is real only as prehended in the present. Emerson was clear that the Oversoul is eternal, no more given to present time than to any other time. He also claimed that our present original engagement gets not only the Oversoul as present to us but as present to Plato, Moses, and Jesus. We encounter the soul that made them great, and them in that soul, in our own encounter with the Oversoul. We are not transported to their time, nor them to us, but we engage them in eternity.18 Emerson’s powers of detailed metaphysics might not have been up to defending this position, but it is a classic Christian one, extremely similar to Peirce’s, and unlike the temporalistic and finitistic conceptions of James, Dewey, and Whitehead.

The Soul Transformed Emerson’s polemic begun in Nature against defining oneself through retrospection is crucial for understanding his approach to doctrine. On the one hand, it is easy to say in classical language that his theology is heavily emphatic of the Holy Spirit, God active and present in our understanding and activity. The past has no authority of its own to bind us by itself. Emerson’s scathing attack on his contemporary Church of England in chapter 13 of English Traits (1940) shows what he thought of the beauty, grace, and good sense of the past which had killed religion. The Anglican preoccupation with remembering stood in the way of any serious engagement with the divine. Yet our own original engagements with the divine, as already noted, are not diaphanous and immediate, but rather are activities that issue in poetry, philosophy, and religion. Religious doctrine, with its imagery, argument, and worship, is at least one of the results of an original encountering of the divine. And that doctrine does not spring de novo from an inspired breast, but as the present divine quickening of an inherited culture so as to fund the poetry, philosophy, and religion of our own moment. Without having read Moses and Plato, our encounters with the divine would be dumb. The chapters at the beginning of Essays: Second Series, “The Poet,” “Experience,” and “Character,” make clear the importance of engaging and learning from other “geniuses” who can arouse our own genius. If we read those Greats without engaging their subject matter from our own original position, however, we would not understand what makes them geniuses and we would be further inhibited from trusting ourselves. The point is, in matters of religious doctrine, we should engage the divine in company with Moses and Jesus, and all the other great spiritual people. We will

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come to understand them and ourselves in that encounter, because we are together with them in the Oversoul’s eternity. They give us the beginnings of language, as adequate for their perspectives, and we, poetically, philosophically, and with religious institutions, extend that for adequacy for our own perspective. In our original engagement with the divine, we can see what Jesus and Moses “really meant.” Here is where the point about the transformation of soul is so important. In Emerson’s view, the engagement of Nature, including God, is transformative in ways that the mere learning of the symbols, the doctrines, is not. The engagement would be blind, and hence not transformative, without some symbols to begin with. But he thought that a spiritual life directed at taking on God oneself, learning what the doctrines really mean and how they are true beyond their initial expression, would transform the soul to be adequate not only to grasp the genius in doctrines of the past but to the task of creative religious living, including expression or doctrine. With respect to inherited doctrines, Emerson thought he had straightforward pragmatic tests. The doctrine of the eucharist was the crisis of his young ministry. He thought that the regular celebration of the eucharist became tedious by its regularity and seduced people into doing it for its own sake so that it blocked the very experiences Jesus was celebrating in what had been taken to be the words of institution. When Emerson engaged the divine with Jesus’ own approach to that meal, as discerned by a critical reading of the scriptures, he could find no serious argument for making the eucharist a regular sacrament. Because his congregation insisted upon its celebration, and he thought that separated them from an original relation to Jesus’ very point, he left the ministry. Not all inherited doctrines are good, only those that facilitate the originality of experience in and of the Oversoul. Scholars who study doctrines for antiquity and consistency might have no serious judgement to make, according to Emerson’s way of thinking, because they might not have souls transformed through original engagement. They would get the network meaning, but could not attain to content meaning and hence could not say whether those doctrines are true and worthy. To unravel the complex levels of meaning in Emerson’s own religious doctrines would be an interesting study. As to their network meanings, they are interwoven with the controversies over Unitarianism versus classical Reformed revivalist and evangelical theology. Emerson looks like a Unitarian because he believed Trinitarian thought was too formulaic and discouraged an appreciation of the spiritual life of the historical Jesus, as Emerson understood him. On the other hand, Emerson looks like an evangelical revivalist with his emphasis on authentic original experience and its transforming conditions and effects.

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The real story about Emerson’s doctrines is deeper than this and probably would show him to be a far more orthodox Christian thinker than he is usually credited to be, however radically he reformulated the ancient doctrines with his own poetry. With respect to the reference of Emerson’s doctrines, he illustrates neatly the scheme of doubled reference sketched in chapter 3 and summarized above. In the first place, he consistently described God in terms of transcendence of the finite, in ever expanding circles. His is perhaps one of the most explicit uses of finite/infinite contrasts in recent theology. He was quite clear that God is expressed in all things but is not to be reduced to those expressions; God is that which makes them what they are as divine expressions. In the second place, he insisted that the engagement of the Oversoul is always from each individual’s perspective. Indeed, this engagement defines that perspective, and the religious genius heroes are more definite than the masses in building and inhabiting perspectives of their own. So the representations involved in religious symbols are tailored to each person’s perspective, doubled with primary and secondary references. The give and take between traditional formulations and one’s own originary one is the detailed expression of perspective making. With respect to interpretants, Emerson again illustrates the theory sketched above. The representative meaning of any doctrine is specific to that doctrine and the specific living contexts in which it is interpreted. Emerson believed generally, however, that American culture is a new context in which the interpretation of doctrine requires a new vocabulary, one developed in association with the complex American encounter with the environment and with opportunities for prosperity.19 The practical interpretations Emerson drew from his doctrines were thus likewise intended to depict how to be religious in this new land. More precisely, Emerson was interested in how doctrines could help anybody, in any land, become religious for himself or herself. For some, this means participating in a church; for others, it might mean just the opposite. Emerson himself believed that many of the inherited institutions gave insufficient inspiration to the task of truly experimental or originary religion. To push that last practical point about interpretation a little harder, Emerson belonged to that group of religious thinkers who believe that religion requires direct encounter with God and that this encounter ought to change the soul and also how one lives in community with others and nature. This position is regarded by many critics as requiring heroism of everyone, which is both unrealistic and demeaning of common people. Because true religious engagement, for Emerson, results in poetry, philosophy, and vital religion, only those ready to be poetic, philosophical, and original in religion can be religious. On the contrary, the critics argue, religion can tolerate and benefit from heroes but is

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genuine when it consists in no more than competence at communal religious culture and practice; valid religion is what anthropologists study, they say. To this criticism, Emerson responded that the very meaning of religion is transcendental in his sense, that is, pushing beyond boundaries that are expressions of God to the God who is expressing. For him, the emphasis on competence at the symbols of communal religious culture and practice is the very thing that kills genuine religion that would have authentic engagement with God, as in the Anglican case. Rather, he argued, real religious symbols and doctrines are not the kinds of things that can be approached with the aim of competence, except in the fairly abstract way of mastering their network connections. Real religious symbols and doctrines are triggers or orientation points for opening up authentic engagement, and when that engagement occurs the symbols are reinterpreted with new life, often with new forms, and a new community of geniuses. Direct religious engagement leads people to poetry, philosophy, and authenticity of originary worship. Emerson indeed was an elitist, distinguishing genuine religious people from the herd of religious believers and practitioners. But his was not an elitism of birth, privileged education, culture, or environment. It was an elitism of daring an “original relation to the universe” and was open to anyone. For Emerson, ignorant frontier people with their eyes open are more likely to be tuned to that original engagement than Harvard divines like himself. The frontier people are not especially privileged, and they might begin their direct encounters with relatively mute and undiscriminate feelings, but the Harvard divines are likely to be oppressed, as we now would say, by their education, which makes them think the doctrines and other symbols are the real thing. From neither frontier people nor the divines, did Emerson expect good poetry, philosophy, or forms of worship that can be helpful to other people. He only thought genuine engagement would drive anyone to imaginative effort, fresh attempts at understanding, and piety constitutive of their own perspectives. In this democratic elitism, calling everyone to transcend the inheritances of culture to engage reality directly and thereby to reform and extend culture, Emerson illustrated a well-noticed American theme. The theme goes back to the pilgrim intention of establishing a holy new nation, and it was developed in the explicit terms of democracy by John Dewey.20 Emerson gave the theme a romantic emphasis. Better than Edwards, he realized the stultifying potentials of doctrines and other symbols of organized religion, and more than Edwards he stressed the public character of the soul in poetry, philosophy, and piety, even if bad poetry, philosophy, and piety. Better than Dewey he recognized the transcendence involved in the “original relation to the universe,” although Dewey’s Common Faith (1934) looks far more religiously potent when read in

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connection with Emerson than it does when read in connection with Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr, who think the payoff requires an interfering God, or in connection with the Columbia antisupernaturalists, who insist Dewey could not have meant what he said in giving an ontological grounding to religion.21

Emerson, Nietzsche, and Jesus: A Challenge to Modernism Two brief observations conclude this discussion of Emerson’s contributions relative to the European religious discussion, one about Nietzsche and the other about the quest for the historical Jesus. As is well known, Nietzsche read Emerson and expressed great appreciation.22 We can see how Nietzsche would respond positively to Emerson’s critique of doctrine and inherited institutions, how he would join in the call for direct and heroic engagement—remember the Camel, the Lion, and the Child—and how he himself practised poetry, philosophy, and perhaps even an Übermensch piety.23 But Nietzsche was caught up in the throes of modernism as Emerson was not. The American tradition is an alternative to modernism and hence also to postmodernism, and it avoids the excesses of modernism (see chapter 7). Several quick illustrations will suffice. Nietzsche and the modernists were deeply exercised to attack the bourgeois class and its culture.24 Although Emerson knew of bourgeois culture, and was an outstanding member of its Boston Brahmin subgroup, that kind of class culture thinking could never be altogether important for him. Americans came from too many nationalities for classlines to be clearcut. The American middle class developed only partly from manufacturing capital, as in Europe, and far more from a mixture of working the land and creating new institutions and markets—the distinctions between farmers, wage earners, and capitalists were slippery and blurred in Emerson’s time. Emerson was not against the bourgeoisie—he would not have recognized them as such—but against any culture that masquerades something else for direct experience. Similarly, Nietzsche and the modernists were anxious to mock, delegitimate, and destroy the old in order to begin anew, as if we could have a new culture that stood on its own justifications with its own efficiency. Emerson by contrast was concerned with our relation to culture, and how that relates us to reality. As to culture, there could be heroes of bourgeois nineteenth-century Europe as well as of the ancient world for him. The issue for Emerson always was whether their poetry, philosophy, and piety results from their own original engagement with the universe rather than merely standing on inheritance. He looked to see how they had enhanced what they had inherited. Emerson’s culture heroes were the

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people whose poetry, philosophy, and piety were sufficiently universal to resonate with others’ own when directly engaging life. So regarding culture, Emerson was positive and appreciative where Nietzsche and so many epigones were negative and destructive, or deconstructive. Emerson today likely would laugh at deconstructionism because nasty logocentrism could be problematic only for people using culture as a substitute for engagement. Emerson would be confident that vital engagement would either correct logocentric distortions without the bother of deconstruction or ignore those cultural artifacts as unhelpful. Finally, Nietzsche and many of the modernists were (and are) totalizers, driven by a kind of Hegelian negative dialectic. Condemn the old, build up the new with superpeople arising from the destruction and death of the holdovers, and demand that justice be measured in terms of the new vision, either of the right or the left. No gentle Emersonian democracy of heroes, quietly taking the originary tasks of poetry, philosophy, and religion to heart in personal expressions, and sometimes in generalizable contributions to art, argument, and piety. Emerson knew and spoke for people whose engagement with the new opportunities in America, the new land and the new possible social arrangements, led them to new visions that valued up or valued down the elements of their inherited ways: rarely “take it or leave it,” but “do something new with it or set it aside for awhile.” We know that Emerson’s period was optimistic and expansionist, and that he and the culture for which he spoke did not appreciate the depths of the problems addressed in their abolitionism and suffragettism. But viewed in comparison with the dominant modernist strains in Europe, Emerson’s vision had and still has power. Robert Bellah and his associates (1991) have argued that the modernist totalitarian experiments of fascism and communism have been a colossal bloody distraction for most of this century and that we need to return to the Progressive program at the end of the last century, which is just about where Emerson left us. Turning to the more explicitly religious topic of the quest for the historical Jesus, a peculiarly Christian form of modernism, Emerson also offers a related position but a clear alternative that escapes its difficulties. The quest for the historical Jesus began as an attempt to shore up Christian doctrine from the attacks of Enlightenment skepticism by basing the doctrine on scientific history. Even if history is not as scientific as many German thinkers hoped in the midnineteenth century, that attempt to shore up Christian doctrine failed. The quest for the historical Jesus found very little indeed that helps doctrine, however much it advances historical understanding (see Wildman 1998). Emerson was intrigued by historical scholarship about Jesus, and his essay about the Lord’s Supper cited earlier is a brilliant forerunner of the kind of

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historical argument that would be given two generations later. But he would say that the attempt to shore up doctrine by historical research misconceives the very nature of doctrine. Doctrines, for him, consist of the expressions that shape our engagements of the divine, and are reshaped by each religious person through that engagement. Their validity depends entirely on the complex dialectic between the self-authenticating ring of an original relation to the universe and the very fallible antecedents and consequences of that in their poetry, philosophy, and piety. Because doctrine is supposed to be public, the question about a genius is whether that person’s doctrines are sufficiently universal as to resonate with others’ direct engagements. Most authentic religious people are such minor poets, philosophers, and worshippers that their doctrines do not travel. The questions of test are never, for Emerson, about the authenticity of an inherited doctrine for its originators, but about its resonance with one’s own engagement, and its capacities to help articulate that engagement. The questions of the validity of one’s own engagements are profound, and judgments about them are fallible, but those are not questions about doctrine per se. The questions about the doctrinal worth of the poetry, philosophy, and piety arising from one’s own engagements are about how well those expressions travel to others who also have original relations to the universe, and perhaps Emerson would allow that we would find such reinforcement in that traveling as to give confidence in the directions of our own engagements. Emerson would regard the attempt to shore up Christianity by the quest for the historical Jesus as explicitly illegitimate because it supposes that the validity of doctrine consists in an inheritable authority. It supposes, for instance, that if Jesus said it, it must be right. But even if we could know with scientific historical certainty what he actually said, whether what Jesus said is right can only be determined within the heart of our own engagement, for Emerson. If it illumines our steps, fine. If not, perhaps Jesus was wrong, or his perspective was so different from ours that our feeble engagements of the Oversoul have not yet made the connection complete. But if it does not resonate it is unimportant, at least for the present. Perhaps deeper engagement will bring it to vitality, and perhaps not. Emerson was pleased that orthodoxy in Christianity consists of doctrines that have indeed illumined many ages and conditions, coming alive to people with very different characters. In terms of the theory of symbols sketched above, we might reserve the word “doctrine” for those religious symbols whose primary referent covers a very diverse range of secondary referents. But there is nothing in orthodoxy, for Emerson, that guarantees that those doctrines will be reinforced in subsequent ages. Indeed, their very power as inherited symbols might inhibit the engagement they are supposed to shape. So Emerson was pleased himself to be a Christian, for that movement has many

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forms with many heroes and he himself could thrill to many. But he was nervous about Christian orthodoxy, not because it was wrong, but because it might be believed instead of used and transformed. For Emerson the past has no legitimate authority in itself and the pretence to inherited authority can block life today; but the past has derivative authority from our own experience when we recognize the expressions of the divine in others. Emerson’s approach to doctrine has many problematic elements, not the least of which is the fact that he was simply not a careful critical philosopher. For many people, his greatest problem is that he could give no criterion, no public test, to judge among religious doctrines or to direct their representative and practical effects. But for Emerson, that is no problem. The public questions are after the fact, and if they are asked prior to, or in the absence of, authentic engagement, they block religion itself and frustrate their own ends. Religion, for Emerson, is not a judgment, as in a doctrine by itself, but a state of moving through engagements with God that manifest themselves in poetic, philosophic, and pious elements of doctrine and yet are not reducible to doctrine. Where modernists insist on a foundation for doctrine, in history, pure faith, or something like that, Emerson insisted on both the roots and fruits of doctrine in vital life, and the freshness of personalized doctrine as expressing that life. This is an extraordinary contribution to religious doctrine, its deployment, and its comprehension. Perhaps its genius might resonate with and better articulate the current religious enthusiasms across the globe that are now dangerously understood in fundamentalist terms.

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PA RT T H R E E Religion and Philosophy in Late Modernity

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CHAPTER 11

The Public Character of Theology and Religious Studies

he American Academy of Religion is at a crisis point in its self-definition, which in turn is critical for the definition of the study of religion. The crisis has been building for many years, as is the nature of such things, but it has been given sharp focus in the report on the profession by Ray L. Hart (1991) published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The visible part of the crisis is the feeling of many people engaged in theological studies, particularly those who themselves are committed to the practice of religion, that they are not welcome in the Academy. They believe that the Academy defines the public objectivity of religious studies in terms of Enlightenment skepticism and holds in contempt the kind of thinking that requires long years of yogic or spiritual practice and that in the Christian tradition has been called “faith seeking understanding.” Often the discontent centers around whether the kinds of theological education appropriate for seminaries find their professional home in the Academy. But the discontent is also felt by professors in liberal arts colleges who see their teaching task as helping students become more sophisticated in their faith. Prior to the complaints from people in theological studies, the chief complaint about the Academy came from some who believe religious studies does indeed require skepticism and distance from religious practice, the complaint, namely, that the leadership is still too fixed on the Christian theological model. The leadership in recent decades, however, has attempted consciously to guarantee representation from all perspectives. That attempt has been overwhelmingly successful. No one approach to the study of religion dominates the leadership of the Academy, and nearly every approach that can be identified is represented. The result is the robust diversity and intellectual power that

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characterizes our regional and annual meetings. The life of the Academy is by no means in crisis but is flourishing. The crisis is in the sense of identity. The crisis of identity will be addressed here in eight theses. The point is not to secure agreement on the theses but to deepen the discussion of the identity of the field of religious studies and to encourage reflection on how each of us relates to that identity. Thesis 1. Religious studies, as properly represented in the American Academy of Religion, comprises all those disciplines and angles of inquiry that individually can contribute to the understanding of some aspect of religion.

By “religion” here is meant whatever any of those disciplines or approaches might mean by religion, including any listing of historical religions, any social science criteriological definitions such as having social maintenance functions, rituals, myths or cosmology, or spiritual practices. Dimensional analyses need also to be included, such as the religious dimension of art, morals, politics, philosophy, and so forth. So do definitions of aspects of religion that arise from specific disciplines, such as psychology of religion, anthropology, sociology, and literature. Disciplines are also part of the field if their subject matter includes elements of religion, such as philology and hermeneutics for dealing with texts that have religious import, archaeology for dealing with religious relics and architecture, history for the study of religions in history and for the history of religions, and the constructive, normative, and critical disciplines for the analysis and assessment of religions’ suppositions, claims, cultural consequences, and obligations, those disciplines often called “theological.” The contradictory of this thesis is the claim that some of the aforementioned disciplines or angles of study do not properly belong to religious studies. This might be because their definitions of religion are mistaken or beside the point, because their methodology or approach is faulty, because their sense of understanding or explanation is inappropriate, or for a host of other reasons. Indeed, any approach to the study of religion is vulnerable to criticism. All of the unimpeachable standard disciplines themselves have been altered through criticism over the decades or centuries. But whether a discipline or an angle of inquiry does or does not belong properly to religious studies is a question within the conversation of religious studies itself, or within the discipline itself insofar as it attempts to understand religion. Therefore all these disciplines and approaches properly belong to the study of religion until they are convincingly demonstrated to be inappropriate. That demonstration would be a proper part of the study of religion.

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Thesis 2. The contributing disciplines and angles of inquiry do not need to communicate with one another in order to do their work; but they do need so to communicate if they are to present themselves within the Academy as part of the field.

Each discipline or approach has a kind of integrity of its own, with selfdefinition, self-criticism, and a kind of ongoing self-regulation concerning what to study and how. The self-regulation is based upon its history, upon the serendipity of new finds and new ideas, and upon a more or less well-defined community of peers constituting a guild or an intellectual project. The field of religious studies, in the corporate person of the Academy, must always be careful not to dictate what a discipline should be doing, what research counts as legitimate, and what teaching is to be respected within the component disciplines. In a certain respect, what the component disciplines and approaches do is a private matter within those communities, for their work must be sensitive to their own internal dialectic. The contradictory of this part of the thesis is the horrendous prospect of censorship and delegitimation. We have observed the tragedy of our colleagues in the American Philosophical Association who have demeaned themselves by claiming that their philosophical opponents are not mistaken but illegitimate, not engaged in “real philosophy.” May the Adityas, Vasus, Rudras, Asvins, and Maruts keep us from that disgrace! In another respect, however, any of the disciplines or approaches within religious studies does need to communicate with other disciplines and approaches if it wants to present itself as more than private, as saying more than “this is what we say religion is,” as claiming that something true and valuable is known here about religion that should be respected by anyone interested. The field of religious studies is not itself a discipline but a topic area within which many approaches make themselves public to one another and thereby represent their work as true, or at least as less false than what previously had been asserted. Although in their private mode the disciplines have their own professional associations and need not regard their topic as even being the same topic as studied by other disciplines, in the private mode the disciplines make no claim for truth that anyone outside the private community logically should respect. To make a truth claim is to present one’s topic as well as one’s claims as public, and to acknowledge that other disciplines too can address that topic. To gain publicity, the disciplines do need to communicate with one another with all the efforts of translation, of objectifying assumptions and methods, and of learning one another’s disciplines that communication requires.

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The contradictory of this part of the thesis is the claim that the results of a discipline’s inquiry are objective and public in themselves irrespective of whether they bear upon any other approach. They may in fact be valid and the validity might be appreciated by all who work within the discipline. But unless a common discussion allows the assertions to be expressed and explored more broadly, the validity cannot be asserted objectively and publically with reference to a topic or subject matter, such as religion, that a discipline shares with other approaches. Thesis 3. Objectivity in religious studies consists in the sustainability of results through a process of criticism that makes the results vulnerable to correction.

The complexity of this philosophic thesis requires clarification through some distinctions that are at the heart of what makes religious studies academically objective. First is the distinction between truth and objectivity. Truth, as people have said since Aristotle, is the property of assertions that assert of their subject what the subject is and deny of it what it is not (Metaphysics 4.7.1011b26). To put the point in more contemporary terms, truth is the characteristic of interpretations that represent the interpreted subject appropriately in the respects in which the interpretation interprets the subject. The meaning of truth, just indicated in one form of expression, is different from the criteria by which we can tell when an assertion is true, a topic to which we shall return in a moment. Whether an interpretation is true is a function of the reality it interprets; either the reality is as the interpretation asserts, in the respect in which the interpretation is made, or reality is not that. An interpretation is true or false whether the interpreter or an interpreting community knows it or not. There are two relative modalities of truth, however, private and public. A truth is private, relatively speaking, when the interpretive context in which a case can be made for it is an individual or a group with a closed discourse. A truth is public, relatively speaking, when cases can be made for it in a variety of interpretive contexts, indeed, in any interpretive context that might be relevant. The relativity of the private/public distinction is illustrated in the fact that an interpetation might be publically true within a specialized discipline, available for correction by all who practise the discipline’s methods, at the same time that the interpretation is private with respect to the other disciplines whose differing methods might provide other interpretive contexts. The previous thesis asserted that the various disciplines of religious studies might proceed quite well within their individual publics but that they must communicate with each other if their interpretations are to be public as part of the field of religious studies.

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The criteria for determining whether an interpretation is true depend on any or all of the conditions that allow us to engage the subject matter. In very limited contexts, truth might be a characteristic we are willing to assert because a given method has been followed. But those contexts are indeed limited because methods themselves are always up for criticism. A number of years ago Van Harvey (1966), following Stephen Toulmin (1957), well characterized the process of appraising claims according to diverse criteria as “making a case.” The point is that different kinds of cases are relevant to different subject matters and also to different disciplines, and for different perspectives. For an interpretation arising within one discipline to make itself public to other disciplines is for it to be prepared to make a case for itself that is accessible within the approach of the other disciplines, or to show how the other disciplines ought to respect the original case. Objectivity is not merely being public but is rather a subjunctive property of a truth claim with its cases. Objectivity is the sustainability of the claim through a process of criticism that would correct the claim if correction were needed. Objectivity is thus not an actual status but a status concerning how the claim would fare in diverse circumstances. When a new interpretive context does correct an interpretation, we see that the claim was not as objective as previously thought but now has been corrected and can be taken to be objective until yet another correction seems needed.1 The philosophical supposition behind this point is that human thinking is always in the middle, always assuming things that need correction and sometimes finding that correction. The question to ask about candidates for knowledge is not whether they are derived from a sure foundation nor whether they have passed all the tests. The question is whether they are vulnerable to correction and are sustained while vulnerable. An intellectual discipline is distinguished from random thoughts by its methods of making itself vulnerable to correction. Attempts to render truth claims invulnerable to correction are desperately mistaken. Objectivity in religious studies then comes when its component disciplines and approaches make themselves vulnerable to correction by each other. Of course not all disciplines are relevant for the correction of others, and not all attempts at criticism do more than beg the issue. Whether a criticism is a valid correction is itself a matter for which a case must be made. But the objectivity of a truth claim requires its vulnerability to correction. A claim is objective to the extent that the cases to be made for it can be sustained through critical processes that would correct it. The criteria for determining whether the claim is true can be exercised only in a public and objective context.

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Thesis 4. The phrase “theological studies” comprises those disciplines within religious studies that deal with first-order normative issues in religion.

By “first-order normative issues” is meant the matters about which religions intend to suppose or assert something true, good, or obligatory insofar as these are religiously important. These suppositions or assertions include characterizations of religiously important ultimate realities, for instance God, the Absolute, Brahman, the Dao, Principle, human origins, and destiny. They also include matters of belief and practice for the living of the religious life. And they include normative analyses of the religiously important aspects of history, culture, the arts, and society. Theological studies of course begin by analyzing what religions assume or assert about these normative issues, and theology in this broad sense is generally sensitive to the nuances and variations on symbolic religious meanings in both illocutionary and performative senses. But theological studies also go on to examine what ought to be said about the true, the good, and the obligatory in normative religious issues, to assess whether religions have it right, and to make practical judgments about how to face those issues both within and without institutionalized religious practice. Theological studies in this sense are normative disciplines, going far beyond description or any attempt to limit themselves to value-free analysis. Thus they are not immediately continuous with those disciplines who believe their objectivity consists in value neutrality, and they need to make a case for normative judgment to people schooled to attempt to shun it. Nevertheless, like the value-neutral approaches the theological disciplines ought to be publically objective in the sense defined in the third thesis, namely, that their normative judgments need to make themselves vulnerable to criticism from all sides and to sustain themselves through the process of correction. The relevant overt contradictory of the thesis that theological studies makes normative judgments about religious matters is the claim that there are no publically sustainable, objectively correctable, normative judgments to be made. Admitting the difficulty of making such judgments, the claim they cannot be made at all is itself extremely difficult to sustain. It founders on the selfreferential question of its own truth. And it founders on the broadly accepted content of many normative claims such as “Might does not make right” and “Justice is obligatory and its failure defines fault.” The relevant covert contradictory of the thesis is the claim that normative theological judgments always unfairly superimpose one person’s, group’s, or religion’s way of valuing things on others’. Sometimes this claim is made by pure relativists who say that no normative judgments are better than others, a position hard to sustain normatively. Other times it reflects an historical observation

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that the normative judgments are imposed because of the power of the imposer, not because of the validity of the arguments justifying the theology. These observations are not limited to the power politics of imperialism, but also apply to the inevitable historical power of an established discipline. Nevertheless, the public debate within religious studies, as in any academic field, is precisely to sniff out and identify the unfair influences that power alone might have on the persuasiveness of argument. The more antecedently powerful an established mode of analysis, the more vulnerable it is to criticism on that account, and the more ready it should be to adopt corrections where it is shown that power corrupts its arguments. Thesis 5. Both individuals (including those who are not religiously affiliated) and religious communities need intellectual guidance and critical reflection on religiously important issues, and rightly can turn to theological studies to pursue that in disciplined ways.

The bite of this thesis is that there are practical religious as well as purely intellectual reasons for undertaking theological studies. The practical religious reasons most often give particular historical shape to theological studies that they might not have when pursued for purely academic reasons. An individual, for instance, even one who is unaffiliated with any religious tradition and alienated from the common religions of the culture, might ask theological questions because of an encounter with great suffering or tragedy, or to make sense of a profound mystical experience, or to cope with a child’s plan to marry someone from a different religion. Religious communities, in turn, usually establish institutions that include thinkers and an environment for theological reflection for the sake of acquiring the best normative theology possible; these institutions include schools, universities, seminaries, monasteries, temple complexes, ecclesiastical bureaucracies, and religious conferences and councils. There are two important contradictories to this complex thesis. The first is that religious people do not really need theological study because religion is performative rather than intellectual. The argument here is that our understanding of religion has been skewed by the Christian, indeed by the Protestant, preoccupation with theological orthodoxy. Orthopraxy, rather, is at the heart of religion, and is even at the heart of what masquerades itself as concern for true belief. This argument against the religious importance of truth has some small historical merit, because indeed the shape of theological studies, as well as of religious studies, has been skewed by the Protestant Christian interest in doctrine and belief. Nevertheless, orthopraxy by itself is sufficient only under wholly static conditions when no problems are perceived and no alternatives

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present themselves. In all other conditions orthopraxy is underdetermined if praxis is to be related to concrete circumstances, and the normative issues of theological studies are required to be addressed in order to determine orthopraxy. This holds for religiously alienated individuals as well as for organized religious communities, and neither individuals nor communities can fail to be affected in our time by modernization and other changing conditions that call for theological reflection. The second and more important contradictory is that theological studies are not the right place to go in order to gain practical religious intellectual guidance. Rather, guidance must be sought from revelatory sources that, while not necessarily acultural, are transcendent of those cultural norms for good thinking that guide theological studies. This is an extremely complicated argument that has been fought out in our own time with immense practical consequences in American education. To simplify the matter for the sake of brevity, the argument against theological studies on behalf of revelation has been associated with Karl Barth’s kerygmatic theology, and the defense of theological studies as critical reflection on first-order normative religious issues has been associated with Paul Tillich. The differences between those two Protestant theological giants have been unfairly exaggerated. Nevertheless, in American academic politics, during the two decades after the Second World War, the Barthians attained to power in many of the major Protestant seminaries and delegitimated their Tillichian opponents as “mere philosophers” caught by the religion of culture, not real theologians at all. The Tillichians and many others who were associated with them often left or were forced out of seminaries to found liberal arts departments of religious studies, not based on a seminary model but on the critical examination of religion in culture. Although the Tillichians and their theological colleagues were genuinely theological in the sense of asking first-order normative questions, they were soon joined by social scientists, philologists, comparativists, and non-Christian area or tradition specialists to make up religious studies departments as we know them today. There are analogues to the Barth/Tillich distinction in Roman Catholicism and Judaism.2 If history is the judge, the Tillichians seem to have won the day within Christian theology with the argument that alleged revelatory spirits must be tested, and the tests come back to the complex business of making a case for your revelation.3 It may be true historically to say that the field has been won by the conception of theological studies as critical reflection on normative, first-order religious issues, and that this conception can easily acknowledge and honor revelations of many types. Nevertheless, there is a deep uneasiness on the part of theologians in nearly every religious tradition that the larger public theological

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discussion will not honor their revelation. Part of the discomfort in the Academy felt by some people associated with theological studies is the belief that they should not have to submit the revelatory or authoritative base of their tradition’s practice to public examination. The next two theses address aspects of this point. Thesis 6. Theological studies need to relate to the history and symbols of concrete religious traditions, analyzing their suppositions in context and reconstructing them in terms of the contemporary normative discussion.

Both theoretical and practical considerations justify this thesis. The theoretical ones have to do with maintaining a continuity between the most abstract concepts used in theological studies and their origins in early and late symbolic guiding principles of behavior in religious matters. Abstraction is always a matter of selection, and critical abstraction controls for normative judgments about what is worthwhile to select out and what can be left behind. Even the most abstract notions, such as Emptiness, Being, Nothingness, Goodness, Obligation, Harmony, Suffering, Sin, and sometimes God, are distillates of matters that are religiously interesting in concrete practice. Perhaps philosophy of religion is well defined as the critical study of what is left out and what is carried along in religious abstraction; in this sense, philosophy of religion is a crucial part of theological studies. The contradictory of the thesis along its theoretical lines is the claim that theologians can just make up their symbols as they need them, without respect for history and traditional developments. The answer to the contradictory is that any symbols have depths like archaeological layers and that instant symbol making cannot control for the hidden implications of these. Even the sheer rejection of a symbol requires knowing what is implied in the rejection if it is to be sustainable while vulnerable to correction. The practical reason for relating theological studies to the concrete symbols and significant practices of religion is that this addresses the real context within which religious questions need practical theological guidance. A theologian thinking in and for a religious community needs to appropriate and articulate the symbols of the community’s cultural-linguistic system in a normative contemporary mode. Perhaps much reconstruction is required in order to appropriate the traditional symbols into a normatively defensible theological claim. Perhaps also the traditional symbols need to be greatly supplemented to address present realities, and perhaps they need to be rejected or sharply modified in the present situation. But unless they are addressed, the theologian is not dealing with the religiously important first-order normative issues as they are faced

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by the religious community. To be what Christians call a “church theologian,” or what might more universally be called a “theologian within and for a religious tradition,” is critical to appropriate and reconstruct the tradition’s symbols. The contradictory of the practical side of the thesis is the claim that religious identity need not have a past to continue, reform, or reject. But without a past there is no responsibility, and religious judgments lose any practical relevance. To be religious just for the present is to be religious in theory alone. In their efforts to relate practically to the symbols of concrete religious traditions, theological studies are often greatly aided by those disciplines within religious studies that sometimes eschew normative first-order issues. Historical, comparative, and social scientific approaches give access to the symbols and their concrete roles through history that sometimes are obscured by theological studies that jump prematurely to normative judgments. Thesis 7. Theological studies need to be public and objective in the same sense that applies to religious studies generally, and religious communities should have just as great a commitment to this as should scholars with purely intellectual motives.

To be able to sustain one’s case while being vulnerable to correction from any angle is the only ground one might have for asserting that normative claims on first-order issues are true. Precisely because the first-order issues often have to do with what people ought to be, do, and believe in religious matters, there is a great practical importance to the pursuit of truth in theological studies. Theological truth might well be a different kind of truth from classifying, reporting, or describing. If it is, a case needs to be made for that, such as Lindbeck (1984) and others have made, and that case examined. Then whatever criteria for truth are appropriate to theology’s kind of truth need to be applied and the results assessed. To the extent a theologian can sustain a case under conditions of vulnerability, the case can lay claim to being true and it should be respected by anyone who takes the trouble to follow the issues. To the extent the case cannot be sustained, its public and objective claim to truth is in question. When an important first-order religious claim is in question, religious individuals and communities, as well as scholars, have a vital interest in pressing ahead for the truth. The rough contradictory of this is that the criteria for truth do not lie in making a case but in the authority for the source of truth. But an authority needs to be identified and justified, and the appeal to authority itself needs to be justified. Most thinkers who appeal to authority address all these issues, which is to say they make a case for their authority. But if the task of justification is

AU: critical to ok, in lieu of critically to

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dismissed with the assertion that the authority is authoritative and that’s that, then the claim to truth is implicitly abandoned and a retreat is made to the claim that this is what I or my community believes is true. The fact that something is believed is an historical or sociological observation about the situation, not a normative claim that the belief is true and that anyone should believe it. A subtler version of the contradictory is that the authority or revelation cannot fairly be appreciated and judged unless the critic enters into the community of practice and faith and gains a crucial probative experience. Edward Conze (1962, 17–21), the great British Buddhist, argued that no religion based on a yogic practice could be understood by a Westerner whose cognitive model is science because yogic practice and science respect very different ideas of experience. For the Western science model, experience has to do with sensation, and one can learn to construct instruments for sensing and to interpret the sensations mathematically with a decade or less in graduate school. For the yogic model, however, experience means the cumulative wisdom that results from physical discipline, habits of healthy and moral living, years of cultivated associations with more experienced people, and many decades of meditation, contemplation, or prayer. Similarly it can be argued that one must be an observant orthodox Jew in order to understand Judaism, or a practising Christian in order to derive the understanding for which faith is the seeking. The yogic requirement of experience so common to many religions stands opposed to the Enlightenment sense of experience as proving or disproving things by a quick positivistic test. And it is that Enlightenment mentality that some religiously committed thinkers believe characterizes religious studies. But quite to the contrary, the experiential yoga argument is a powerful public critique of Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism in religious studies. The range of valid applications of Enlightenment thinking is far narrower than some people once believed, and this point is being widely recognized. All this is to say that the varieties of the faith-seeking-understanding position have sustained their case that a fair judgment concerning some kinds of theological matters requires participation in their community of practice and belief. For a theological claim to be publically vulnerable does not mean that it must be reduced to what is easily grasped by an external observer. The state of religious studies now is that the conditions of authentic dialogue among adepts in different religions are far from established; moreover, even the categories according to which theologies can be compared are only beginning to be formulated. Because of the relatively primitive state of religious studies in these regards, public vulnerability is difficult to attain. Nevertheless, such vulnerability should be sought if the truth of theological matters is important. Scholars of theological studies with concern for the authority of their own tradition should not fear

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that it could legitimately be condemned by being subjected to inappropriate external standards; they should fear rather that the work of making their claims publically vulnerable will be too hard for anyone to bother. Thesis 8. The field of religious studies embraces all the world’s religions, not only as subject matter but as presenting scholarly traditions, including theological studies.

Religious studies as embodied in the American Academy of Religion developed at first very much as an American phenomenon, with historical conditions shaping its course, such as the initial focus on the teaching of Christian religion, the disputes between Barthians and Tillichians, the effects of Vatican II, and the conversations between Christians and Jews. The dialectic of public objectivity has driven the field to widen so as to include all religions within its survey, and that same dialectic requires respect for the styles and standards of scholarship and critical reflection in all those traditions. Respect, of course, does not imply acceptance. Just as Western styles of scholarship are constantly changing, as from the narrow rationalism and empiricism of Enlightenment thinking to richer kinds of participant-observer critical reflection and speculation, so are the styles and standards of scholarship in other traditions in transition. Modernization is affecting other religion’s senses of self-understanding as it did those of Judaism and Christianity a century and a half ago. Moreover, the dialogue among religious traditions itself is affecting their senses of inquiry and understanding. All styles and standards of inquiry and understanding, including those typical of Western intellectual culture, need to sustain themselves under conditions of vulnerability to all angles of criticism. The discomfort currently felt within the Academy by scholars who believe their faith is not respected in public academic discourse, or that it is threatened if made vulnerable, will be magnified manifold in the case of scholars faithful to traditions other than Judaism and Christianity. If the dialectical development of religious studies from its origins in Western disciplines of thought requires it to make itself public and vulnerable to other traditions of disciplined inquiry as represented in other religious traditions, then we must squarely face the question of the integration of theological studies into religious studies. Discomfort is always felt when the assumptions of one’s project are objectified and placed in a larger context. The discomfort is intensified when one’s own symbols and heroes are not predominantly honored in the larger context. So we may understand those among us who believe their scholarship and religious practice are not honored in a context that prizes Enlightenment skepticism. So we may also understand those who identify with the science of reli-

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gion and believe the context is preformed and controlled by a theological agenda. The argument here is intended to intensify the feelings of discomfort even more on both sides, because they call for an engagement of the issues at every level. Let us take pride in belonging to an academic profession blessed with such diversity of disciplines and angles of inquiry that its subject matter cannot for long be obscured by the limitations of any one. Let us take comfort from the dual tolerance of religious studies, that it encourages each approach to work out its own development on its own terms, and that it welcomes each approach to present its results for scrutiny and use in the larger field. Let us take courage to formulate our inquiries so that they are vulnerable to correction, both within our disciplines and within the more general dialectic of religious studies. Let us acknowledge that the normative issues of faith and practice, intellectual and performative, verbally articulated and danced through space, are susceptible to critical analysis, disciplined formulation, speculative reconstruction, and normative valuation. In this acknowledgment, let us honor the sources of authority and revelation while engaging in critical discussion of how they are understood and justified. Let us embrace the human need for practical answers to religious questions, and the peculiar shapes this human need gives to theological studies both for communities and for individuals. In this embrace, let us not confuse practical need or traditional inertia with good reasons for addressing the normative issues one way rather than another. Let us admit the necessity for theological studies to come to terms with the concrete symbols embodied in religious scriptures, traditions, and experience, recognizing both that the symbols need to be understood in terms of their original and developing contexts and that the critical evaluation and reconstruction of them is an essential part of theological study. In this admission, let us recognize the mutual needs of theological studies and the nontheological disciplines of religious studies for one another. Let us insist that if theological studies are to present their judgments as true, interesting, valid, and worthy of respect, they should engage in making vulnerable cases for them that all the perspectives on the field might address. In this insistence let us be aware that not everyone will be willing to enter into religious life and practice sufficiently to be able to judge a case, but that the need to do so is respected by all. Let us move forward from the study of the world’s religions by the scholarly traditions of the West alone to the engagement of mutual understanding, of

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critical objections to Western scholarship, and of new disciplines and languages that might embrace a larger culture of inquiry. In this step into a genuinely omnicultural understanding of religious studies, let us not abandon the hard-won methods of making our inquiries vulnerable to correction that have given Western scholarship its sympathies, sharpness, and dispassionate piety before the facts. But let us also expect that an enlarged field of mutual engagement will change us all for a better that cannot now be told. Excellence in the study of religion is vulnerability to correction.

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CHAPTER 12

Religions, Philosophies, and Philosophy of Religion

The Impact of Scholarship on Philosophy of Religion he most dramatic change in the academic study of religion in the last twenty-five years has been the vast increase in the knowledge, by Western scholars, of the world’s diverse religious traditions. Before this, the background images of religion that came to mind were drawn mainly from European religions, often in their Enlightenment representations. This was so even when the topic of discussion was, say, Confucianism, and the question was whether it is a religion: the images, metaphors, associations, and weighting of the importance of specific ideas and emotions framing the question came from Christian and Jewish models plus a little Greek paganism for comparative breadth. The dramatic change in the academic study of religion caused by vastly increased knowledge is different from equally or more dramatic changes in the thinking of religious cultures other than those friendly to the Western academy. For those other religious intellectual cultures, perhaps particularly that of Islam, encounter with the Western academy itself has been extraordinarily dramatic. The topic here, however, is limited to the understanding of religion in the Western academic sense, acknowledging that the academy is expanding beyond its Western source through the participation of scholars steeped in other cultures. Although there remain important conceptual questions about the nature of religion as such, many scholars would prefer the operative phrase to be the study of religions, not the study of religion (see Hart 1991). A number of factors have contributed to this change. A general cause was the political temperament of anti-imperialism that made concerned interest in non-Western and primal religions an academic

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(and social) imperative and at the same time made the assumptions of the theistic problematic (existence of God, theodicy, epistemologies of revelation, and so forth) something of an embarrassment. This political temperatment was in full swing when the International Journal of Philosophy of Religion published its first number in 1970. A second contributing cause was the state twenty-five years ago of the philological study of religions with texts in non-European languages. The great pioneering efforts at making critical editions and translating texts into European languages, of course, were made in the nineteenth century. James Legge’s translations of Chinese texts and Max Muller’s editions of Sacred Books of the East are examples; also some of the great work in anthropology and phenomenology of religion was done then and in the early decades of the twentieth century (see chapter 6). But in 1970 there were flourishing graduate departments of Asian, East Asian, South Asian, or Buddhist studies and the like, or religion or philosophy departments with those specialities, at Hawaii, Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago, Wisconsin, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, as well as at other places in the United States and outside, and also at non-English-speaking European and Latin American universities. Though each of these departments might have had very few senior scholars at that time, nearly every graduate student had to edit or translate a text, or provide an historical analysis of the setting of some text or practice. In the intervening quarter century there has been thus an extraordinary multiplier effect of translations and detailed historical studies. The multiplier effect continues because universities such as Boston University, which in 1970 at its most exotic had a two-person program in Islamic studies, a Hindu teaching in its Methodist seminary, and a Pakistani Christian teaching religion, now offers philologically sound graduate programs in Islam (still), Hindu religions, Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and anthropology of religion, all taught by professors whose doctorates date since 1970 and who publish in technical journals. Whereas in 1970 there were good translations of the “great” texts, such as the Princeton Source Books (Radhakrishnan and Moore 1957; Chan 1963) in Chinese and Indian Philosophy,1 now there are good translations of less great texts, of the “alternatives,” and of secondary literature. In Chinese studies we now are in the midst of a revisionist controversy concerning the ways the academic giants of 1970 carved up the field.2 The result is that contemporary philosophers of religion have as much scholarly background now about the religions of Asia, Africa, and primal peoples as they did about Christianity, Judaism, and (for the daring ones) Islam in 1970. A third contributing cause is that increased economic, military, and political internationalization has stimulated vastly increased international scholarly contact. There has long been an international community of North Atlantic

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scholars, but now the Muslim world has entered into serious contention with Western traditions of scholarship as have the scholars of India, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia.3 For better or worse, the second language of most scholars who operate in more than one language is English; and most scholars who are limited to only one language are native speakers of English. Although the international study of religion(s) has far to go to attain to equality of voice and an ability to give sensitive readings to diverse traditions, that process has made decisive strides. As a result of these and doubtless many other factors, the contemporary “phenomena” of religions presented to philosophy of religion for philosophic study are global and pluralistic in breadth and deeply framed by high standards of scholarly analysis in philological and historical areas. Assuming that the background study for philosophy of religion is philosophy, not some philologically oriented study of a religion, there is nevertheless a more than adequate literature in English and other European languages for the empirical knowledge of religions appropriate for philosophy of religion. It takes but a moment to recall that philosophy of religion as we know it is a part of Western philosophy and arose in the modern period in the writings of people such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel, each of whom was concerned in his way to protect the autonomy of philosophic reflection from absorption into theology and each of whom took religion to be a kind of naturalized monotheism related to the Bible and institutionalized in Christianity and Judaism (and more distantly Islam).4 Polytheistic religions and religions of “principles” or personal enlightenment and transformation were viewed as immature or partial religions, perhaps insufficiently distinguished from ethics or inadequately developed into metaphysics. Currently popular political thinking attributes this narrowness of vision to European imperialism but a simpler explanation is that those philosophers identified religion with the ones they knew intimately as culturally dense and intellectually developed in tandem with Western philosophy and that they recognized as religious only those elements in other religions that seemed to be counterparts to European theism. There was too little information to put together visions of alternative dense and developed religious cultures. That information is easily available now, as is foreign travel and conversation with neighbors of non-European backgrounds. What a surprise it is, then, to discover that academic philosophy of religion, as represented in this distinguished journal, has not changed its agenda much at all in twenty-five years! The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion has had an International Advisory Board of Editors from its beginning in 1970 to the present. There were four Asianists or scholars of non-European religions on

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that Board for volume 1 in 1970 and the same number on the board for volume 33 in 1993 (the last complete volume available at the time of this writing). In volume 1 there were fifteen articles in addition to a complete issue devoted to Hegel. Of those fifteen, two dealt with issues outside the problematic of Western theism, an article by Kenneth Inada on “Buddhist Naturalism and the Myth of Rebirth” and one by Hajime Nakamura called “Pure Land Buddhism and Western Christianity Compared: A Quest for Common Roots of Their Universality.” The others were within the Western theistic problematic: “Two Forms of Idolatry,” “Differing Perspectives in Religion and Philosophy,” “The Language of Religious Experience,” “A Study of the Concept of Mystical Experience,” “Word and Idea,” “Self and World as Starting Points in Theology,” “Language, Berkeley, and God,” “A Note on Love and Obligation (and Utility),” “Jaspers as the Metaphysician of Tolerance,” “ The Epistemic Status of Analogical Language,” “The Theological Import of Cartesian Doubt,” “Hume’s Philosophy of Religion,” and “Can Theology Survive the Impact of the Sciences?” plus five essays on Hegel. In volume 33 there are ten essays, on “Descartes, Modalities and God,” “Scotus on the Existence of a First Efficient Cause,” “Arbitrariness, Divine Commands, and Morality,” “On a Not Quite Yet ‘Victorious’ Modal Version of the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God,” “Theological Fatalism and Moral Confusion,” “The Problem of Divine Exclusivity,” “Preserving Perseverance,” “How Good/Bad Is Middle Knowledge?” “A Latter-day Look at the Foreknowledge Problem,” and “Divine Foreknowledge and the Libertarian Conception of Human Freedom.” There is not a single topic outside the Western problematic; David Hume could have addressed every single topic on its own terms (if someone had explained to him Hartshorne’s symbolic modal reformulation of Anselm’s ontological argument). The suggestion that religion is something more than Western theism has dropped away. Perhaps the two articles in volume 1 merely reflected the 1970s fascination with exotic religious alternatives, not the beginning of an empirical reorientation of philosophy of religion. The articles in both the first and last volumes are of high quality. On the positive side it must be said that part of the latter’s reemphasis on eighteenth-century European topics derives from the truly exciting recent recovery of religious rationalism in the work of such philosophers as Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, George Mavrodes, James F. Ross, and Philip Quinn. But on the negative side, it must be said, from the perspective of the state of Western scholarship about world religions, that these articles in volume 33 represent less philosophy of religion, as the eighteenthcentury philosophers would have intended that term, than the philosophy of Christian (and maybe Jewish) theism. A comparison of the first and last volumes of a single journal is not a fair sample, of course, and is a rhetorical exaggeration.

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There have been many articles in other volumes that deal with a broadly religious problematic. But the rhetorical point about a general narrowing rather than broadening of the problematic stands. How do we account for this reinforcement of the Western theistic problematic in philosophy of religion, acknowledging the point above that analytic philosophy’s religious rationalism merits attention on its own? It cannot be because the scholars in question themselves did not expand their horizons. Of the authors of Western-oriented topics in volume 1, Hartshorne, Macquarrie, J. E. Smith, Harris, Capaldi, and perhaps others have subsequently written out of a broader problematic, with Hartshorne and Smith making repeated contributions and taking part in many conferences set in the context of comparative religions.5 The matter has to do with how philosophers define philosophy of religion, and thus why they send some papers to philosophy of religion journals and others to Philosophy East and West or to Dharma. Like most definitions, that of philosophy of religion comes mainly through negation, through identifying its boundaries. There are many contemporary near neighbors: confessional theology or its equivalent in other religions of “practice,” philosophical theology, the historical, empirical, social scientific, or literary study of particular religions, comparative religions, metaphysics, philosophy of culture, and ethics or social philosophy. An irenic philosopher of religion would define that field as philosophic reflection in and about any and all of these, emphasizing philosophic methods and questions addressed to religious topics. But philosophers of religion appear not to be irenic as a group and, by and large, define the discipline as having sharp boundaries. The way to have sharp boundaries from all these neighboring traditions is to emphasize the questioning of assumptions of empirical studies and to assert the independent authority of philosophy as a discipline by either adopting a skeptical attitude or giving a rational answer to skepticism. Combining these two, one can honor skepticism while questioning assumptions of empirical research only if one avoids much involvement in the empirical research itself, which would be coopting. Hence, there is little motive to involve oneself in religions beyond the theistic heritage of European culture. And thus philosophy of religion, in attempting to have its own definition and integrity, lands squarely in the problematic of eighteenth-century Western theism and its Western critics.

A Definition of Philosophy of Religion While there is nothing at all wrong with the eighteenth-century problematic of Western theism, it is anachronistic if abstracted out by itself and outrageously

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narrow to define a discipline. Therefore it is worthwhile to propose another definition of philosophy of religion, borrowing from Whitehead’s remark that philosophy is the critic of abstractions (1925, chapter 3; 1929, chapter 1). Philosophy of religion is the critic of abstractions in religions. This definition easily encompasses as a special case the narrower tradition of philosophy of religion focused on the problematic of Western theism, for instance concerning proofs for God, theodicy, epistemological problems of revelation, and the rest, for these are all abstractions typical of Western theisms. But because all religions and their abstractions are the province of philosophy of religion so defined, other problematics become topical. Instead of God, other types of ultimate reality need to be considered, including religions that deny ultimacy in senses parallel to monotheism.6 There are many models of spiritual perfection other than those of righteousness as promoted in the West. Some epistemological problematics in religion have to do not with revelation versus reason but with authenticity of transmission of sacred texts or traditions.7 By opening philosophy of religion to many deep problematics other than Western theism, this expanded definition will also call for a reexamination of Western thesisms themselves, particularly Judaism, which has too easily been assimilated to an alternative religion to Christianity according to Christianity’s model of religion. In order to make this new definition of philosophy of religion plausible, it is necessary to say something more about what is meant by abstraction in religion, of which philosophy should be critic. Abstraction generically is selectivity of response and is unavoidable wherever there are potential alternatives for response. If one’s tradition of liturgical dancing in religion offers opportunities for starting either clockwise or counterclockwise and one selects one or the other, that is an abstractive representation of the tradition. One can reinforce the richness of the tradition by exercising each of the options on different occasions, but each time is an abstraction from the whole. Abstraction selects out certain elements to be actualized or enacted or represented and implies that the elements and options left behind can be treated as trivial, at least for this occasion. Abstraction thus involves both gain and loss. What is gained is definiteness and focus. What is lost is what cannot be carried along in the abstraction. The degree of loss depends on the ease with which what is lost can be recovered and on the intrinsic worth of what is lost. Sometimes elements in a religion are just plain bad and ought to be lost. Reform movements aim to abstract in such a way as to carry on what is good in the tradition while successfully abandoning what is bad. Other times, elements in the religion have positive worth but are not as important as other things with which they are incompatible; wise abstraction abandons the less important in favor of the more important. Importance

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and worth are complex notions, of course, having to do with issues such as inclusiveness and exclusiveness, immediate satisfaction and long-range payoff, fruitfulness, the increasing or decreasing of options, for good or evil, and so forth. Philosophy of religion should be critical of abstractions in the sense of laying out all the relevant senses of value, showing what is gained and lost in various abstractions in religion, and assessing that. As such its results would be useful for the various studies of religion, for theology and its parallels, and for other branches of philosophy, overlapping but not be reduced to them. The example of dancing as an abstraction was chosen deliberately to emphasize that much more of religion is practice than pure intellectual interpretation. The European tradition of philosophy of religion, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, has emphasized the criticism of beliefs. All religions of course have beliefs about the world, life, the religious “problem,” the pursuit of the religious “answer,” transcendent or extraordinary, and so forth.8 These beliefs have many different kinds of symbolic expression, from the mythic to the metaphysical, including creedal doctrines, stories, law codes, and various forms of commentary on all the above. Any formulated belief is an abstraction from the mass of other formulations and not quite formulated instincts, habits, and hunches. Furthermore, any formulated belief employs symbols that abstract from the welter of things to which they refer. An ash tree as the axis mundi is as much an abstraction as the act of esse, only a different kind of abstract symbol (see Eliade 1959). Some thinkers like to say that narratives are more concrete than philosophical categories. But that is just not true. Narratives never tell “all the facts” but only certain people’s stories, abstracted to form a coherent line, and to the exclusion of the meanings of episodes for other peoples. The Exodus story of liberation is a Canaanite story of oppression and an Egyptian story of betrayal and thievery.9 Narratives are merely abstractions different in kind from the categories of a philosophical system or from the commandments in a law code. Each carries along on the one hand and on the other trivializes different kinds of things. And there are levels of abstraction among stories, categories, laws, and so forth. Moreover, stories employ or presuppose categories and habits. Categories take their plausibility from paradigmatic stories that use them, on and on. Philosophy of religion needs to sort the kinds of abstractions and trace the particulars in historical religions. Religious symbols expressing beliefs function in various intentional contexts. Sometimes they are meant straightfowardly to represent what they are supposed to represent and are to be interpreted with regard to their truth. This is a roughly theological intentional context, though it is important to remember that the form of theological symbols includes not only propositional expressions of doctrine but stories, laws, commentaries, songs, and so forth. Another

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kind of intentional context is where religious beliefs are used to guide practical life, as in a religious community or in a political group sensitive to religious dimensions of things. The question of truth is not irrelevant here, but the additional questions of how the beliefs are received and embodied in practices and institutions need to be raised; moral and psychological consequences, as well as aesthetic and political ones might be important. Religious actions, habits, and institutions, though guided or shaped by beliefs, are abstractions of their own sorts, selective responses that need to be understood and assessed. Yet another context for religious symbols, if not for beliefs as such, is in spiritual or devotional life, in which symbols are exaggerated and made fantastic so as to move people’s spirits, to address the particularities of individuals’ or groups’ situations, and nudge them toward the religious goal. In devotional life religious symbols are often replaced or reconstructed stage by stage. These too are abstractions that need to be analyzed and assessed. The theological, practical, and devotional are only a few of the intentional contexts within which religious symbols and beliefs function at various levels of abstraction. Clifford Geertz (1968, 1973) and others have shown that actual religions need to be understood through what he calls “thick descriptions.” Religious life is actualized only in complicated intertwinings of social, cultural, and personal systems. These were understood but largely taken for granted by philosophers of religion in eighteenth-century Europe. George Lindbeck (1984) has made enormously profitable use of Geertz’s notions in his study of the nature of doctrine. In order to identify the contexts in which abstractions function, philosophy of religion needs to learn from as many sources in the study of religion as it can. Thus rather than defining itself by clear boundaries with other disciplines, philosophy of religion would do well to consider itself overlapping them, distinct only by its integrating emphasis on the critical analysis and assessment of abstractions in religions. The definition or program offered here for philosophy of religion—being the critic of abstractions in religions—is presented as a more up-to-date vision of the discipline than the more typical identification with the eighteenth-century problematic of Western theism. But little has been said so far to indicate how this is so. Two points have been made characterizing the present situation, that Western scholars’ knowledge of diverse world religions has expanded dramatically even in just the last quarter century, and that this increase in knowledge has cast doubt upon previously accepted paradigms as to what constitutes religion, so that many now speak of the study of religions. Can we define religion as a subject matter for philosophy of religion? Or do we merely point its critical approaches toward a bunch of cultural enterprises that someone, somewhere, has called “religion”? To be sure, philosophy of religion needs to attend to its

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own abstractions and consider such questions as the definitions or general traits of religions. If there are none, that is something important to know and philosophy of religion should disperse its efforts in the face of that.

The Problematic of Translation and Comparison The reason that definitions of religion as such are problematic now is not the popular guilt about essentialism but derives from a far deeper problem. As English-language scholarship of even the traditionally recognized Big Seven religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Daoism—has become increasingly detailed and historically particular, and as texts have become available with alternative visions and expressions to those that initially introduced many of those religions to the European world in the nineteenth century, scholars have come to recognize that the religions have not been made commensurate. Despite the enormous genius and erudition that has characterized the translation process, the words chosen to translate are inevitably biased and give the appearance of commensurateness when more thorough knowledge, entering into the lifeworlds of the diverse religions, shows that there is crucial slippage. Translations, of course, are all abstractions, attempts to find expressions in one language that represent what is most important in some other language or culture, leaving out only what is trivial. There is loss as well as gain in any translation and that by itself is not a special problem. The special problem in religion is that the expressions in European languages reflect the integral structures of theistic European religions. Their resonances and nuances exhibit the kinds of systematic symbolic and other interconnections that are revealed in thick descriptions of Western religions. In good translations these expressions are used to advantage to pick out and represent some things in the religious culture being translated. But they also suggest associations, resonances, and systematic connections that may be wholly alien to the other religion. For instance, the problem of God is very important in Western monotheisms, which has suggested that in nonmonotheistic religions it is important that there are thousands of gods or no God; but of course that is false: other things are important in nonmonotheistic religions, not their nonmonotheism. Christianity and Judaism are institutionalized as movements within a larger society and thus in the modern period lend themselves to analyses as churches or denominations; this model is too easily read into the institutions of Buddhism and Daoism, which have monastic communities; and it is utterly unhelpful for understanding Islam, for which the culture as such is a religious institution, or for understanding various forms of Hinduism,

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shamanism, and primal religions that have very different forms of institutional structure. Western theistic notions of scripture color the representation of “scriptures” of other traditions. Just as translations into European languages suggest more similarity to Western religions than is warranted, they also easily fail to pick up on important elements in the religious cultures being represented that do not have counterparts in Western theism, or that have deceptive counterparts. Western scholars of other religions have found those religions stranger and stranger the more they learn about them, and harder and harder to describe with ways that compare with Christianity or Judaism. It is common to read disparaging remarks about the use of the term “religion” to refer to those other “things,” because there is no word in Chinese (or Sanskrit, and so forth) that means what “religion” means in the West. Some scholars, as a consequence, identify their subject according to its proper name, like “Buddhist studies,” not a generic name like “religion,” and eschew comparison. Freeing as this disciplinary nominalism might be, it carries significant liabilities. One obvious liability is that even the assertion of uniqueness and incommensurateness supposes some comparative ground. The examples cited above of overhasty assimilation and failure to recognize differences all presuppose some elementary recognition of what is unwarranted in the suggested similarities and what is left out in the translations. To be sure, we are not in a position to give a systematic comparison of differences, to say how there are structures of importance in one religion that differ from structures of importance in another. But we have enough comparative knowledge to know that the easy comparisons expressed in the earlier translations do not hold and in fact are sometimes deceptive. Sometimes the argument is made that comparative categories are not necessary because scholars can learn the particularities of two or more religious cultures, as individuals can learn several languages, and just translate back and forth. This is a kind of nominalist ideal of all particulars with no substantive connections. But the analogy with knowing several languages and translating is false because the assumptions about translating are false. The nominalist assumptions are that people knowing both Chinese and English can translate back and forth with no expressions that are not either Chinese or English. But in fact where translation actually takes place some Chinese expressions take on some extra meanings as translations of English expressions, and vice versa. Translation is an historical, diachronic affair, not merely a coded coordination of systematic expresssions. It has been argued that multilingual people rarely actually translate within their own minds. In fact, to think in one language and translate into another is

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a mark of insufficient expertise. The purpose of immersion in a foreign language is to make that language and culture not foreign. One can participate in many languages and cultures. But the fact that one can enter with ease and thoroughness into several languages and (religious) cultures does not mean that one necessarily makes comparisons or knows how they relate to one another. It is similar with scholars and others who are thoroughly at home in two or more religions or religious cultures. The depth of multiple areas of familiarity is not in question, although such depth does not guarantee that genuine comparisons are made or that the people so multiply involved know in what the differences consist. Of course, few people are so incurious about languages as not to ask about translations, or so incurious about the relations among religions they know well as not to hazard interpretive connections. But if connections are drawn, then the language of one or another of the religions, or of some other scheme, is transformed to be an interpreting language. Given the fact that any translating comparison is an abstraction that inevitably leaves something out, and perhaps confuses things by suggesting connections that are built into the translating language rather than the translated religion, why not simply avoid comparisons as a matter of principle, at least for a while? Perhaps some wisdom indeed lies in the suggestion to let the “obviousness” of unconsciously imperialistic Western theistic categories lie fallow until no longer obvious. Nevertheless, that strategy would be to diminish the understanding even of the religions considered individually, for a large part of understanding comes from seeing how a religion looks from the outside, when placed in the context of another religion or a secular culture, that is, when studied comparatively. Even worse, to say that Saivism, for instance, ought to be studied only on its own terms comes very close to advocating the very chauvinism for which the eighteenth-century Western theistic assumptions are criticized. Part of definition as noted above, even self-definition, lies in distinctions (permeable or porous) from neighbors. In actual fact, every modern scholar who approaches a religious subject matter does so with at least the comparative assumptions that give discipline to method, for instance faithfulness to language and its resonances, attention to the implicit assumptions of practice, the understanding of a religion as existing in a lifeworld with an environment and history. In the long run no escape is possible from the task of developing defensible comparative categories in terms of which similarities and differences among religious traditions and phenomena might be noted. That the task still has far to go should not be daunting, especially if philosophy of religion is aware of both its strengths and weaknesses. The chief strength of the comparative enterprise, which lies behind definitions of phenomena as religious, is that it has already been done, massively,

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over a long period of time, and with a history of self-criticism. From Tyler to van der Leeuv to Eliade there has been a progressive sophistication in the categories employed to collect phenomena. Even though they still can be criticized for their bias, categories of comparison already exist and data have been gathered around them. Just as studies of individual religions according to the history of religions approach is still provisional, still undergoing improved sophistication and revision in each case, so are the categories of the phenomenological sort that allegedly pick out important classes of religious phenomena. The peculiarity of phenomenological categories is that they are vague.10 To understand phenomena from any one religion as mysterium tremendum or part of a “lunar mythology” requires showing how those particular phenomena both illustrate the category and make something special of it, or are different from other illustrations of the category. This is an important point concerning the logic of comparative categories and should be spelled out in more detail.11 A comparative category, such as the numinousness of a religious object, actually has two levels, a relatively vague level and a level of relatively more specific expressions of instances. The vague level is vague in the sense that it can be instanced by things that are very different from one another, even mutually contradictory. Totem animals are numinous, rocks are numinous in Shintoism, the long-uncorrupted corpse of a saint is numinous in Korean Buddhism, the Holy One of Israel on Sinai is numinous, encounters with death can be numinous, and the Nothingness of the mystical abyss can be numinous. All these instances meet the criteria of Rudolf Otto for falling into the vague category of numinosity, but they obviously are numinous each in their own way, which is quite different from the other ways. A sensitive appreciation of how each is an instance of numinosity requires the intellectual translation or interpretation of the instance into a specification of the vague category. Totemic numinosity is different from the kami-filled or geomantic numinosity of rocks, which is different from the numinosity of a human life, and so forth. The instances are united in being vaguely numinous, and connected as different and similar according to the ways they case by case make vague numinosity differently specific. Only when all the instances are translated into specifications of vague numinosity is it possible to tell whether the numinosities of a physical object, a person, a transcendent infinity, and a nothingness are coherent with one another, contradictory, overlapping, supplementary, or what. Only when the vague category is specified to diverse instances, all specifications using the language of the vague category, are the phenomena made commensurate. Left on their own terms, the phenomena mentioned are not commensurate. Collected immediately into a vague category without the level of diverse specifications, the phenomena are made commensurate by

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violence. The demonstration of genuine commensurateness comes only with the successful expression of the diverse phenomena as specifications of ways of being numinous. Phenomena remain incommensurate when they are not comparable according to double-level vague/specific categories. Perhaps some phenomena in the end simply cannot be compared, because no comparative categories can be found; they are then incommensurable. If philosophy of religion is to function as a critic of abstractions in religion, it needs to foster the development of proper and justifiable comparative categories. We have discussed or at least touched upon three reasons for this. First, philosophy of religion needs to be able to define its field of inquiry and thus must have some vaguely broad notions of religion. Second, the abstractions of any religion can be well understood only if approached from the outside as well as from the inside, that is, comparatively. Third, assessments of relative importance of abstractions requires making comparative judgments within as well as between religions.12

Comparison, Philosophy, and Theology In light of the history of bias in comparison mentioned above and so acutely appreciated by scholars of religion, however, the advocacy of developing more and better comparative categories is no innocent move. The danger is vicious reductionism. All representation, being selective abstraction, is reductionistic in a generic sense. But vicious reductionism occurs when something important in the phenomenon is systematically excluded. This happens when interpretive theories have a built-in structure that, because of the formal nature of the theories, can register only those things important to the theory and cannot even apprehend that things otherwise important in the phenomenon are being left out. The case of translating other religions into the language and sensibilities of Western monotheisms is an instance of this theory-driven reductionism. The much wider range of cases that have fallen under the charge of “imperialism” also illustrate vicious reductionism. Minorities in any culture, and women in most, have been “viciously reduced” because their natures are represented within the expressions of the dominant culture only insofar as those expressions in their theoretical base are prepared to recognize them; otherwise, what is important is ignored or suppressed. Cultural domains besides religion, literatures, and a host of other social elements fail to be registered within the theoretical vision of viciously reductive social outlooks and academically disciplined theories, and hence suffer practical distortion, marginalization, and delegitimation.

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The problem of finding proper comparative categories in philosophy of religion is thus part of a deeper problem of finding theories that are not viciously reductive. The solution to the problem is to recognize and practise two routes to the formation of theories. One route, that presented in textbooks, traces the construction of a theory from a recognition of a problem, the speculation of an hypothesis, the reconstruction of the hypothesis into formal language from which deductions and predictions can be made, and the testing of the predictions. The formal language of the hypothesis determines the descriptive language of what counts as phenomenal evidence for or against the hypothesis. Though this route might be sufficient in some kinds of science where the theoretical hypothesis is closely tied to the instruments that deliver up the empirical evidence, its weakness is that the formally derived descriptive categories might systematically exclude what is important in the phenomena and the theory would have no way of recognizing the exclusions. The other route to theory is to construct the descriptive categories for the phenomenon in close dialectical interchange with the phenomenon, and then connect those descriptive categories with formal explanatory hypotheses. In complex studies such as those of religion, this second route is perhaps more typical than the first, though not often recognized as such. The most obvious case of “dialectical interchange” is dialogue itself, where the scholar presents descriptions of a religious practice or phenomenon and then is told by practitioners and devotees whether they can recognize themselves in that, in what respects yes and in what respects no. The scholarly descriptions are modified by the interchange, and the persons studied come to see their religion in richer ways (W. C. Smith 1981). Where such ideal conditions of dialogue are absent, there still are artifacts and texts on the one hand, and skilled hermeneuts on the other. The point is that the phenomena themselves need a voice, an opportunity for critical resistance, a prod to contribute the descriptive terms, in the formation of descriptive categories that can be integrated into a more comprehensive theory. The representation of a religious culture in another culture is an analogue of integrating it into a more comprehensive theory, the cultural theory of the interpreting culture. In order not to be viciously reductive, theories or large-scale representations of religions need to be constructed according to both routes of theory construction. The key to this is the recognition of the dual-level character of comparative categories. All descriptive categories are comparative at the level of their specifications, and the dialectic of interchange between the phenomena and their description in those specifications takes place in the formation of that level. The vague level of the category connects with the formal language of the theory or interpreting perspective. The formation of genuine

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comparative categories, with both vague and specified levels, requires theory construction with both routes. All theories are fallible, of course, and need to be vulnerable to improvement when the opportunities arise. So too every culture’s representation of another culture is fallible and should be vulnerable to correction. These points show the continuity of philosophy of religion, defined as the critic of abstractions in religion, with philosophy more generally defined as the critic of abstractions. The abstractions involved in the scholarly study of religions, abstractions that allow them to be understood from the perspectives of scholars who themselves may not practise the religion in question, are inevitably comparative. Comparative categories themselves stand in need of criticism. Philosophy of religion as the critic of abstractions thus moves from reflecting critically on religions themselves, and the abstractions involved in their self-reflections, in their practical life, and in their devotional practices, to the abstractions involved in the scholarly study of religions, in comparing religions, and finally in the self-understanding of philosophy of religion and its connections with other disciplines. This chapter has argued that the conditions for philosophy of religion have been changed dramatically in the last quarter century by the vast increase in Western scholarly knowledge of all sorts about religions other than Western monotheisms. Preoccupations with the eighteenth-century problematic of Western theism need to be seen as a small slice of a far larger philosophic problematic regarding religion that embraces comparative religions and acknowledges that different religions have different agendas of abstractions. Philosophy of religion is best described, in this new situation, as the critic of abstractions regarding religion; it has been argued that this requires involvement in many faces of the study of religion, and also the invention of new forms of philosophic thought having to do with comparative categories and nonviciously reductive theories. It is instructive to conclude with some suggestions about how two of philosophy of religion’s near neighbors, philosophy more generally and also theology, are affected by the changed conditions. Western philosophy, like Western religions, has its own structures and habits of thought that are vulnerable to criticism from the standpoints of other philosophic traditions. The points made above about comparative categories and nonviciously reductive theories are not exclusive to philosophy of religion; they apply to philosophy generally. Philosophic interpretation, argumentation, theory, and practical guidance need to be rethought in light of the appreciation of other philosophic traditions (often associated with religious traditions), which now need to be recognized as genuine dialogue partners.13

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Theology too has been significantly changed by the new circumstances. Until recently it has been possible to think of theology as the self-critical reflections of a religious community. But now it is obvious that if theology is to deal with the truth of its issues, it cannot limit itself to what any one tradition or community believes: that would be mere sociological reporting. Theology must also make its arguments vulnerable to any and all who have an interest in the issues at hand, and thus its arguments need to be able to be cast in comparative language. Moreover, the comparative language needs to be able to compare both religious and philosophical traditions. Therefore, it seems that at the present time theology requires three different but interdependent genres: traditional theology that interprets and reconstructs the symbols of a tradition (each tradition) in currently defensible and relevant ways, comparative theology that allows for the integration of perspectives needed to have public claim to truth in even just one tradition, and philosophical theology that relates the symbols to their referents in critical fashion. If philosophers of religion adopt the problematic that has been advertized here, namely that of criticizing the abstractions in religions, in all the variety, depth, and self-reference that has been mentioned, they can then be in sensitive touch with the religions of the world about which so much is known now (and so much more remains to be understood). But they also would be made sensitive to the diversities within philosophy itself, which like religion is suddenly being internationalized and perhaps interculturated. So there are philosophies as well as religions in the self-understanding of philosophy of religion that acknowledges of vast proliferation of new knowledge of religions by Western scholars.

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CHAPTER 13

A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of the History of Philosophy

Paleopragmatism mong the most important contributions of Richard Rorty to the revival and extension of pragmatism is a philosophy of the history of philosophy. Peirce, James, and Dewey had all commented on historical philosophers, often with great insight. They also had important points to make about the history of philosophy. One thinks of Peirce’s complaint that modernity has been a long decline into nominalism, and of Dewey’s point about the deformation of philosophy into academic epistemological irrelevance.1 But none of the great pragmatists dwelt at length on the philosophic nature of the history of philosophy as such. Richard Rorty has done that, and it is one of the main themes of David Hall’s recent book on him.2 Rorty’s Neopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy is that it is a narrative, and it is as parts of narratives, or of a grand narrative, that his own discussions of readings and misreadings are to be understood. His philosophy of the history of philosophy as having narrative structure is also closely allied with his view of philosophical conversation. The general view that the history of philosophy is a narrative, of course, is Hegelian, and it has come to seem natural to us in the West. Hegel had a philosophic theory about the narrative structure of the unfolding of philosophy’s history, and also an historical account of that history in the form of a narrative.3 Wilhelm Windelband, the Hegelian historian of philosophy put it in narrative form, and so has nearly every other historian, even non-Hegelians such as Copleston, Reale, and, most influential of all, Will Durant. Although Hegel was the great master of the history of philosophy as narrative, he surely was not the first to think of it that way. With a

A

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generous enough understanding of what counts as philosophy (one that plays better in East and South Asia than in West Asia or its European extensions) the sermons of St. Peter and St. Stephen as recorded in Acts 2 and 7 present the history of philosophy as having a narrative form. Like Hegel, but probably not like Rorty, the saints had reason to think of philosophy’s history as a narrative because they believed that there was a single main agent of history, God, and that philosophy as well as everything else is God’s story. Natural to us as it seems, narrative is not the only form philosophers have defended for the history of philosophy. Aristotle (Metaphysics A) structured the history of philosophy according to a classification of ideas, not a narrative. Richard McKeon has given this classificatory approach as much sophistication in our time as the narrative approach enjoys.4 Walter Watson (1985) and David Dilworth (1989) have continued the extension of this work, the latter dealing with the history of world philosophies, not merely Western ones, although we should note that Hegel himself dealt with the philosophies of South and East Asia, and with unusual insight for his time, especially if we count his treatment of religious ideas as part of philosophy (as would make sense in most cultures).5 To take the history of philosophy to be either a narrative or a process of filling in possible types of ideas is not satisfactory, however. Much can be learned from both approaches. But to take the history of philosophy to be the development of examples of types of ideas treats it as merely possible, never actual except in accidental ways. According to Watson and Dilworth, for example, what is important about a philosophy is its locations in grids and matrices of possible ideas, and the structure of those ideas can be known from the classificatory scheme. That a philosopher’s philosophy actualizes a position in the scheme provides flavor, but nothing really new. The drama of narrative is far truer to the struggles to build an actual philosophy. On the other hand, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a narrative has its own limitations, however pungent and seductive its drama. The principle limitation is that the narrative form, any narrative form, imposes a story on the material that trivializes and dismisses all the positions that do not fit that story. A good historian would try to tell as fair and inclusive a story as possible, but the narrative form carries with it its own principles of what counts in the story and what does not. As postmoderns (Hall 1994, chapters 1 and 3) might say, this is to do violence to those positions that are marginalized or trivialized by the logocentric story. Or as Hegel said, in defending the thesis that the rational is the real and the real is the rational, all those things that exist but do not fit into the dialectical narrative form of Reason are as if they had not existed, that is, as never more than mere possibilities despite their accidental existence.6 Whereas the classificatory approach treats history’s philosophies as possible positions, the narrative ap-

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proach treats them as actual only insofar as they play roles in the narrative. This chapter’s title word, “Paleopragmatic,” reflects pique that the Neopragmatic grand narrative trivializes Peirce because it can relate to him only as someone not quite liberated from classical epistemological concerns; it therefore misses his main contributions in speculative philosophy and semiotics. Similarly, the Neopragmatic narrative truncates Dewey to dismiss his metaphysics, for which it has no role, and it trivializes Whitehead, Weiss, Hartshorne, and others whose work has little bearing on what Neopragmatism says is important to the conversation.7 This violence is not refutation, which is respectful, but deligitimation made possible by control of the concepts that say what is important. The purpose of this chapter is not to consider the narrative or classificatory approaches to the philosophy of the history of philosophy at greater length but to develop a third alternative, one deriving from ideas of Peirce, the Paleopragmatist. This philosophy of the history of philosophy is guided by Peirce’s theory of categories and signs. The argument shall examine, first, philosophies as signs themselves, then philosophies as signs in reference to reality, and finally philosophies as signs under interpretation, each as paradigmatic for some dimension of the study of the history of philosophy. To consider philosophies as signs is to treat them as Firsts; to consider them in their modes of reference is to treat them as Seconds; to consider them as under interpretation is to treat them as Thirds. With Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds, and Peirce’s theory of signs, the paleopragmatic wagon lumbers along at a remarkable clip.8

Signs: The Phenomenology, Comparison, and Lineages of Philosophies According to Peirce, the fundamental classification of phenomena is as Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds. Firsts are things in themselves without reference to any other thing; Seconds are things that are what they are in reference to other things; and Thirds are things that are what they are by virtue of connecting two other things. Signs as phenomena thus can be considered in themselves, in comparison with one another, and in terms of their influence on one another.

Phenomenology of Philosophy

This scheme causes us to note first that philosophies have a character of their own, prescinding from their relation to one another, to reality, or to a subsequent

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tradition of interpretations. This character is what it is regardless of the roles the philosophy might play in some larger narrative or the positions it might occupy in a larger typology of philosophic ideas. The character of a philosophy is the philosophic identity of the philosopher, however borrowed or novel the ideas and their connections. The outer bounds of a phenomenon might very well be fixed arbitrarily. So, by a “philosophy” in this sense might be meant the entire corpus of a philosopher, a single work, a period in the philosopher’s development, or a school or tradition of philosophy. The point is that, however the boundaries are set, what is within them has a character. The writing of a history of philosophy, therefore, needs to begin with an articulation of all the philosophies, however bounded, on their own terms. New terms and perspectives of analysis might be required to make the philosophy clear on its own terms, but the intent of this dimension of a historical analysis of philosophy is to acknowledge and lift up what the philosophies do and assert. This is a powerful heuristic corrective to both narrative and typological approaches to the history of philosophy. Whereas both of those approaches come to a philosophy with biases to relate it to a larger story or fit it into predetermined categoreal types, this first Peircean point stresses what might be called a “phenomenology of philosophy.” Phenomenology of philosophy is not likely to be the most congenial approach for philosophers in engaging historical figures. Even if we are not trying to understand philosophers in terms of larger narratives or typologies, we usually are interested in them because of some point of our own work. Most active philosophers approach its history reconstructively, bending interpretations so as to be helpful in current work, or to provide dialectical foils. This is well and good for philosophy, but it is not as such responsible history of philosophy. History of philosophy ought to have a strong phenomenological beginning, a resolute attempt at nonbiased piety.

Comparative Philosophy

The phenomenological articulation of philosophies on their own terms is not to understand much about them. Serious understanding requires noting the boundaries of philosophies and how they differ from one another, their Secondness. Regardless of whether a philosophy represents its own differences from other philosophies within itself, it is different, according to its character and the characters of others. Even philosophies within the same school, or that use the same terms, have unique identities over against each other. Despite their

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school ties, Plato and Aristotle were very different in their philosophies. That difference consists in lifting up different things as important, treating different things as focus and background, taking different things to require explanation, shaping conceptual representations differently, and plainly asserting different things, each asserting some things the other denied. The history of philosophy is not merely a bunch of philosophies, but philosophies that differ from one another in important respects. Therefore, the writing of a history of philosophy needs to “compare and contrast.” Comparison by itself can be rather dull; teachers pray to be delivered from “compare and contrast” term papers. Neverless, a philosophy cannot be understood on its own terms alone. It needs to be understood from the outside, in terms of its differences with other philosophies. It needs to be understood in terms of how its forms, and the components it seeks to integrate, look when registered within other philosophies. This is precisely where both narratives and typologies give helpful guidance for studying the history of philosophy. Of course there are other points of comparison as well, such as themes, ways of handling ancient motifs and older philosophies, interests, audiences, and so forth. A faithful historian of philosophy will not limit comparisons to readymade strategies but will look at the philosophies’ own characters to determine interesting points of comparison and contrast. Comparison, of course, requires what Peirce would have called “Thirds,” namely “respects of comparison.” Even the phenomenology of philosophy calls for the use of Thirds in description. The Secondness I am emphasizing now is the real differences between philosophies and how the study of the history of philosophy needs to mark these differences in describing that history.

Philosophical Influences

The Thirdness at this point in a Paleopragmatic philosophy of history consists in the fact that philosophies have influence in other philosophies. They are connected by influence, sometimes mutual influence in the case of contemporaries but most often by historical influence. Philosophers rework their antecedents’ ideas, reshaping, affirming or denying, and generally forming their own philosophies so as to be able to retain the good and get away without the bad in their predecessors. Sometimes philosophical influence is not very conscious. Sometimes it is ironic, as when a philosopher in haste to deny some predecessor’s point presupposes the predecessor’s way of setting up the problem. A third dimension of the study of the history of philosophy thus is the tracing of influences. Some thinkers might overvalue this kind of understanding

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through influences: How much do you understand when you know Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian or Whitehead was a Platonist? Not much, unless you know in exactly what respects the influences held and how they were carried down. You would need to know in what respects Aquinas was not an Aristotelian and Whitehead not a Platonist, and why. Narrative has an important place in the tracing of influences. This is especially so if attention is given to the career of the influential idea and its adventures in affecting this or that philosophy. If one starts from a given philosopher, however, and asks what diverse things from the past have functioned influentially, that study might be far more neatly organized by structural considerations within the philosophy itself. Typology is important in the tracing of influences because structural connections of ideas affect how influences are possible and impossible, and how ideas have to change as they get carried along. A good historian’s subtle detective work in identifying influences, and following out the influences of a philosophy on subsequent philosophies, is not to be limited to either narrative or typological forms but needs to take conceptual causation or influence to be a philosophical problem in itself for each kind of philosophy. When we contemplate the ways Peirce, James, and Dewey related to the history of philosophy, the very meaning of “being influenced” is different in each case. Treating the history of philosophy as a set of complex signs, to be studied phenomenologically, comparatively, and in terms of historical influences, is intellectual history, the history of ideas. Intellectual history without careful phenomenology of philosophy falls into ideology. Without careful comparison it can lose the richness of its topic. Without tracing historical influences it can lose the real connections among philosophies that allow us to speak of a history of philosophy. All three are necessary and together they point to the objective reality of philosophy’s history and to the natural piety or faithfulness appropriate to its study.9 As a topic in intellectual history, every philosophy is important and due its day. Even if seriously influenced by philosophic, scientific, or religious ideas that later turn out to be wrong, and even if totally neglected by subsequent philosophers, or so seriously misunderstood as to have trivial real influence, every philosophy deserves study. Or, put more cautiously in respect of demands on time and interest, no philosophy should be judged or forgotten without careful study. This is the moment in the study of the history of philosophy that guards against reductionism. The creative appropriation of elements from the history of philosophy might legitimately be reductive, if there is no suggestion that it is a true representation of history. But historical commentary that presents itself as doing justice to the subject matter needs first of all to be respectable as history of ideas, with these three Peircean moments.

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Philosophies as Referents: Structures, Insights, Orientation Peirce claimed there are three kinds of reference that signs might have to their objects, namely as icons, indices, and symbols. An icon refers by saying that reality is something like the sign’s character. An index refers by pointing out something in the object that otherwise would not be represented. A symbol refers by means of a complex of conventional connections in a semiotic system. Each of these kinds of reference lifts up an important dimension of philosophy and its history, and the study of its history.

Philosophic Conceptual Structures as Icons

The conceptual structure of a philosophy is a putative icon of reality, or of that portion of reality to which the conceptual structure refers. This is most obvious in the case of systems. Leibniz said the best way to conceive of reality is that it is like an infinite plenum of monads described as in the Monadology. Hegel’s logic is an icon of the rational structure of reality. Whitehead asserted that what reality is most like at its most general is a bunch of actual entities defined and related according to the category of the ultimate, the categories of existence, the principles of explanation, and the categoreal obligations. Justus Buchler said that reality is like a complicated set of natural complexes. Of course, every systematic philosopher knows reality is more than what is modelled in these categories, but hopes that everything else can be represented as illustrations of the categories. Not all philosophies are systematic, and perhaps none is wholly so. Most philosophies are indexical in the sense of pointing out things other philosophies had missed and in the sense of aiming life to reorientation. But most philosophies have conceptual structures of one sort or another and part of their claim to truth and importance is the implicit or explicit assertion that reality is like that conceptual structure. An icon, of course, needs to be interpreted; philosophic icons are turned into complex symbols when interpreted. As interpreted, an icon is taken to be like reality, or reality is asserted to be like it, in a certain respect. Taking the icon itself to be a sign and referring it to reality is to construe it as standing for reality in a certain respect. Thus, philosophies as icons can be distinguished in part by the respects in which they assert that reality is like their conceptual structure. Two quite different iconic philosophies might be compatible if they are like reality in quite different respects. Like myths, philosophies as icons can be inhabited. Without much consciousness that one’s philosophy is a sign, one simply works with it to engage life,

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sharpening and correcting it and living life according to it, learning the while. Only when someone points out that this philosophy is a complex representation, a kind of lifeworld shaping perception, thought, and practice, would a philosophers insist, “O, yes, and reality is like this philosophical structure.” Mythopoeic thought tends to collapse with the realization that there is a distinction between the myth as icon and the reality of which it is an icon; before the breakdown, the mythopoeic person simply takes reality to be the way the myth says it is. Philosophy survives that breakdown, or perhaps actually was born of it, by virtue of being able to understand the icon of the philosophic world of representations as distinct from the reality of which it is a putative icon. Some contemporary philosophers forget this distinction, and assume that the references within the icon, of one sign to another, are the only references there are. They miss the point that philosophers, or at least most of them, assume that the structure of intrasystemic interpretations is an icon of reality, and that if it is not, the system ought to be changed to be more like reality. The internal intepretive structure of a philosophy contains extensional references and interpretations of its signs; but the actual interpretation of reality by means of constructing and inhabiting a philosophy involves the intentional referent of the system as an icon, as well as existential interpretations of the system for relating people to reality. A philosophy is an icon that can be referred to reality, with the interpretation that reality is like the philosophy.

Philosophies as Indices

Most philosophies are also indices, pointing to parts or aspects of reality that might not otherwise be noticed and thus in a practical sense reorienting how philosophers engage the world. Philosophy as a way of life, philosophies as religious schools, religious practice in its intellectual phases, all stem from the indexical character of philosophies. Philosophies in contrast to most other forms of thought call attention to things both larger and smaller than the usual human scale, and also to origins and destinies, and to extremely general or universal traits. Philosophies differ from one another by their indexical references. Kierkegaard, for instance, dramatically called attention to particularity, individuality, and subjectivity, in contrast to the palette of indexical references in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s thought itself was the development and extension of a line of thinking in European modernity that emphasized the universal, the whole, and the objective. Of course Hegel recognized Kierkegaard’s topics, and even said many of the same things that Kierkegaard said; but his overall philosophy deflected attention from them and trivialized them, represented them as things to be overcome and made part of something

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else. Kierkegaard showed their irreducible importance. Marx showed the importance of economic determinants of culture, Freud of the unconscious. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida have pointed out the marginalizing effects of systematic representations of the world. Whitehead and Weiss have pointed out the dogmatic violence of unsystematic philosophies based on biased evidence. Weiss points out continuities that Whitehead barely recognizes. The conceptual devices by which a philosophy exercises indexical reference might be parts of an overall system, as is typical with Weiss and Whitehead. In these cases, the iconic structure of the philosophy allows for pointing to things that other iconic structures obscure; they give those otherwise obscured things prominence and articulation. But many devices of indexical reference in philosophy are demonstrations by indirection. Kierkegaard is the obvious example of this, but it is as old as Socratic irony. Points made by silence, humor, double entendre, and other forms of indirection are indexical in their reference. Systematic philosophers of an idealistic persuasion, bent on being faithful to coherence, often have neglected the importance of indexical reference and thus have not appreciated what might be learned from that which cannot be made coherent with a system. Part of understanding the history of philosophy is discerning the kinds of things philosophies lift up to attention and the kinds of things they obscure, and how these have practical bearing on life. Furthermore, philosophies are helpfully compared with respect to their indexical references. Among the most interesting questions of comparative philosophy, in fact, is whether the philosophies, say, of China, point up an extremely different set of elements of reality from those to which West Asian philosophies point. Do they emphasize the metaphysics of morals, for instance, to the neglect of the metaphysics of cosmology, as is sometimes suggested? Do the indirections of Zhuangzi about knowledge point up characteristics of language and communicative behavior that are found in Chinese but do not occur in Western languages, as Chad Hansen (1983, 1992) argues? Answers to the questions about what things are real and important are give through indexical references as well as through iconic reference that says the real and important are “like this.”

Philosophies as Conventional Orientations of Life: Symbolic Reference

In addition to iconic and indexical reference, philosophies have symbolic reference, by which is meant that they present a fabric of conventions about how to behave in the world that connects philosophy with the other dimensions of life. This includes not only overt behavior for which questions about ethics arise, but also intellectual and emotional behavior. A philosophy articulates

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what is important to know and why, what is important to appreciate and why, what is important to feel deeply, to take to heart, to mould oneself and one’s society around, and why. One of the most important cultural functions of philosophy is to provide orientation in the senses discussed in chapter 2. Philosophical orientations serve to connect and integrate the other orientations that make up social and personal life. A society such as ours has many philosophies, and hence many philosophical orientations. So far our problems are still insufficient orientation, not too many conflicting ones, and thus the more orienting philosophies the better. Philosophies can perform the orienting function only so long as they are expressed in conventions that connect up with the other elements of life. Philosophies need to address ethical, artistic, economic, domestic, political, and all other dimensions of life, or at least employ signs that allow for these connections to be made. For this reason philosophies do not employ a language private to philosophy, not for iconic, indexical, or symbolic orienting reference. Philosophies might get technical, but they cease to be symbolic ways of taking the world if there is no way to make connections between the philosophies and other affairs. The symbolic reference of a philosophy, relative to its iconic and indexical references, has to do with how it refers the civilization’s cultural world to reality. The philosophy is a symbolic sign mediating between the culturally formed signs of life and the subject matter of philosophy. A philosophy does this, of course, only insofar as it is a sign in living interpretation, and intepretation is the topic of the next set of points concerning a paleopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy. This discussion of the ways philosophies refer can be concluded by an indexical point. Intellectual history of philosophy examines and compares philosophies as artifacts. It does not ask whether those philosophies are true, although it might well discriminate among them on grounds of coherence, elegance, and so forth. Existential history of philosophy is something in addition to mere intellectual history; it has to do with the ways by which philosophies refer, and the nature of the realities imaged, pointed to, or taken into orientation by philosophies. Existential history of philosophy has often been missed in thinking about the elements of the discipline of history of philosophy.

Philosophies as Interpretive Engagements: Truth, Usability, Fallibilism The third main dimension of history of philosophy to which a paleopragmatic theory calls attention concerns philosophies as under interpretation. When

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philosophies are used to interpret the world, they are to be judged according to their normative qualities as true or false, accurate or confused, alert to what is important or trivializing. The vast array of elements that enter into what makes a philosophy good or bad cannot be dealt with here except in a summary way (but see Neville 1989 for the opposite of a summary treatment). For the sake of convenience, we can speak of a philosophy’s virtues as truth and its faults as falsity or error. There are three principal elements to be discussed concerning philosophies under interpretation, namely, their relative truths and falsities, their potential contributions to our own development of true philosophies, and their corrective powers for philosophy more generally. Both narrative and typological philosophies of the history of philosophy are concerned with assessing what is good or bad in the philosophies studied. Hegel, like Aristotle before him, wanted to show what is true in each philosophy, and also what its limitations are. As a philosopher, each of them constructed a philosophy that aimed to incorporate all the truths without the limitations to which the historical conceptualities were bound. A paleopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy sorts the normative interpretations of philosophies into three questions.

Philosophies as True or False in Their Contexts

The first question inquires about the truth of a philosophy in its own context. This is a meaningful question, in contrast to what might be taken to be the more natural question about a philosophy’s truth as such and in general. The contextual truth of a philosophy has to do with whether the philosophy carries over what is important and real into the philosophic interpreters, who are themselves contextually defined. Their context includes their science and religions, their political and historical situation, their arts and economies. Plato and Aristotle are contextually true and false in the ways they relate to their own culture, and we can understand that easily as we understand the differences between their science and religions and ours, and so forth. As argued, philosophies refer as symbols with conventional connections with many other cultural symbol systems. For a philosophy to provide good orientation to reality for a culture, it must symbolically connect with that culture. Western philosophers by habit make allowances for the cultural contextualization of their historical precedents. Whitehead, for instance, did not hold Greek science against Plato but quickly translated the implications of Plato’s physical philosophy into relevance for quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Similarly, he decried the slavery Plato seemed to countenance but argued

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that the real implications of Plato’s views unfolded in the adventure of liberation through two thousand years of European institutional development. This was generous and acceptable from the standpoint of the development of a twentieth-century philosophy. But it obscures the question of historical truth on Plato’s own terms, namely, in addressing the world as Plato could know it. Part of the history of philosophy is the worth of philosophies in their own contexts. The complexity of this issue is heightened by the fact that philosophies assert on so many levels. Some are highly contextualizable to historical conditions, such as science, religion, politics, and art, and other levels of philosophic assertion seem to be more general across cultural contexts. A paleopragmatist would point out that generalities are not ontologically imposed abstractions but rather are growths and extensions of historical contexts. Our own philosophic context is every bit as historically contextual as Plato’s, and if there are levels of reality where the differences between his context and ours are irrelevant, as in discussions of being, sameness, difference, and so forth, that is because we share a large historical context with him in those respects. It is not because the topics, either the representations or the realities represented, are wholly transcendent of culture. This point is particularly important in comparative history of philosophy, in which the philosophies of South and East Asia are brought into conversation with those of the West. In these instances the historical contexts might be far more different from one another than appears on the surface. So it is especially important to pause in the study of history of philosophy to analyze the context in which a philosophy is framed as an interpretation of reality, and to be explicit about the salient features of that context. For a philosophy that is true in one context, carrying over the values resident in real things into the interpretive conclusions with accurate representations, might be quite false in another context. This is to say, the conceptual forms of a philosophy might mediate one thing in one context, and quite a different thing in another context. A strong sovereign with unlimited powers looks far more attractive in a violent state of nature than in a working democracy. A proper history of philosophy ought to make appropriate contextual assessments.

Historical Philosophies as Contemporary Resources

On the other hand, history of philosophy is interesting not only as history but as very important material for the development of our own philosophy. The senses in which this is so are commonplaces among philosophers. First,

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understanding the history of philosophy is essential to understanding our own situation as the present part of that history. Second, the philosophies in history are extraordinary achievements of intellectual invention, providing conceptual elements crucial for civilization, and our own philosophies should not begin with less. Third, by examining the structures and mutual criticisms of historical positions we can tell where the main ideas lead and what their limitations are. In developing our own philosophies we try to preserve their strengths and avoid their limitations. Fourth, we can conceive the fallibility and contextuality of our own philosophies by seeing them in continuity and conversation with history. Generalizing these points, we can see that the history of philosophy is both the substance with which we philosophers begin and also a lesson for us, or many lessons. Contemporary philosophy is always reconstructive of the history of philosophy. Dewey’s brilliant Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) is only one of the more honest recognitions of this point. Any attempt to construct a philosophy needs to reinterpret the history of philosophy critically, learning what projects to abandon as well as which to carry on. Furthermore, although historical philosophies might have all sorts of values on their own, of the sorts already mentioned and more, those philosophies have special values for what they can contribute, positively or negatively, to our own philosophic work. In this context, special readings, even strong misreadings, of the history of philosophy are in order, so long as they are not presented as if they were phenomenologies of those philosophies, or existential analyses of that to which those philosophies point. The epistemological tradition of which Dewey and Rorty have been so rightly critical likes to sort modern philosophers into rationalists and empiricists, with Kant mediating the two. Whitehead, by contrast, claimed that Descartes, the arch rationalist, was the great philosopher of subjective experience, whereas Locke, he said, had the best metaphysical ideas. Given the empiricist and the process philosophy projects, both of those reconstructions make sense, respectively. Neither is a faithful historical account in the senses discussed earlier. Many elements enter into the situation in which philosophy is a creative enterprise, such as our own. The reason that historical philosophies expressed many truths but with crippling limitations is that their conceptual structures entailed the bad parts while embodying the good. Usually the first impetus to creative philosophy is the attempt to find a novel conceptual structure that would preserve some prized truth while avoiding the disastrous implications of the way some previous philosopher expressed it. So, Paul Weiss, for instance, admired Whitehead’s reinvigoration of physical cosmology in the age of late modern science, especially with its emphasis on the dynamism of creativity; but

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he lamented the inability of process philosophy to acknowledge continuities of personal identity in serious ways. Weiss’s philosophy, which looks so different from Whitehead’s in its conceptual structure, is an attempt to make Whitehead’s good points without being stuck with the bad ones. The imaginative side of philosophical creativity is important for precisely this reason—philosophy in this respect is an imaginative dance. Another crucial element of the situation for creative philosophy is the shifting character of the public. Western philosophy, beginning in ancient Greece, has gone through several major upheavals of publics. The encounter with Christian theology in late antiquity, with Islamic philosophy in the high middle ages, and with science in the modern period are all crisis points. Our present time is characterized by the interaction of West Asian civilizations with East and South Asian, and that means the relevant philosophic public includes the Indian and Chinese philosophic traditions. Dewey, Whitehead, and Rorty are surely right in playing down the importance of Kant and the epistemological project of foundationalist modernity. But their critiques have been internal to the Western tradition. As the conversation emerges employing the histories of East and South Asian philosophies as well as our West Asian ones, Kantian modernism looks even less important, and postmodernism as a reaction against that seems merely unnecessary. The conversation has not progressed enough yet to establish a new pantheon of philosophic heros, or to discard previous heroes to long range obscurity. But we can be sure that the reconstructive histories of philosophy for creative twenty-first-century philosophy will be quite different from what we Westerners inherited from Windelbandt and McKeon. The paleopragmatic philosophy of history of philosophy underscores the importance of noting the difference between appropriating elements in the history of philosophy for one’s own philosophic projects and understanding those historical philosophies on their own, in relation to one another, and in terms of their own contextual worth.

Historical Philosophies as Correctives

The last point in the paleopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy is to emphasize the importance of making our own philosophies vulnerable to correction by rereading the history of philosophy. This is pragmatism’s general philosophy of fallibilism as applied to the use of the history of philosophy to interpret reality. The history of philosophy should correct our creative mistakes. Pragmatism says that philosophy is less knowledge than learning, to use Dewey’s play on words. In contrast to foundationalisms, pragmatism says we are

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in the middle of knowing, and learn by correcting what we’ve got wrong, insofar as we can find that out. Therefore, considerations of the form of a philosophy ought to include those elements that set a philosophy up for being corrected. A good philosophy is not well entrenched but rather vulnerable to correction. Philosophies should present their hypotheses boldly so that they can be grasped and criticized, not surrounded with such hedges that they could not conceivably be shown wrong. Among the devices for making a philosophy vulnerable is the reconsideration of it in the history of philosophy. This has many dimensions. One is to understand a philosophy as the outcome of historical trajectories. Another is to compare it to similar and different philosophies to see whether it does as well or better, and at what prices. Yet another dimension is to test a philosophy’s depth, subtlety, and penetration by comparison with a great historical philosophy. There are few limits to what can be known about a contemporary philosophy, for instance one’s own, by reading it through the knowledge of the history of philosophy as laid out here. This paleopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy, based on Peirce’s categories and theory of signs, indicates some complexities in the study of philosophy’s history that might get short shrift on the narrative and the typological philosophies. Peirce’s categories are abstract and wooden, but they make us look for what we might otherwise miss. History of philosophy as a discipline has been divided here into its firstness, secondness, and thirdness. The firstness of the history of philosophy is intellectual history; its secondness is in the ways philosophies refer to reality, and its thirdness is in the roles historical philosophies play in interpretation. The firstness of the firstness is the character philosophies have on their own, and the exposition of this. The secondness of the firstness is the relations and comparisons of these characters. The thirdness of the firstness is the causal connections of ideas from one philosophy to another and the tracing of these connections. The firstness, secondness, and thirdness of firstness in history of philosophy make up intellectual history. The firstness of secondness is the iconic character of philosophies; the secondness of secondness is their indexical characters; and the thirdness of secondness is their symbolic characters in which philosophies are parts of cultures. Because reference has to do with how philosophies engage reality, this is existential history of philosophy. The firstness of thirdness is the assessment of philosophies in their own historical contexts. The secondness of thirdness is the critical appropriation of elements from the history of philosophy for our own philosophy, with a resultant reconstruction of the history of philosophy according to what is important in

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our own schemes. The thirdness of thirdness is making our own philosophies vulnerable to correction by the history of philosophy so that that history is extended and, hopefully, increased in value and relevance for our situation by our work. These three degrees of thirdness can be called the “normative element” in the history of philosophy. The discussion of the intellectual, existential, and normative dimensions of the history of philosophy has been careful to refer both to philosophy’s own historical course and to our writings and other representations about that historical course. We need to cultivate a sense of humor about this kind of schematic philosophy. It treats Peirce’s categories and theory of signs not as icons, the way he thought of them, but as indices, pointing us to elements in the history of philosophy that easily might be neglected. To press beyond this point to iconic and serious symbolic reference would require an actual representation of the history of philosophy. The paleopragmatic philosophy of the history of philosophy is vulnerable to further correction by an actual interpretation of philosophy’s history and current situation.

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Notes Chapter 1. The Contingencies of Nature 1. Indeed perhaps all human experience includes this, although the discussion here is limited to its civilized expressions. 2. Ontology, metaphysics, and cosmology are terms that Western philosophy has sometimes used interchangeably. For instance, Quine’s “ontology,” Buchler’s “metaphysics,” and Whitehead’s “cosmology” are alternative approaches to the same thing. Sometimes, however, it is useful to distinguish them, and in what follows I sometimes observe the following differences: ontology is the study of how it is possible to be and why there is anything at all; metaphysics is the study of what it means to be determinate; and cosmology is the study of the generic kinds of determinateness such as temporality. Obviously these are connected, and in the present chapter metaphysics is used to articulate ontology in section 2 and cosmology in section 3. 3. The extended defense of this thesis is complicated, but I have attempted it in print. Part of the defense is to show how symbolic representation is itself a part of nature. For this we need not only a theory of signs, such as that provided by Peirce (1931–1935), but a theory of nature as well. Then we need an analysis of some important kinds of symbols, such as religious ones, that purport to engage ontological dimensions of reality as well as garden variety things. My trilogy, Axiology of Thinking, attempts the theory of signs and nature; it consists in Reconstruction of Thinking (1981), Recovery of the Measure (1989a), and Normative Cultures (1995). For a theory of religious symbols and their ontological reach, see chapter 3 and also my The Truth of Broken Symbols (1996). 4. By “Western” here I mean Western Asia with its European appendage and American colonies, and include the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each of which has been called a civilization in its own right. 5. See the criticism of the idea of totality in nature in Kant’s Antinomies (Critique of Pure Reason, B 455–462). I have discussed it at some length regarding Hegel and Whitehead’s approach to nature in 1992a, chapter 5. 6. This was the nub of Kant’s argument about totality. 7. Many of the elements of nature discussed here, in the ancient conceptions, are discussed compendiously by Sorabji (1983). 8. See the book of Judges in the Bible. 9. See 1 Samuel in the Bible. 10. See Isaiah 40–66; Ezekiel; Job. 11. On the secularizing of God’s creation in the Hebrew Bible, see Frymer-Kensky 1992. 12. The ideal of early modern science was to quantify measurement, as in Descartes’ analytic geometry. See my discussion in Reconstruction of Thinking (1981), chapter 1. 13. The discussion to follow summarizes in part and extends my analysis of determinateness in God the Creator (1968), chapters 1–3. For a system with alternative language that makes the same point about determinateness, or “being in an order,” see Buchler 1966.

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14. There might be many things with respect to which it is only partially determinate, or indeterminate. It might be, for instance, that the determinate character of the present is such that several different responses to future possibilities can be made; with respect to the future, the present is somewhat open or indeterminate, awaiting subsequent deciding events. 15. This analysis summarizes that in my Recovery of the Measure (1989a), chapters 9–10. 16. Our late modern age has more difficulty than the ancient Western world in imagining dynamic eternity as the context for immersion in the temporality of life. But that is because of an impoverishment in the conception of time as much as it is a collapse of eternalistic religious sensibilities. For more on eternity, with pictures, see Neville 1993. 17. See the analysis of perception and appearance in my Reconstruction of Thinking (1981), part 2. 18. The argument above urged that things are determinate only by being related to other things, and that they and the other things must have essential features that are together on a more basic level than their conditioning relations. Thus even the laws of logic and mathematics are ontologically contingent even if we cannot imagine alternatives— indeed, imagination itself is contingent.

Chapter 2. Human Nature 1. See for instance Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book mu. For a brilliant discussion of Aristotle’s response to Plato, see Brumbaugh 1989, part 3, especially chapter 10, “If Aristotle Had Become Head of the Academy. . . .” 2. Republic, book 10, 618c-619b. 3. I have analyzed obligation at length in The Puritan Smile (1987), chapter 3; The Highroad around Modernism (1992), chapter 10; and Normative Cultures (1995), chapters 5–6. 4. For a systematic defense of realism with regard to values, and the knowledge of value, see the three books in my Axiology of Thinking. For a very Platonic defense of valuerealism, justifying the references to Plato in section one of this chapter, see my Cosmology of Freedom (1974), chapter 3. 5. See my Highroad around Modernism (1992), chapter 10, and Normative Cultures (1995), chapter 6. 6. See my Normative Cultures (1995), chapter 5. 7. On deference, and its distinction from concerns for order, or rational order at least, see Hall 1982, chapter 4, and Hall and Ames 1995, chapter 3. For a splendid example of the aesthetic elements in deference, see Strong 1995. 8. See his Critique of Judgment, “Analytic of the Beautiful” and “Analytic of the Sublime.” 9. See Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, second section. 10. The Confucian tradition in particular has emphasized advancing beyond bottomline utilitarian human relations to the civilizational excellences of family love and life, friendship, public life, and accomplishments in the arts. According to Confucianism, the difference between biological needs and capacities and the living habits of high civilization is made by ritual, or conventions the exercise of which constitutes human excellences. The best ancient philosopher on this was Xunzi. I have discussed the matter at length in Normative Cultures (1995), chapter 7. 11. This is one of the central points of Plato’s philosophy, not the description of those excellences in definitions or essences. 12. See Taylor’s 1989 discussion of this. 13. See Machle 1993 for a translation of Xunzi’s treatise on nature (or heaven) and a discussion of this point. 14. The beginning of the Dao De Jing.

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15. That is the purpose of Boston Confucianism (Neville 2000). 16. I don’t really believe in angels, understand, but I’m willing to be surprised.

Chapter 3. Religious Symbols 1. This essay summarizes the theory elaborated in detail in my The Truth of Broken Symbols (1996). For Peirce, see The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). Peirce’s writings on religion have not been collected in English but have been collected and translated into German by Deuser with Maassen, 1995. Deuser 1993 (especially chapter 1 and chapter 8) analyzes Peirce’s philosophy of religion. See also Deuser 1996. Book length introductions to Peirce are Anderson 1995 and Corrington 1993. See also Raposa 1989 and Colapietro 1989. My own interpretation of Peirce in the respects relevant here is in 1992, chapter 1. 2. For the most insightful interpretations of pragmatism, see J. E. Smith 1978 and 1983. 3. Peirce made some subtle distinctions of usage according to which symbols are just one kind of sign, in relation to iconic and indexical signs. Because the more general discussion of religious signs, from Cassirer on, has called religious signs “symbols,” I take the word “symbol” in that general sense, abandoning Peirce’s usage, though not his distinction, which will be elaborated below. 4. A more elaborate analysis and illustration of finite/infinite contrasts is made in Neville 1996, chapter 2. The term “contrast” derives from Whitehead 1929, for whom it means the relatively stable conjunction of two very different things which as a conjunction can have causal force. 5. For a study of the religious significance of ritual in Hinduism, see Clooney 1990. 6. This theory is defended in detail as a theory, not just a root metaphor, in the three volumes of my Axiology of Thinking. Reconstruction of Thinking shows how form can be conceived as a function of value rather than the other way around. Recovery of the Measure provides a complex philosophy of nature that explores the causation involved in the carryover from natural things to intentional interpreters. Normative Cultures elaborates a theory of truth in both theoretical and practical reason. 7. On this very important point about direct but mediated experience, see J. E. Smith 1968, chapter 2.

Chapter 4. The Symbols of Divine Action 1. For a sophisticated expression of this, see Murphy 1990. For the religious sensibility represented here, see the statements of various thinkers in Clark 1993. 2. I owe this point and its development here to Carse 1985.

Chapter 5. Eternity and the Transformation of Soul 1. These introductory points about Tillich are spelled out in much greater detail in my Truth of Broken Symbols 1996. 2. For a fine historical study see Sorabji 1983. 3. Interestingly, Leibniz took an interest in Descartes’ theory of creation in order to disagree with him sharply. For citations of the relevant texts and an analysis of their arguments, see Neville 1967. 4. This analysis of the philosophical and religious dimensions of time and eternity is expanded in Neville 1993.

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5. The distinctions are dealt with at length in my God the Creator, chapter 3. 6. That time and eternity constitute one topic was pointed out most felicitously by Manchester (1986, 384). His whole essay is very helpful for the topic of this section. But he illustrates the point made in the previous section about our obsession with time when he calls “this single embracing topic . . . temporality.” If the point about causal dependence of temporal process on eternity is understood, the name ought to be something like “emanation” or “creation ex nihilo.” 7. I follow the MacKenna edition and translation. 8. See Hadot’s excellent review article (1986). 9. See Neville 1981, part 2, which analyzes the role of synthesizing imagination as constitutive of personal identity. The project, of course, is a development of Kant’s approach to imagination in the Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason. 10. The interpretation of pragmatism as a late-modern European philosophy, distinct from modernist and postmodernist philosophies is developed in Neville 1992. 11. The importance of context for interpretation has been stressed by Gestalt psychology and much philosophical phenomenology. See Neville 1989, chapter 2. 12. For a discussion of the religious dimension of things see Tillich 1952.

Chapter 6. Religion and Scholarship 1. See, for instance, Plato’s Apology (40) where Socrates cites his daimon as warning him not to accede to the pressures of the court to rejoin the deme and the state with unthinking solidarity; rather, the daimon says to hold fast to the critical examination of Athenian culture and its religion even if this unacceptable and subversive distance leads to his death. On the question of the “invention” of distancing objectivity and its connection with widespread literacy, see Havelock 1963. 2. Plato’s Euthyphro provides the paradigm case for uncritical participation. On his way to his own trial as recounted in the Apology, Socrates encountered the youth Euthyphro heading for another courtroom to prosecute his own father for causing, by neglect, the death of a bandit. Euthyphro’s motive was the religious one of purifying the stain his father brought on the family, and Socrates attempted in vain to bring Euthyphro to a more balanced view of his father by questioning him about the nature of religious committment. Euthyphro simply could not gain distance on the religion of the deme. For an unusually insightful discussion of this case as paradigmatic, see Vaught 1982, chapter 3. 3. For the development of the metaphors of dao and daimon for the attainment of objectivity through distance and participation, see Neville 1982, especially chapters 10–11 and the postscript. 4. Concerning the limitations of the claim to radically different cultural experiences, see Davidson 1974. 5. For a full account of this, see Wildman 1998, part 1. 6. Many scholars at the newly emerging African universities have been trained in Europe or America. The scholars at Latin American universities, of course, have long been connected with the universities of Europe and more recently the United States and Canada. The brief summary in the text of the development of the disciplines of religious studies has slighted these traditions. 7. Geertz’s classic example of thick description is his Islam Observed, 1968. W. C. Smith (1981) has developed the idea that the people being studied should recognize themselves in the scholar’s description. 8. The philosophic point underlying this discussion of imagination is that every

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element of human experience, conscious or not, assertoric or visionary, aesthetic or voluntary, is formed by imagination; the point derives from Kant. Imagination is what transforms the causal impingements of body and world into the shape of experiential elements. See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, especially the A edition Transcendental Deduction. See also Neville 1981, part 2. 9. When theological practice is cut off from being judged by external references, as Lindbeck tends to do, it becomes more nearly limited, if never completely so, to exercising intellect’s imaginative character-shaping function. 10. There are many common forms of multiple religious identity in the scholarly world. At one extreme, the spiritual path of scholarship defines the most heartfelt identity and participation in organized religion as hardly more than an exercise in nostalgia or “for the sake of the children.” At the other extreme the chief commitment is to the traditional community and the scholarly spirituality is not explained to that community. In between are those who attempt to make scholarly spirituality concrete by adapting it to the practicalities of a traditional cultus, and those who work within the traditional structures to enlarge them so as to encompass and fully incorporate scholarship with its own spirituality. The issue is dealt with at length, in the matter of Christian-Confucian multiple religious identity, in Neville 2000. 11. See also Taylor’s many writings, preeminently Erring:A Postmodern A/Theology (1984).

Chapter 7. Religion and Society 1. In Neville 1989a I develop a general theory of causation for both nature and society in which semiotic structures of meaning are qualifications of special kinds of causation; this philosophic theory, however, is more general than any workable scientific theories in physics or sociology. In Neville 1995 I develop a general theory of cultural social causation, centering around ideas of obligation and ritual. The present study sorts out distinctions between society and culture. 2. See Dewey 1995 for his metaphysics of experience and theory of meaning and Dewey 1927 for his social theory. My own analysis of these themes is found in 1974, part 3, and 1987. My discussion of natural causality and meaning is in 1987 and 1989a, divisions 3–4; for the normative aspects of culture, see Neville 1995, part 5. 3. For a series of discussions of many of these matters as they pertain to Confucianism and its sequelae, see Allinson 1989 and Neville 2000. 4. See Fingarette 1972 and Neville 1995, chapter 7. 5. This interpretation of ancient Confucianism treats social relations as (at least) partly asymmetrical; that is, one role determines aspects of another role that are different from the causal influences of the second on the first. For instance, parents and children care for one another in different ways. By its emphasis on asymmetry, which allows for a stress on causation, this interpretation contrasts in emphasis with that of Hall and Ames (1987) who point out the importance in ancient Chinese thought of synchronic lists and parallel classifications, which are symmetrical. Although they have an important point, I still believe the parallels are intended to lift up causal factors and to constitute systems or patterns of causation. Thus, for example, yin affects yang in a yin way, whereas yang affects yin in a yang way; the seasons rotate, but only insofar as they causally lead to one another in order; though the hierarchy of social organization is idealized as fixed, there is a causality of influencing through example moving downward and a causality of service and support moving upward. The elementary idea of a social thing in ancient China, from the I Ching onward, is a structured change or transformation.

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6. This theory of meaning was originated by the pragmatist Charles S. Peirce, and developed above in chapters 3–5 with respect to religious meaning. 7. The stress on codes comes from the French semiotical tradition of de Saussure and his structuralist and deconstructionist disciples. The stress on the evolution and devolution of signs comes from the American semiotics of Charles Peirce. The point is argued in detail in Neville 1989a, chapters 4 and 13, and 1992, chapter 1. 8. On the comparative use of religious motifs, see Neville 2000, chapter 6. 9. A point argued in detail in Neville 1991b, chapter 6. 10. Conze (1962, chapter 1) made this point with particular force with regard to religious authority. 11. This characterization of the cultural dimensions of religion has been defended in Neville 1978, chapter 1, and 1991a, chapter 10. On the problems of defining religion beyond its cultural dimensions, see Neville 1996, chapter 1, and Wildman 2001. 12. These large generalizations are defended with sophistication in McNeill 1963. 13. For further analysis of the relation of religion to other spheres of life, see Weiss 1964; J. E. Smith 1968; Tillich 1963, part 4; and Neville (ed.) 1987, chapter 10. 14. On modernism and postmodernism, see the anthology with a fine introduction by Cahoone (1996). For a careful discussion of modernism, postmodernism, and their latemodern alternatives, see Neville 1992, introduction and passim. 15. Mutually interpretive comparative language arises out of dialogue, but not only out of dialogue. Scholars who do not themselves represent religions as dialogue experts still can contribute to mutual comparative understanding through the discipline of academic imagination and criticism. The work of the Cross Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project, reported in Neville 2001a, 2001b, and 2001c, makes a small contribution.

Chapter 8. Religion and Politics: Spheres of Tolerance 1. The term exclusivism is widely used in discussions of relations among religions to denote the claim by a religion that it and only it is valid. Alternative positions are inclusivism, which claims that the truths of other religions can be included within the truth of one’s own, and pluralism, which claims that different religions have different truths of their own, not necessarily about the same topic. 2. See the instructive discussion of public theology in Cady 1993. On how to make theology public rather than restricted to confessional commitments, see chapter 11 below.

Chapter 9. Religion and the American Experiment 1. For a recent history of Native Americans and their religion, told from their standpoint and not that of European immigration, see Wilson 1998. 2. The historical points to follow make no special claim to innovation. For more, consult a comprehensive history of American religions such as Ahlstrom 1972.

Chapter 10. Religion and Vital Engagement 1. See Dewey 1922, 1925. For a good interpretive account, see J. E. Smith 1983, chapter 4. For a more comprehensive account of the contributions of the pragmatists, see Smith 1978, 1992. 2. On Rorty, see also Hall 1994. Although I like Rorty’s title, I am not at all a “neopragmatist” or “new pragmatist” myself. For an account of why Rorty’s version of pragmatism

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misses the very point of “paleopragmatism’s” main contributions, for instance as used in the present chapter, see Neville 1992, introduction and chapter 1. 3. See J. E. Smith 1978, chapter 1, and 1992a, chapters 10–11. This has been a principal theme in the writings of Smith, and can be studied in two volumes devoted to his work, Colapietro 1997, and Kasulis and Neville 1997, especially his own responses to the other contributors, J. E. Smith 1997a and b. My own version of the pragmatic account of signs in thought and society is Neville 1995, chapters 1–3 and 7, with the discussion of religious symbols in Neville 1996 and in chapter 3 above. For a technical theory of imagination as transforming causal influences into the form of experience, see Neville 1981, part 2. 4. Pragmatism, of course, took its rise from Charles Peirce, still the greatest pragmatic thinker. He invented semiotics as the theory of signs, and took as the paradigm cases scientific experimentation and investigating new natural landscapes. This gave his pragmatic semiotics a vastly different twist from Saussure’s work of a generation later, for whom the paradigm cases of interpretation are interpretations of texts, not natural objects, people, or institutions. See chapter 3 above. 5. A fine defense of representation within engagement, with a polemic against representations as constructions of the world, is Weissman 1993. 6. For an elaboration of this as a technical distinction, see Neville 1982, chapter 11, and 1996, chapter 3.3. 7. Some recent thinkers have neglected this distinction in claiming that “everything is a text.” That is true in reference to signs considered within their networks as having extensional reference and interpretation; it is quite false in reference to signs considered in their intentional use to engage the realities of life. Any intentional interpretation can be redescribed as a possibility within a network of extensional signs, with the loss of nothing but the actuality of living engagement, the reality of the objects engaged, the surprises not yet encoded within networks of signs, and the capacity for novel metaphor. 8. The most important discussion of competence at religious symbols, especially doctrine, as the very stuff of religious living is Lindbeck 1984. Lindbeck models competence on the Wittgensteinian idea of learning to play a language game, and hence does not have much of a stress on the externality of nature, what Peirce would call its “secondness.” Consequently, he downplays the correspondence of doctrines to the realities engaged by them. See J. E. Smith 1997a. 9. The phrase, “consent to being in general,” is the pivot of Edwards 1960. For an introductory interpretation of Edwards, see J. E. Smith 1992a. 10. His sermon “The Lord’s Supper” gave his reasons for declining to celebrate the eucharist regularly. His parishioners at the Second Church in Boston, however, wanted a regular celebration, and they agreed mutually that he should leave. This was in 1832 when he was twenty-nine, and he did not practise a parish ministry again. The sermon is in Emerson 1940. 11. For a brief study of Emerson’s famous address “The American Scholar,” see Neville 1992, chapter 7.7. The address is in Emerson 1940. 12. See his “Oversoul” in Essays: First Series (1940). 13. This is the critical argument of the “Second Analogy” in the Critique of Pure Reason, B232–256. 14. In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson wrote, It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the

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Notes to Chapter 10 experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental. (1940, 93)

Now Kant’s point, of course, was to deny that there is any human intuition. Only God has intuitive knowledge, and that consists in God’s creating or making real any thing God thinks. Human beings, rather, have no intuition of real objects but “forms of intuition,” namely spatiality and temporality, to which any real things must conform in order to be experienced by humans. Far from our making the truth of real things, the truth of real things is conceivably known, according to Kant, only by conforming to our intuitive forms of space and time. By intuition, Emerson means something very akin to what Kant denied of intuition, namely, a creative spirit that is an expression of God by which we might do originary things. The essay “The Transcendentalist” draws out a contrast between materialists and idealists, of whom transcendentalists are the latter, in terms of activity and passivity. Materialists believe nature is inert, and idealists, according to Emerson, believe it is filled with divine creativity, especially in us but also in environing nature. Where Kant intended to make philosophy safe for deterministic science, Emerson intended to make determinism wholly implausible, even trivial. 15. Some extended quotations from “The Over-soul” (1940) can lay out some of his theory: When I watch that flowing river, which, out of the regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised spectator of the etherial water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. (262) A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these commu-

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nications the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. . . . A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been “blasted with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. (269) The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. (270) 16. See Augustine’s Confessions, books 10–11, and De Trinitate. 17. See Emerson 1940, 265. 18. See Emerson’s essays “Intellect” and “Art” in Essays: First Series; “The Poet” and “Character” in Essays: Second Series; and “Plato; or, The Philosopher,” from Representative Men (1940). 19. The need for a new American vocabulary was by no means unique to Emerson. One thinks of Cooper’s attempt to write in the American accents, Whitman’s new poetic vision, and Mark Twain’s extremely subtle dialectic of novelty and critique. 20. Dewey’s 1916 Democracy and Education is the classical development of the point about democratic elitism. Dewey’s educational scheme was designed to educate people from any social class and from any ethnic background to assume competent leadership in a democratic society. He did not pay much attention to the religious aspects of this. 21. For an interesting study of Dewey and neoorthodox theology, see Rice 1993. The antisupernaturalists were thinkers such as Sidney Hook and Justus Buchler. 22. See for instance 1974, section 92 and the translator’s introduction. 23. See Nietzsche 1957, “About the Three Transformations.” 24. See the wonderful analysis of this, with an emphasis on Freud more than Nietzsche, in Schorske 1980.

Chapter 11. The Public Character of Theology and Religious Studies 1. The emphasis on the subjunctive quality of truth, its general feature of not being exhausted in any finite number of illustrations, is the chief point of Charles Peirce’s pragmatic or pragmaticist theory. See Peirce 1935. 2. In the mid-1960s the Roman Catholic theological community developed a somewhat analogous distinction to that between the Barthians and Tillichians, except that the Roman Catholic adherents of the Barthian persuasion emphasized the authority of the Church rather than that of the Word of God; authority was perhaps the real issue in both Protestant and Roman Catholic circles. The historical lesson is that when you subtract what I have caricatured as the Barthians or lovers of authority from the larger Christian theological community, the remainder find that theological studies fits neatly into the more inclusive enterprise of religious studies. Jewish theological thinking differs from both Protestant and Roman Catholic theology, and finds itself analogous to Eastern Orthodox Christian theology, in being fiercely oriented to Jewish civilization; after that orientation is taken into account, there is considerable analogy of Orthodox Judaism to the Barthians, Reform Judaism to the Tillichians, with Conservative Judaism divided on the issue.

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3. George Lindbeck is one of our most creative colleagues descended from the Barthian side of the divide, and the cultural-linguistic model he developed in The Nature of Doctrine (1984), while denying truth or falsity to doctrines in a propositional sense, affirms the truth problematic of doctrines in their performatory roles, as shaping religious behavior; however sophisticated and resistant to “cultural criticism,” his criteria for truth still refer to characteristics of cultural behavior.

Chapter 12. Religions, Philosophies, and Philosophy of Religion 1. Although “philosophy” is in the titles of these works, the selections count for the intellectual side of religion. For instance, the Indian source book contains selections from the six orthodox schools, including Yoga and Vedanta, the entire Bhagavad Gita and important Jain and Buddhist texts, as well as others; the Chinese source book has extensive selections from Daoist, Confucian, and neo-Confucian sources, as well as Chinese Buddhism of many sorts. William Theodore de Bary at Columbia University and his colleagues published comparable source books on the Chinese and Japanese traditions. 2. See the exchanges in the journal Philosophy East and West starting with Tillman 1992, de Bary 1993, Tillman 1994, and de Bary 1994. 3. A comparison of the programs of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion for 1970 and 1998 will show a phenomenal growth in international participation in diverse religious traditions and area studies. The AAR now has a a long-running task force on the development of international cooperation in the academic studies of religion. 4. See the introduction in Long 1995 for a history of the development of philosophy of religion. See also J. E. Smith 1989 and Neville 1989b. 5. Nor can the issue be any hostility toward the broader problematic of religions on the part of the current editor, Eugene Long, who invited me to write this essay precisely because I would make this case. Ordinarily, that is, when not editing special thematic issues, he accepts the best of the articles sent him and they tend to fall within this narrow range. 6. See the several discussions in Neville 2001b. 7. See the several discussions in Neville 2001c. 8. The “of course” should be qualified by the discussion below about the scholarly differences concerning the definitions of religion and of religions’ incommensurateness. See also Neville 2001c. 9. See Tracy 1987, chapter 1, for a discussion of narrative where he shows there can be no “one story” of the French Revolution. 10. On vagueness in this sense, see Neville 2001a, chapters 1–2. 11. On issues in the development and systematization of phenomenological categories, see Mason 1993. 12. The discussion of comparative categories in this section and the next reflect the work of the Cross Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project, which has been published in the volumes edited as Neville 2000a, b, and c. Those volumes contain both methodological and philosophical discussions, as well as extended analytical comparisons on the topics of the human condition, ultimate realities, and religious truth respectively. 13. Arvind Sharma (1990) has made an interesting beginning to this. Sharma is a Western-educated philosopher of religion whose field is his native Hinduism.

Chapter 13. A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of the History of Philosophy 1. See, for instance, Peirce 1935 and Dewey 1920. 2. This is the main burden of Rorty’s theory of philosophy as conversation, developed

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in 1979, part 3, and elsewhere. See Hall 1994, especially chapter 1, “Holding One’s Time in Thought.” 3. See Hegel 1953, 1956. Hegel is very clear that he means a philosophical narrative, whatever the alternatives to that might be. 4. David Dilworth (1989, 213) cites McKeon’s “voluminous career-text” on this point. 5. Hegel begins his History of Philosophy with a discussion of the I Ching, Confucius, and Laozi. 6. Hegel treated this theme in the introductions to the Lesser Logic (1892) and The Philosophy of Right (1952). I discuss the texts at some length in Neville 1992, 177 ff. 7. See the Introduction to Neville 1992. 8. The theory of signs is detailed throughout the first two volumes of Peirce’s Collected Papers. I have discussed many of the relevant texts, for my present purposes, in Neville 1992, chapter 1. 9. For these reasons of objectivity and piety, Randall Collins’ (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies is intrinsically important to philosophy as well as sociology.

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Index Absolute, 121, 208; dependence, 90; idealism, 14 Abstraction, 211–12, 231–32, 244; critic of, 222–25; as imaginative, 117; in metaphysics, 21–22; in semiotics, 99–100 Abyss, 68, 77–78, 83, 228 Academy, 203–4 Act, creative, 69–71; of esse, 223; ontological, 22–27 Action, conjoint, 32–33, 43; divine, 66– 86 Actors, 34–35 Actualization, 16–19, 23, 55–56, 100–3 Adams, John, 178 Adepts, 187, 213 Adequacy, xii Adityas, 205 Advaita Vedanta, 27, 97 Aeons, 89, 106 Aesthetics, 34 Africans, in America, 173–75, 178–79 Afterlife, 83 Agnosticism, 88 Ahlstrom, Sidney, 254 AIDS, 33 Akiba, Rabbi, 55 Alienation, 105, 210 Aliens, 39, 44 Allinson, Robert, 253 Ambiguity, of life, 83 Ambuel, David, xiv America, xiii; religion in, 5, 171–83 American Academy of Religion, 203–16, 258 American Philosophical Association, 205 Ames, Roger, 253 Analogy, 70–71, 226–27

Analysis, xii Analysis, temporal vs. eternal, 103–5 Analytic philosophy, 89 Anderson, Douglas, 188, 251 Angels, 12, 35, 39, 44; and truth, 62 Anselm, 220 Anthropology, 45, 120, 195; of religion, 218 Anthropomorphism, 60, 63, 71 Apologetics, 154 Apophasis, 48, 58, 79 Appearances, saving, 14, 45 Apprehension, primordial, 9–10 Appropriation, of tradition, 1 Aquinas, Thomas, 25, 48, 70, 238 Arbitrariness, 10–11 Archaeology, 204 Architecture, xii, 60, 204 Aristotle, 18, 26, 30, 42, 96, 134, 206, 234, 237–38, 243, 250; truth in, 61 Art, 60, 190, 204, 208 Ascent, 97 Aseity, 70 Asia, 169, 249 Asoka, 142 Assertion, 129–30, 206; as dimension of religion, 119–25 Assessment, 32; of philosophies, 247–48 Astronomy, 12 Asvins, 205 Asymmetry, ontological, 24–27, 69 Atomism, 14 Atonement, 50, 120 Attunement, 56, 162–64 Augustine, 100, 191, 257 Aurobindo, Sri, 114 Authenticity, 105

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270 Authority, 120, 131, 137, 145, 147, 149, 213–14 Avalokiteshvara, 63 Avatars, 12 Axial Age, xi, 4, 12, 172, 181 Background/foreground, 63–64 Balance, 180; of self, 40–44 Baltimore, Lord, 172 Barbour, Ian, 66 Barth, Karl, 196, 210, 214, 257 Beauty, in creation, 72–73 Beer, 41 Behavior, 29, 35, 241–42 Behmen, 257 Being, 9, 21–24, 110, 211 Beliefs, 223 Bellah, Robert, 162, 197 Benedict, Ruth, 113 Berger, Peter, 46, 111–12, 142, 180 Bergson, Henri, 16 Berry, Thomas, 123 Berthrong, John, 128 Bhagavad Gita, 47, 60, 63 Bible, 26, 110, 112, 147, 188, 219 Biblicism, 71 Big Bang, 12, 22 Biology, 12; as qualifying truth, 62 Black Muslims, 175 Blasphemy, 55 Bliss, 83 Bodhisattvas, 12, 140, 150, 153 Body, human, 43–44 Boeve, Lieven, xiv Bonaventure, St., 97 Borsche, Tilman, xiv Boston Brahmins, 175, 196 Boston University, 218 Bouchard, Raymond, xv Boundaries, xi–xii; in finite/infinite contrasts, 46–47; of human nature, 29, 35; of nature, 11–12; of religious communities, 60 Bourgeois culture, 196 Bradley, F. H., 14 Brahman, 2, 42, 91, 185, 208 Britain, 178

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Index Brumbaugh, Robert S., 250 Buchler, Justus, 239, 249, 257 Buddha, 12, 55, 113, 139–43, 150, 180; relics of, 47–48 Buddha-mind, 120 Buddhism, 4, 47, 52, 54, 63, 109, 118, 120, 122, 131–32, 136–37, 139–43, 162, 164–65, 177, 183, 220, 225–26, 228, 258; African American, 174; American, 151–52, 174–75; Hua-yen, 56, 59, 89, 127; study of, 218, 226; Tibetan, 60, 97; Zen, 63, 47, 175 Bultmann, Rudolf, 88, 112 Cady, L., 254 Cahoone, Lawrence, 148, 254 Calvin, John, 51 Camus, Albert, 35 Canaan, 1 Cannibalism, 52, 117–18 Capaldi, Nicholas, 221 Capitalism, 196 Cappadocian fathers, 140 Caribbean, 174 Carryover, and truth, 61–65, 243 Carse, James, 251 Cases, making, 170, 205–7, 251 Cassirer, Ernst, 45, 251 Castes, in India, 175 Categories, 223–24; comparative, 228–32; schemes of, 111 Causation, 15–19, 23–24, 58–59, 140; affected by religions, 132–38, 141–43; in creationist metaphysics, 71; social, 30 Censorship, 205 Chan, Wing-tsit, 218 Change, 100–6; in Chinese philosophy, 253 Chaos, 136 Chapman, J. Harley, xv Charity, 153 China, 106, 114, 128, 142, 148–89, 162, 177, 241; Buddhism and Christianity in, 151; philosophy of, 40 Chinese language, 226 Chinese religion, 116; in America, 174–75 Choice points, 23

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Index Chou Tun-I, 26–27 Christendom, 173 Christian Right, 179 Christianity, xv, 4–6, 38, 48, 50–57, 60, 71–72, 74, 76, 78, 81–82, 112, 118, 120, 122, 131–32, 137–43, 162, 164– 65, 179, 198–99, 203, 209–10, 213, 217–19, 220, 222, 225–26, 249, 253; for Chinese Americans, 174–75; for Hegel, 111; and war, 159–60 Christians, 214 Church of England, 174, 192–93, 195 Church theologians, 212 Citizenship, 34 Civil religion, 158–70 Civilization, 40–41, 55, 135–56, 180, 242 Civilizations, clash of, 5 Clans, 180 Clark, K. J., 251 Class interest, 133 Classification, 234–35; of human beings, 29, 35 Clooney, Francis X., S.J., 251 Closure, 11–12 Clothes, washed in blood becoming white, 51 Cobb, John B., Jr., xv Codes, semiotic, 46–52, 56, 58, 62–65, 78, 184–88 Coexistence of religions, 176–79 Cohen, Robert S., xiii Coherence, xii Colapietro, Vincent, 188, 251, 255 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 189 Collins, Randall, 259 Columbia University, 218 Commensurateness, 227–29 Commentaries, 117, 223 Communication, electronic, 144; systems of, 135 Communism, 174, 197 Community, 43–44, 140, 149; as context, 60–61; religious, 209–11 Comparative philosophy, 236–37, 241, 244 Comparative religions, 117–18 Comparative theology, 232

271

Comparison, 129, 225–32 Compassion, 120, 153 Competence, to engage through signs, 185–88 Components, 72 Comprehensiveness, of vision, 123 Comte, August, 111 Conditioning, 17–19 Conditions, 10–23; circumscribing human nature, 35–39; limiting personification, 84–86 Confession, 81–83 Confessional theology, 232 Conflict, 134 Confucianism, 4, 26, 43, 47, 50, 118, 120, 122, 131, 135, 137, 148–49, 151, 155, 162, 165, 170, 177, 185, 217–18, 225– 26, 250, 253, 258; in America, 174–75 Confucius, 12, 259 Connection, human, 30–31 Consciousness, 16, 42, 59, 11, 132, 192; and eternity, 89 Consent, 188 Conservatism, in civil religion, 164 Consistency, xii Constantine, 142 Consumerism, 90 Content meaning, 117–19, 186–88 Contexts, 6; in interpretation, 59–65, 76; for personification, 77–84; for truth, 154–55, 206–7, 243 Contingency, 9–28; ontological, 9, 22–27, 68–71, 77–84; Contrast, 251 Control, and responsibility, 33; self, 38 Convention, in reference, 56–57 Conversation, 6, 233–35, 258–59 Conze, Edward, 213, 254 Coomeraswamy, Ananda K., 175 Copleston, F., 233 Coptic Christianity, 176 Coram dei, 82 Corporeality, 89 Correction, of claims, 121, 207, 215. See also Vulnerability Correspondence, 189 Corrington, Robert S., 188, 251

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Cosmology, 245, 249; as science-friendly, 18–19, 21–24; truth conditions for, 18– 19; as vague, 18–19 Cosmos, xi, 11, 40–41, 44, 183 Courage, 30 Cousins, Ewert, xiv Covenant, 136 Creation, 27, 47, 54, 95; in Descartes, 89; divine, 2, 26, 136, 141; ex nihilo, 20, 66–86, 92, 252 Creative act, divine, 89, 95 Creativity, 16, 26, 95, 101, 190; ontological, 23–27; in process theology, 75 Creator, as source, act, and product, 68–71 Creator, divine, 47–48 Criticism, 142–43, 151, 163–64 Cromwell, Oliver, 160 Crosby, Donald A., xiv Cross, the, 48 Crucifixion, 117; and resurrection, 140, 142, 156 Cultural systems, 136–37 Cultural-linguistic system, 211–12 Cultural-linguistic theology, 117 Culture, xii, 242; Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, 12; and religion, 163–64, 230; qualifying carryover in truth, 62; and revelation, 210–11; systems of, 136–37, 230 Cyrus, King of Persia, 50 Daimon, Socrates’, 109, 129 Dancing, 222–23 Dao, 1–2, 26, 40–44, 47, 71, 91, 208; dao/ daimon discipline, 109–10, 113–14, 115, 119–26, 129–30, 252 Daodejing, 26, 47, 71, 135 Daoism, 12, 43, 47–48, 55, 60, 97, 122, 131, 137, 151, 162, 165, 177, 225–26, 258; in America, 174–75; study of, 218 Dates, in time, 17–24, 94, 96–97 David, the king, 11, 50 Davidson, Donald, 252 De Bary, W. T., 258 Dead, space of, 11 Death, 11, 25–26, 73, 83, 140, 142, 187 Decision, 18, 23, 38, 100

Deconstructionism, 2, 29, 45, 52, 128–29, 196–98 Deduction, 230 Deference, 124; norms of, 33–35, 43–44 Deism, 74 Delegitimation, 147, 205, 229–30 Democracy, 244; and religious pluralism, 177 Demographics, in religious studies, 115 Demonry, 11 Demythology, 88, 112 Dependence, of time on eternity, 92 Derrida, J., 49, 241 Descartes, Rene, 14, 40, 89, 146, 220, 245, 249, 251 Descriptive versus normative inquiry, 126 Desire, 92–94 Destiny, 128, 130 Determinateness, 13–27, 68–71, 249–50; defining creation, 72 Determinism, 16, 22, 105–6 Deuser, Hermann, 188, 251 Devils, 12 Devotion, 54, 119–20, 141, 224; as context for interpretation, 60–61, 63–64 Dewey, John, 42, 46, 89, 98, 135, 146, 184, 192, 195, 233, 235, 238, 245–46, 253– 54, 257 Dharma, 48, 132, 149, 151 Dialectic, 25–27, 30, 97, 124–25, 214, 230 Dialogue, 2, 154–57, 231 Dignity, 44 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 113 Dilworth, David, 234, 259 Dimension, of religion, 116–26 Discernment, 67 Discipline, spiritual, 121, 187 Disciplines, in religious studies, 204–16 Discrimination, 185 Disharmony, 124 Dislocation, 140 Distance, critical, 109–10, 125, 130, 203 Distributive justice, 153 Diversity, 15–19; of religions, 171–83 Divinity, 166

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Index Djinns, 12 Doctrine, 185–86, 189, 192–97, 223–24 Dogmatism, xii Dostoyevsky, 34 Dream time, 172 Durant, Will, 233 Durkheim, Emile, 113 Dynamism, of time and eternity, 17–19, 26, 69, 94–95, 102, 106 Earth Mother, 124 East Asia, 4, 178–79; and academic scholarship, 114 Easter Bunny, 79 Eckel, Malcolm David, 47 Ecology, xi, 124, 153, 172 Economic theory, 133–34 Education, 148 Edwards, Jonathan, 171, 188, 195, 255–56 Ego, 147, 156 Egypt, 11, 47 Einstein, Albert, 94 Eisenhower, Dwight, 178 Elders, religion of, 172 Eliade, Mircea, 55, 113, 123, 228 Elites, 36 Elitism, 195 Emanationism, 94, 252 Embodiment, 1 Emergence, 16 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 45, 184, 188– 99, 255, 257 Empiricism, 189, 214, 245; in creation ex nihilo, 66–71; in defining human conditions, 37; in study of worldviews, 111 Emptiness, 47, 91, 137, 156, 180, 211 Encounter vs. memory, 191 Engagement, 4, 33–35, 46, 58–61, 76–77, 88–91, 95–106, 121–22, 130, 188–92, 242–48, 255; and distance, 109–10; and insight, 98; in interpretation, 184–88; of late modernity, 150–51; norms of, 43– 44; through signs and symbols, 9–10, 51–57, 84–85 English, as language of scholarship, 219 Enjoyment, 32 Enlightenment, 47, 56, 162–64, 180, 219;

273

Buddhist, 120, 139, 147; European, xi, 1, 3–6, 23, 64, 74, 173, 181–82, 185, 187, 197–99, 213–14, 217; personal, 141 Environment, 34, 153, 189 Epistemology, xii, 46, 184, 222, 233, 235 Erasmus, D., 110 Essence, 2; of human nature, 29–44; of religion, xi Essentialism, xi–xii, 29–31 Eternal objects, 106 Eternity, 1, 4, 75, 88–106, 191, 193, 250– 52; of creative act, 69–71; of God, 67; defined by Plotinus, 93–95; and time, 98, 103–6 Ethnicity, 165; and war, 159–60 Eucharist, 52, 60, 117, 140, 189, 193, 197– 98 Europe, 144–50, 196 Evangelicalism, 193 Excellence, in religious studies, 216 Exclusivism, 168, 182, 254 Exemplar, 92 Existence, 20–24 Existential engagement, 72, 124–25 Existentialism, 16, 34, 39, 100, 112, 242 Exodus, 47–48, 51, 55, 74, 223 Experience, 90–91, 145, 147, 185, 215; civilized, 9; direct vs. immediate, 189; as knowledge of God, 72–73 Experiment, 137; controlled, 145; in religion, 171, 183 Explanation, 230–31 Extension, 25, 49, 77, 186, 240, 255; vs. intention in interpretation, 52–61 Ezekiel, 128 Ezra, 55 Faith, 63, 130, 140, 215; seeking understanding, 129, 203, 213 Fallibilism, 73, 198, 231–32, 245; and tolerance, 168 Families, 37, 148, 250 Farming, 40 Fascism, 197 Father, as symbol of God, 53–54, 80 Fayaerts, Kurt, xiv Fa-zang, 48, 56

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Features, conditional and essential, 13–24, 30, 43, 68–71, 75, 100–2, 158–61 Feeling, 90 Felicity, 105 Fertility rituals, 139 Feuds, 34 Fichte, G., 190 Field, for process, 15 Filiality, 50 Fingarette, Herbert, 253 Finite/infinite contrasts, 46–48, 53, 57–58, 62–65, 179–83, 194 Firstness, secondness, thirdness, 235–37, 247–48 Fixity, of past, 15–19 Flight of the alone to the alone, 91–97 Flow of time, 100–2 Forgiveness, 33, 51, 80–82 Form, 47, 72; as future, 15–19; Platonic, 30 Foucault, M., 133 Foundationalism, xi–xii, 58, 246 Fox, George, 257 Fragmentariness, 157 Frankenberry, Nancy, xv Freedom, 32–33 French Catholicism, 174 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 228, 133, 257 Friendship, 3, 38; with Jesus, 60 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, 249 Fulfillment, religious, 90–91 Fundamentalism, 85, 152, 159, 182, 199 Future, 75, 100–2; features of, 15–19; reality of, 90–91 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 113 Gardens, 83 Geertz, Clifford, 45, 115, 224, 252 Genius, 192, 198 Geomancy, 228 Gestald psychology, 252 Globalism, in religious studies, 219 Globalization, 4–5, 135 Glory, 83, 188 Goals, technological, 149 God, 1, 2, 20, 38, 47–48, 50, 71, 91, 96– 97, 105, 121, 125, 181, 185, 188–99, 208, 211, 218, 249; of Abraham, Isaac,

and Jacob, 48; as child abuser, 120; as personal agent, 84–87; as a being, 75, 77; classical conceptions of, 66–67; conditions of symbolizing, 67; creator ex nihilo, 68–71; knowledge of, 72–77; motives of, 86; and narrative, 234; as personal, 4, 66–67, 74–77, 84–87; as personified, 4; as wild, 74, 83 Gods, 11–12, 25, 121 Good, form of the, 26 Goodness, 211; divine, 22; human, 37 Gospel, 151 Government, 32–33, 40, 179–80 Grace, 132, 147, 150 Graduate training, 186 Gratitude, as context for personification, 80 Great Commandment, 150 Great Learning, 135 Greece, mythopoeic, 38 Greenstone, J. David, 178 Griffin, David, 66 Grim Reaper, 79 Grokking, 189 Guanyin, 63, 67 Guidance, from intellect, 209–11 Guilt, 81–82, 90 Habitats, 43–44 Habits, 163, 184, 188; cultural, 169–70; in pragmatism, 98–99 Hadot, Pierre, 252 Haecceity, 26, 55 Hall, David L., xv, 233–34, 253, 259 Hansen, Chad, 241 Hardwick, Charley D., xiv Hari Krishnas, 175 Harmony, 13–24, 47, 68–72, 180, 211; of self, 40–44 Harris, Errol, 221 Hart, Ray L., 203, 217 Hartshorne, Charles, 90, 220–21, 235 Harvard University, 195, 218 Harvey, Van, 207 Havelock, Eric, 252 Hawking, Stephen, 22–23 Health, 32, 147, 163

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Index Heaven, 40, 57, 73, 83, 179; as schema, 48 Hegel, G., 110–11, 121, 190, 219–20, 233–35, 239–41, 243, 249, 259 Hegemony, 182 Heidegger, Martin, 58, 89–90, 113, 146, 241 Hell, 57, 60 Hermeneutics, 64, 112–15, 121, 127, 133, 204, 230 Heroism, 194, 214 Herzl, 55 Hinduism, 47, 63, 109, 113, 122, 137, 142, 155, 162, 164, 225–26, 251, 258; in America, 175; study of, 218; and war, 159 Historical consciousness, 110–15, 129–30, 152–53 History, 90, 136; as defining human nature, 39; in religion, 211; and revelation, 112 History of philosophy, 233–48 Hobbes, Thomas, 134, 219 Holiness, 82–84 Holland, 178 Holocaust, 50 Holy Spirit, 60, 192 Homeostasis, within human limits, 35 Hook, Sidney, 257 Hopelessness, 105 Hopkins, Gerard Manly, 26 Hubris, xiii Huguenots, 172, 174 Human condition, 35–39, 116–17 Human nature, xii–xiii, 29–44; as biological species, 35–39 Human rights, as natural, 167 Humanism, xii Hume, David, 189, 219–20 Humility, Christian, 156 Humor, 241, 248 Hunter, James Davison, 179 Hunter-gatherers, 139, 172, 176 Huntington, Samuel, 5 Husserl, Edmund, 89 Hutchinson, Anne, 177 Hypotheses, 247; cosmological, 9–24; about American religion, 171, 176–79; in theory construction, 230–32

275

Iconic reference, 54–57, 239–42; in history of philosophy, 247–48 Ideal types, 134–35 Idealism, 14, 39, 190, 241, 256 Identity, eternal, 19–20, 105–6; human, 1– 3, 29; norms of, 33–35, 43–44; public, 146 Idolatry, 78, 86, 181, 220 Ignatius, St., 97 Ignorance, 41, 124, 136 Illusion, 3, 122, 124, 147; of eternity, 98 Imagination, 110, 129; late-modern, 4–5; in philosophy, 246; as religious dimension, 116–25; in scholarly spirituality, 126–30; and time, 104–5 Immensity, divine, 13 Immigration, in religion, 183 Immortality, 98 Immortals, 12 Imperialism, 29, 38, 209, 217–28, 219, 227 Importance, 222–23, 225, 229 Inada, Kenneth, 220 Incommensurateness, in comparison, 227– 29 Indeterminateness, 15, 101–2, 250 Index, in reference, 25–27, 54–57, 239– 42; in philosophy, 247–48 India, 12, 27, 106, 142, 148, 162; and academic scholarship, 114; religions in, 116–18 Indifference, 73 Indirection, 241 Individualism, 147–49, 194 Indochina, 175 Indonesia, 175 Indra, 56 Infinite, actual, 92 Infinity, 83, 120, 166, 181 Influence, philosophical, 237–38 Injustice, 80 Innocence, 119 Inquiry, xii, 113, 120; bias in, xi; as hypothetical, 9–10; in religion, 229 Institutions, 185, 192 Instruments, in inquiry, 230 Integration, of orientations, 3 Integrity, 119; of culture, 3; of disciplines, 205–6

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Intellectual history, 238, 247 Intentionality, 16, 23–24, 46; in interpretation, 49–50, 58–61; in reference, 53– 57 Intentions, divine, 75 Interfaith dialogue, 172 Interiority, in God, 81; of self or person, 39–40 International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 218–21 Internet, xi–xii Interpretants, 46, 49, 58, 194 Interpretation, xii–xiii, 9–10, 98–99, 136, 165, 206, 239–42; in codes, 49–52; of philosophies, 242–48; and pragmatism, 45–46; primary and secondary, 61, 85– 86; of religious symbols, 57–61 Intuition, 189, 256; forms of, 89 Iran, 175 Irony, 237, 241 Islam, 4, 60, 71, 74, 76, 78, 81–82, 122, 131–32, 137, 152, 162, 165, 182, 217– 20, 225–26, 249; in America, 173–74; in China, 177; and historical consciousness, 111; study of, 218–21; and war, 159–60 Isle of the Blest, 55 Israel, 47–48, 55, 74, 128; religion in, 130; sacrifice in, 50 Israelites, 11 Jack Frost, 79 Jainism, 258 James, William, 192, 233, 238 Japan, 114, 142, 148–49 Jaspers, Karl, 12, 220 Jesus, 50–52, 54, 67, 97, 112, 118, 139–43, 192–93, 197; the historical, 196–99 Job (biblical character), 80 Johnson, Charles, 174 Jones, Judith, xiii Joshua, 55 Judaism, 50–57, 71, 74, 76, 78, 81–82, 110, 112, 122, 124, 131–32, 127, 155, 162, 165, 173, 213–14, 217–20, 222, 225–26, 228, 249, 257; European, 176– 77; Hellenistic, 142; rabbinic, 142

Judge, divine, 70, 82 Justice, 30, 124, 157, 162; distributive, 183; social, 33–34 Justice, distributive, 183 Kafka, Franz, 34 Kami stones, 180, 228 Kant, 2–3, 45–48, 88–89, 97–98, 111, 144, 189–91, 219, 245–46, 249–50, 252–53, 255–56 Kasulis, Thomas, 255 Kathopanisad, 47 Kenosis, 137 Kerygma, 210 Khomeini, Ayatolla, 55 Kierkegaard, Soren, 42, 166, 240–41 King, 51–52, 124; Jesus as, 140 Knowledge, 37; of God, 72–77; as learning, 98 Kohak, Erazim, xiii Korea, 114, 142, 148–49, 151 Korean Buddhism, 141 Kreuzer, Johann, xiv Krishna, 47 Lamaism, 111 Language, 58, 99, 226–27; as temporal form, 89 Laozi, 12, 259 Late modernity, 95, 137, 144–50, 250 Law, 223; causal, 16 Legge, James, 113, 218 Leibniz, G., 219, 239, 251 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 113 Li (ritual propriety), 135 Liberal arts colleges, 203 Liberalism, 146; in political theory, 32 Life, petition for, 80–84 Limitations, to personification, 83–86 Lincoln, Abraham, 178 Lindbeck, George, 45, 117, 212, 224, 253, 255, 258 Literalism, 79, 85–86 Literature, xii, 229 Liturgy, 60, 67, 78, 186–88 Location, personal, for eternity, 96 Locke, John, 32, 219, 245, 255

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Index Logic, 117 Logocentrism, 197, 234 Logos theory, 72, 191 Long, Eugene, xiv, 258 Lord, 139 Love, 30, 32, 38, 73, 120, 139–40; for God, 83 Lutherans, 59 Maassen, Helmut, 251 Machle, Edward, 250 MacKenna, Stephen, 252 Macquarrie, John, 221 Magic, 11–13 Mahavira, 12 Mahayana Buddhism, 111, 141 Maimonides, 55 Maitreya, 132, 156–57 Maitreyan strategies, 131–32, 150–57 Malinowski, Branislaw, 113 Manchester, Peter, 252 Mann, Mark, xv Marduk, 11, 55 Marginal location of religion, 142–43 Marginalization, 229–30 Maruts, 205 Marx, 3, 111, 118, 134, 241 Marxism, 129, 133–34; in China, 114 Maslow, Abraham, 42 Mason, John R., 258 Materialism, 256 Mathematics, 89, 135, 145 Matthew, Gospel of, 97 Maturation, 84–86 Mavrodes, George, 220 McKeon, Richard, 234, 246, 259 McNeill, William, 36, 254 Mead, George Herbert, 98 Meaning, 45–52, 117, 143, 186–88; of causal variables, 133; human, 180–81; quest for, 104 Means and ends, 34 Means/ends, 73 Measure, 12–13, 145, 147 Medical model, 105 Meditation, 141, 155 Meiji Restoration, 114

277

Melville, Herman, 184 Memory, 20, 191 Mercy, divine, 82 Messiah, 50–52 Metaphor, 119–20 Metaphysics, xii–xiii, 13, 48, 110, 192, 249; of essential and conditional features, 20–24; of eternity, 93–95 Mind, 13 Mind/body, 146–48 Minorities, 220 Models, of eternity, 91, 100; mathematical, 22–23 Modernism, xii, 196–99, 246, 254 Modernity, 66, 89–91, 137, 144–50; late, xi–xii Modernization, 1, 4, 122, 131–32, 144–50; marginalizing religion, 143 Modes, of time, 100–6 Monasticism, 187, 225–26 Monotheism, 47, 71, 75, 79, 180–81, 219, 225–26, 229–30 Moore, Charles, 27, 218 Moral majority, 161 Morality, 23, 34, 121, 204; and religion, 116 Mormonism, 177 Moses, 11, 47, 55, 74, 192–93 Motifs, 9, 26–27, 137 Motivation, in human nature, 29 Moving image of eternity, 92 Mueller, Max, 113, 218 Multiculturalism, 39 Multiple religious identity, 128–29, 155, 253 Murder, religious, 52 Murphy, N., 251 Music, 54, 78, 185 Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, 78, 106, 228 Mystery, 27–28 Mysticism, 77, 82–83, 97–98, 187, 220; varieties of, 106 Myth, 41, 46, 122, 138–43, 181, 223, 228, 240 Nagarjuna, 140 Naivete, first and second, 4

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Nakamura, Hajime, 220 Narcissism, 148 Narrative, xi–xii, 148, 223, 233–35, 237– 38, 243 Nation states, and religion, 160–61 Native Americans, 172–74, 176–77 Natural thing, defined, 10 Nature, xii–xiii, 1–6, 9–23, 121, 189–99; closure of, 11–13; defined, 10; explanatory, 22–23; and natural things, 9; limited to science, 2; theory of, 249 Near East, 168; religions of, 162 Neo-Confucianism, 26–27, 59, 71 Neo-Kantianism, 45 Neo-Platonism, xiv, 91–97 Neopragmatism, 233–35 Network meaning, 117–19, 186–88, 193 Networks, of symbols, 50–52 New age religion, 5, 175 New Testament, 26 Newton, Isaac, 94 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 196 Nietzsche, F., 111, 196–99, 241, 257 Nominalism, 226, 233 Non-attachment, 120 Normativity, in philosophy, 243–48 Norms, 2–3, 162–64; defining human nature, 29; defining obligations, 33–35; in disciplines, 208 Northern Europeans, 172–75 Nothingness, 12–13, 24–28, 57, 68, 70, 77, 211, 228; and determinateness, 14 Nous, 96 Novelty, 70–71, 100 Numinous, 228 Object, religious, 2 Objectivity, 118, 130, 252; in four dimensions, 125; in scholarship, 109–10; in theology and religious studies, 203–16 Obligation, 124–25, 158, 211; defined, 31; individual vs. general, 32–33; lying under, 2–3, 31–36, 43–44, 121–22, 162, 187–79 Obligatoriness, a religious establishment, 163–64 One and many, 68–71, 77

One, the, 27, 96, 256 Ontological context of mutual relevance, 21–24 Ontological question, 22–23 Ontology, 9, 102, 249 Ontos, 9 Openness, of future, 19–24 Optimism, 197 Order, norms of, 33–35, 43–44; pockets of, 11 Organism, 18 Organizations, voluntary and inherited, 148 Orientation, 3, 122, 179–84, 242; defining self, 40–44; in reference, 56; to religious quest, 125; to ultimacy, 165 Origen, 89 Originality, of engagement, 189–99 Orthodoxy, 209; Eastern, 174–76, 183, 257; relative to heresy, 198–99 Orthopraxy, 209–10 Otherness, 130, 150 Otto, Rudolf, 228 Oversoul (in Emerson), 188–99 Ownbeing, 68 Paganism, 217 Paleopragmatism, 233–35, 242–43, 246, 254 Panikkar, Raimundo, 155 Pantheism, 190–91 Paradigms, shifting, 19 Park, Sung-bae, 147 Parochialism, in God, 85 Participant-observation, 115 Participation, 125, 130; in eternity, 1; in religious understanding, 110; through symbols, 88 Passion, infinite, 166 Passover, 51 Past, 100–2, 212; features of, 15–19; reality of, 90–91 Pattern, 30, 181; of order, 33–35; in society, 132–38 Paul, St. 257 Peace, 5, 7 Peirce, Charles S., 3, 6, 45–46, 49–50, 54– 56, 88, 98, 188, 192, 233, 235–36, 238– 39, 247–49, 251, 254–55, 257–59

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Index People without anuses, 55 Performatives, 99, 208–11 Person, as machine, 146; and story, 146; the time of, 103 Personification, 1, 54; contexts for, 77–84; of God, 66–67, 75–87; vs. personalizing, 79–80 Perspectivalism, 194, 215 Peter, St., 234 Petroglyphs, 172 Phenomena, 235–38; defined, 230–32 Phenomenology, 45; of philosophy, 235– 28; of religion, 113, 227–29, 258 Philology, 204 Philosophical interpretation, 247 Philosophical reference, 247 Philosophical theology, 117, 221, 232 Philosophical worldviews, 138–43 Philosophy, 181, 190, 192, 194, 198–99, 204, 213–32; history of, xiii, 2; of history of philosophy, 233–35; of nature, 45–46; ours, 244–48; transcendental, 2; Western, 89, 106 Philosophy of nature, 251 Philosophy of religion, 5–6, 110, 211, 217– 32; defined, 222–25 Physics, 16, 19, 146 Piety, 30, 12–25, 128, 130, 161, 198–99, 238; in scholarship, 109 Plantinga, Alvin, 220 Plato, 26, 29–30, 38, 89, 96, 143, 192, 236–38, 243–44, 250, 252 Platonism, 6, 30 Plausibility, 183 Play, 3 Playwrights, Greek, 12 Plotinus, 91–97, 102, 257 Pluralism, 1, 138, 150, 158–70, 254; in Africa, 176–77; in Europe, 178; in philosophy of religion, 219; in religious categories, 153–54; of religious studies disciplines, 215 Poetry, 192–99 Pointing, 240 Poise, 179–83; defining self, 42–44 Political structure, 167–70 Political tolerance of religion, 166–69

279

Politics, 1, 5, 204; and the need for religion, 166–70 Polytheism, 219 Porphyry, 257 Portuguese, 172, 176 Position, 68 Positivism, 111–13 Possibilities, 43 Postmodernism, xi–xii, 144–45, 196–99, 254 Power, 146 Practice, 55–56, 116, 210, 215, 221, 231; and religious symbolism, 76 Pragmatics, 117 Pragmatism, 42, 62, 89, 98–99, 121, 144, 184, 188 Pratitya-samutpada, 141–43 Prayer, 41, 80–84, 116–17, 15, 187–88 Preaching, 188 Predestination, 75 Present, 15–19, 100–2 Primal religions, 169, 218 Principle, 47; in Confucianism, 71, 121, 185, 208, 219; first, 23–24; transcendent, 4 Privacy, in theology, 169–70 Privatizing of religion, 4–5, 158–70 Process, in nature, 15–19 Process philosophy, 42, 89–90, 95, 100, 144, 192, 245 Process theology, 66, 70, 75–76, 94 Professionalism, 205–16 Profundity, through symbols, 88–89 Progressivism, 197 Proofs, for God, 74, 222 Prophets, 82 Propositions, in theology, 59–60 Protestantism, 110, 152, 172–75, 178–79, 182, 209–11, 223, 257 Psychology, 19, 120 Psychotherapy, 147 Public life, 31–35, 38; for religions in America, 178–79 Publics, 98; for doctrine, 198; for inquiry, 5–6; for philosophy, 246–48; for soul, 195; for special disciplines, 205–6; for truth, 121

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Puritanism, 146, 148–49, 173–74, 177; conscience of, 178 Purity, 121 Purpose, divine, 22, 94; in truth assessment, 62 Quantum mechanics, 243 Quarks, 12 Quest, for the historical Jesus, 112, 189– 99; religious, 123–25, 130, 187 Quine, W.V. O., 249 Quinn, Philip, 220 Quran, 54, 78 Racism, 32, 177 Radhakrishnan, S., 27, 218 Ramakrishna Mission, 114 Raposa, Michael, 62, 251 Rational is the real, 234 Rationalism, 38, 213, 245 Rationality, divine, 22 Razavi, Mahdi Amin, xiv Reale, G., 233 Realism, in religious symbols, 88 Reality, 9–10, 181, 239–42; correcting symbolic codes, 58–59; for Kant, 190 Reconstruction in philosophy, 245, 247 Recursiveness, in obligation and responsibility, 33, 38 Redeemer, divine, 70 Reductionism, xi, 3, 45, 115–16, 229–32, 238 Reference, 3, 45–46, 52–57, 119–20, 120– 22, 186–87, 239–42, 253, 255; doubled, 57, 95–96, 194; primary and secondary, 53–54, 56–57, 76, 84–86, 91; in religion, 1–6 Reform, in religion, 142, 222–23 Regress, infinite, 21 Relations, internal and external, 14; temporal, 90–91 Relativism, 33, 122, 178, 208–9 Relativity, 243 Religion, 41, 105, 213, 243; as academic field, 114; Asian, African, Native American, 111; encounter in, 194; essence of, 165–70; in late modernity, 1–6; orga-

nized, 127; in philosophy of religion, 217–32; as practiced, 78; privatizing, 178; in public education, 161; and religions, xi, 217–18; vs. secularism, 1–2; study of, 2, 5–6, 203–21; theory of, 179– 83; traditional, 64; and war, 160–61; West Asian, 22; vitality of, 182–83 Religion and science, 2, 76 Religious minorities, 178–79 Religious situation, xi–xii Religious studies, disciplines in, 221; as public, 203–16 Religious symbols, 188–92, 223 Renaissance, European, xii Repentance, 51 Repetition, 118–19, 134 Replicas, 48 Repose, 92–97 Representations, 88, 98, 184 Republic (Plato’s), 30 Reservations, for Native Americans, 177 Resonance, 51 Respects of comparison, 237; of determinateness, 15; of interpretation, 9–10, 46, 49, 53, 59, 61–62, 64; of reference, 55– 57 Responsibility, 23, 32, 103, 105 Resurrection, 117 Retreat/return, 154 Revelation, 210–11, 213, 218, 222; special, 73 Rewards, divine, 83–84 Rg Veda, 27 Rhythms, 40–43 Rice, Daniel, 257 Ricoeur, Paul, 4, 113 Righteousness, 56, 124–25, 128, 130 Rights, human, 2, 29, 158, 168–69 Ritschl, Albrecht, 113 Ritual, 116, 135, 138–43; 153, 179–83, 251; dialogue of, 155; symbols in, 56 Roles, 149 Roles, in modernity, 59, 148, 172–76, 178– 79, 182, 210, 223, 257 Romanticism, 144, 146 Rorty, Richard, xiv, 6, 184, 233, 245–46, 254, 258

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Index Ross, James F., 220 Rouner, Leroy, xiii Rubinstein, Richard, 55 Rudras, 205 Rushdie, Salmon, 55 Russell, Bertrand, 30 Russians, in America, 174 Sacred canopies, 46–47, 112 Sacred and profane, 55, 116 Sacrifice, 32, 50, 156–57 Saints, 12, 38 Saivism, 227 Salvation, 47, 165 Samadhi, 118 Samurai, 55 Sangha, 147 Sankara, 48 Sanskrit, 226 Santa Claus, 79 Saudi Arabia, 175 Saul, King, 11, 50 Saussure, F., 49, 254–55 Scale, in orientation, 41 Scapegoat, 51 Schelling, F., 190 Schema-image, 48 Schematism, 47 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 90, 112–13 Scholarship, as spiritual path, 115; western and non-western, 215 Schopenhauer, 3 Schorske, Carl, 257 Schulkin, Jay, xv Science, xi, 2, 10, 18–19, 22, 41, 57, 64, 67, 122, 147, 185–86, 190, 210; and civilization, 40; and knowledge of God, 73– 77; mathematical, 12; of society, 134; worldpicture of, 84–85 Science of Judaism, 112 Science and religion, 66. See also religion and science Scientism, 45 Scotus, Duns, 25, 70, 220 Scripture, 152, 188, 215, 222, 226, Searle, John, 99 Secondness, 255

281

Secularism, xi, 5, 160–61m 178 Self, 3, 39–44; -contradiction defining self, 42; -criticism in translation, 228; -determination, 44 Selflessness, 118 Semantics, 49, 117 Semerad, Marilyn, xv Seminaries, 203 Semiotics, 3, 6, 32, 43, 45–65, 88–89, 133, 186–90, 235, 255; codes and systems, 98–99, 136; reality as, 9–10 Serendipity, in inquiry, 205 Service, 140 Sex, 37 Shamanism, xi, 12, 151, 173–77, 187 Shangdi, 71 Sharma, Arvind, 258 Shintoism, 228 Siberians, 176 Signs, 98–99, 176, 184–92, 235–49; and interpretation, 46; in Peirce, 251 Sikhs, 176 Simmel, G., 134 Simplicity, divine, 25 Sin, 41, 124, 136, 211 Sinai, 48 Singing, 187 Singularity, 25, 68–71 Skepticism, 64, 88, 98, 203–4, 214 Sky god, 71, 73, 124 Slavery, 174–75, 243 Smart, Ninian, 123 Smith, Adam, 134 Smith, Huston, 123 Smith, John E. xv, 142, 188–89, 221, 251, 254–55, 258 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 123, 230, 252 Social sciences, 113–15, 132, 145, 204–5 Social structures, 132–57 Societies, xiii, 18; and causal patterns, 133; culture, and community distinguished, 132–38; variously modernized, 150 Sociology, 111–12, 120, 259 Socrates, 109–10, 129, 241, 252, 157 Solomon, 55 Song, 41, 60, 223–24 Sorabji, Richard, 49

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Index

Soul, 42, 60, 92, 180, 185–88; transformation of, 1, 84, 91–106, 117 South Asia, 4 Soviet Union, 176 Space, 140; created, 11; schematizing the infinite, 48 Spanish Catholicism, 174 Species, and essence, 30 Specification, of vague categories, 228–29 Specious present, 191 Speculative philosophy, 235 Spinoza, B., 110, 112, 219 Spirits, testing, 210 Spiritual formation and practices, 88, 91, 128, 139–43, 224; in scholarship, 109, 126–30 Spontaneity, 15–19, 190 Stanford University, 218 Steady state (theory of cosmos), 22 Stephen, St., 234 Stoicism, 6 Strauss, David Friedrich, 112 Structure, 15–19; social, 32 Subjectivism, in religious understanding, 110 Subjectivity, 70, 190; divine, 81, 83, 86– 87 Subjunctivity, 101, 207 Substance, 18; philosophy of, 70–71 Substantialism, 42 Suffering, 32, 73, 80, 140, 142, 211 Superman, 196 Supernaturalism, 11–13, 77 Superstition, 12 Surprises, 179 Sustainability, through criticism, 206–7 Sutras, 117 Swedenborg, E., 257 Symbol systems (see also Codes), 51–52, 97–98 Symbolic reference, 239–42; in philosophy, 247 Symbols, xiii, 4, 6, 182–83, 214; broken, 79–87; engaging eternity, 95–106; for finite/infinite contrasts, 180–81; religious, 45–65, 88–89, 195, 211–12; theory of, 198–99

Symmetry, ontological, 24–27 Syncretism, xi, 128–29, 141 Syntactics, 49, 117 System, xii–xiii, 183; in philosophy, 239 Tai-ji, 57 Tauber, Fredrick, xiii Taylor, Charles, 38, 250 Taylor, Mark C., 253 Teachers, 149 Technology, 41, 145–46 Temporality, 1, 67–71, 89–91; grounded in eternity, 89; symmetrical, 56 Texts, 141 Textuality, 255 Theism, 25, 191, 220–25, 231–32; and public life, 167–69 Theodicy, 75, 218, 222 Theological studies, defined, 208–9 Theology, 5, 22, 63, 117, 124, 152, 154– 56, 182, 213–32; confessional, 221; as context for interpretation, 59–60; normative, 208–11; public, 158–70, 203– 16; of world religions, 155–57 Theory, 117; of causation, 133–38; nonreductive, 230–32; social, 133–38 Thick description, 45, 115, 224 Thief, 103–4 Throne room, divine, 71, 83 Tibetan Buddhism, 97 Tillich, Paul, xi, 66, 83, 88, 97, 210, 214, 251–52, 254, 257 Tillman, Hoyt, 258 Time, 4–5, 13–24, 89–91, 140; as created, 20, 91–92, 191–92; defined by Plotinus, 92–95; described, 100–2; flow of, 15–19 Togetherness, of past, present, and future, 16–24, 94–95, 102; ontological, 75 Tolerance, xii, 5, 71, 85, 158–70, 215 Tooth Fairy, 79 Torah, 54 Totalitarianism, xii, 33, 197 Totality, of nature, 10 Totum simul, 89, 191–92 Totems, 228 Toulmin, Stephen, 207

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Index Tracy, David, 258 Traditional culture, 137 Traditions, 182, 215; of East, South, and West Asia, 9, 12, 20, 26–67, 34, 38–43, 47, 57, 91, 234, 246 Transaction, 184 Transcendence, 167, 223; vs. engagement, 132 Transcendental ego, 190 Transcendental philosophy, 45 Transcendentalism (Emerson’s), 184, 189– 99; defined by Emerson, 255–56 Transcendentals, of creation, 72 Transformation, of consciousness, 91; personal, 219; of soul, 185–88, 193–96 Translation, 113, 225–29 Transmission, of texts, 222 Transplantation, from one tradition to another, 156 Triviality, 225 Troeltsch, Ernst, 113 Truth, 2, 25, 55–56, 212, 224–25; Aristotle’s theory of, 206; criteria for, 212–16; a dyadic relation, 62–63; in interpretation, 52–53; in philosophy of history of philosophy, 242–48; and publicity, 205; in religion, 61–65, 119–25 Twain, Mark, 257 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 113, 228 Typologies, 121, 234–35, 237, 243 Tyranny, 134 Ultimacy, xiii, 1–6, 28, 64–65, 78, 121, 165–70; vs. relativity, 122 Ultimate, Great, 27 Uncle Sam, 79 Unconditioned, 136–37 Understanding, objective, 1 Union, with God, 82–83 Unitarianism, 193 Unity, 92–93, 101 University of Chicago, 218 University of Hawaii, 218 University of Wisconsin, 218 Univocity, 64 Unnatural, 12–13 Upaya, 63, 147

283

Uterine environment, as common human condition, 35 Utilitarianism, 34 Vagueness, xii, 4, 10–11, 18–19, 62, 66– 71, 228–29, 258 Vaishnava, 47 Validity, of religions, 179–80 Value, 13, 47, 72, 147, 180–81, 222–23; carried over in truth, 61–65; differences in, 32, 38–39; in time, 15–19 Van der Leeuw, G., 113, 228 Van Ness, Peter, xiv, 129 Vasus, 205 Vatican II, 214 Vaught, Carl G., 252 Vedanta, 47, 59, 71, 258 Vietnam War, 175 Violence, in narrative, 234; in philosophy, 241 Vishnu, 47 Vision, 130, 197; cosmic, 122–25; the scholars’, 127 Vitality, 1–2 Vivekananda, Swami, 114, 175 Voluntarism, 25–26 Voting, minorities, 178–79 Vulnerability, to correction, 129, 204, 207, 209, 212, 214–16, 231–32, 246–48 War, religion in, 158–61 Ward, Keith, 70 Warrior, 11 Waste, 73 Watson, Walter, 234 Wealth, 133–34 Weber, Max, 113, 134 Weiss, Paul, xii, 235, 241, 245–46, 254 Weissman, David, 185, 255 Wesley, Charles, 97 Western culture, 249 Westernization, 114 Whitehead, Alfred North, xii, 30, 66, 70, 90, 94, 106, 191–92, 222, 235, 238–39, 241, 243, 245–46, 249, 251 Whitman, Walt, 184, 257 Wildman, Wesley, xv, 197, 252, 254

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284 Will vs. nature in God, 70 Williams, Roger, 177 Wilson, James W., 254 Windelband, Wilhelm, 233, 246 Witch trials, 160 Witchcraft, 11 Wittgenstein, L., 255 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 220 Women, 229 Word of God, 149 Work, 3 World community or culture, 131–57 World religions, 131, 135–36, 143 World society, 135

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Index World soul, 96 Worldviews, 111–15 Worship, 85 Worth, 222–23 Wu-ji, 57 Wyschogrod, Edith, 128, 146, 161 Xunzi, 40, 179–80, 250 Yale University, 218 Yoga, 4, 78, 109, 187, 203, 213, 258 Zhu Xi, 48 Zhuangzi, 241

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RELIGIOUS STUDIES / PHILOSOPHY

“This is an impressive re-imagining of the history of religion, politics, ideas, world views, and an investigation of the impact of modernity, ‘postmodernity,’ and late modernity on world praxis. The global ‘reach’ of this work and Neville’s engagement of contemporary and historical situations is profound. A rich but complex gift to the scholarly world.” — Robert M. Garvin, University at Albany, State University of New York ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University and Dean of the School of Theology. His most recent books include Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the LateModern World and the three edited volumes of The Comparative Religious Ideas Project: The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth, all published by SUNY Press. State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu

RELIGION IN LATE MODERNITY

Religion in Late Modernity runs against the grain of common suppositions of contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Against the common supposition that basic religious terms have no real reference but are mere functions of human need, the book presents a pragmatic theory of religious symbolism in terms of which the cognitive engagement of the Ultimate is of a piece with the cognitive engagement of nature and persons. Throughout this discussion, Neville develops a late-modern conception of God that is defensible in a global theological public. Against the common supposition that religion is on the retreat in late modernity except in fundamentalist forms, the author argues that religion in our time is a stimulus to religiously oriented scholarship, a civilizing force among world societies, a foundation for obligation in politics, a source for healthy social experimentation, and the most important mover of soul. Against the common supposition that religious thinking or theology is confessional and inevitably biased in favor of the thinker’s community, Neville argues for the public character of theology, the need for history and phenomenology of religion in philosophy of religion, and the possibility of objectivity through the contextualization of philosophy, contrary to the fashionable claims of neo-pragmatism. This vigorous analysis and program for religious thinking is straightforwardly pro-late-modern and anti-postmodern, a rousing gallop along the high road around modernism.

Neville

RELIGION IN LATE MODERNITY

Religion in Late

Modernity