Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Friday, June 4, 2010

Wilber & the religions of the book


Over at Love of All Wisdom, Amod has put up a sort of rejoinder to my review of Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, in which I assert (among other things) that Wilber does not offer a very recognizable portrait of Christianity, nor indeed of Judaism or Islam; and that this seems to me to stem from what I called his "Atmanism," his position that at bottom there really is One Big Thing (a.k.a. "Spirit,") whereas the sense that God is encountered is just foreign to his way of thinking.

This criticism is not the whole of my review, far less of my opinion about Wilber, about whom I tend to have a more cautious enthusiasm than his fans, and a more muted critique than his foes, who seem to see him as a guru who brooks no criticism. Also, as I have said both in an addendum to the review and over at Amod's blog in the comments, Wilber has somewhat expanded on his position in such a way as to make more explicit how he places the I-Thou experience. This remains, still, somewhat too little in my opinion to be a really robust account, but I'm a card-carrying Levinasian (of a sort), and so am hard to please on this score.

But I want to address here just one aspect of Amod's post. Amod questioned my reasons for finding fault with Wilber not reading the "religions of the book" in their own terms. This has to do with the "scandal of particularity," the claim that the people of Israel or the Incarnation of Christ or the revelation to Mohamed, these concrete historical events, have a universal pertinence rather than just being instances of some more generic truth. My own example was with regard to Christianity. I had written:
[Wilber] insists that Christian church fathers (note, we're not talking about run-of-the-pew "believers" in the Bible belt, but about the great Saints, Doctors of the Church, and masters of the Christian mystical tradition) have just got it wrong --with the exception of a few misunderstood voices-- about "the adept from Nazareth;" a claim that would be astounding if he made it about chess masters' opinions of the Ruy Lopez, or music critics' estimations of Beethoven's late quartets, or even of Zen masters' account of the Tathagata.
On this, Amod writes:
....it is surely a gross misunderstanding of Christian saints’ claims about Jesus to take them as a matter of specialized expertise. On their own understanding, Jesus is not a specialty, a limited field of human knowledge; He is universal, a truth who saves us all. ...once one makes that sort of universal, nonspecialist claim (and I think it’s a legitimate claim to make), one necessarily opens oneself up to nonspecialist criticism: if the truth in general isn’t what you say it is, then maybe Jesus isn’t what you say he is either.
Amod's point about nonspecialist claims making you vulnerable to nonspecialist critique is fair, but my argument really is that there is nothing immediately obvious about what is entailed by Christianity's claims. It is not an obvious thing to do "emic justice" to the Abrahamic faiths, or indeed to any other. Take the claim that "Jesus saves." What, exactly, is the danger we are "saved" from? What is this sin and death? The Bible, in fact, does not read itself; you have to inhabit the whole narrative for a good long while before you start to feel what might be meant by either sin or salvation (as opposed to, say, the superego's scowl or your parents' approval).

Nor is Buddhism transparent. The eightfold path doesn't explain itself; the four noble truths require considerable unpacking before they really sink in ("life is suffering" ...really?). What is this nirvana and why should it be sought? In what way does it answer the dilemma of desire? If as a Christian I tried to explain Buddhist enlightenment in terms of an encounter with Christ, and hence had to explain away all the obvious rhetoric of impersonality, absence of self, void, and so on, as "culturally determined" errors, Buddhists of all stripes would be right to caution me that I had got their tradition wrong. It is, after all, their tradition. (This isn't to reduce questions of truth to questions of proprietorship, though I do believe that such questions of "cultural sensitivity," to use the somewhat over-determined vocabulary of political correctness, have a place).

My review went on:
claims by or about the Buddha are wholly different in content from claims about Jesus as the messiah; and if one wants to understand Christianity (no matter what one "believes") one has to take those claims seriously in the terms in which they are presented.
The methodological issues that arise from inter-religious encounter are very tricky. I don't want to say that translation is impossible or that one can only repeat what the tradition says. If there is to be any encounter at all, real dialogue and mutual influence and transformation must be possible. And there have to be differences between types of conflict--instances where it is in principle possible to resolve contradictions with judicious distinctions, and others in which there really is an either/or incompatibility. As I hope I made clear in my response to Amod, this difference has to do with what the claims are about. Amod offered (in a comment to his post) the example of Sura 112 of the Qur’an: "Say: He is God, (the) One; the Self-Sufficient Master, Whom all creatures need; He has begotten no one, nor is He begotten; and there is no one comparable to Him." This, I agree with Amod, designedly confronts the Nicene clause: "I believe...in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made." The conflict exists because the traditions intend the same object and make different claims regarding it.

But the Buddhist/Christian case is different. Caveat lector: I do not speak as a Buddhologist, just an interested layperson who's read a bunch of (mostly popular) Buddhist literature, plus the occasional deeper work like The Words of My Perfect Teacher. But as I understand, the Buddha (the very term means "awake," designating a condition of being, not an essence) is held to have seen the nature of the universe as becoming and passing-away. His prescription (the eightfold path) is claimed to be able to get you the same realization. This is held to be not just a recipe for an experience but a path to understanding (I would say, "objective" understanding, but this would already court terminological problems); but this understanding is about the natural order.

The Christian claim about the Incarnation, on the other hand, is of a different order. It is about the intersection of a "supernatural" order with the natural; and about relating oneself to a person. It is (I hold) quite possible to maintain in a Christian context that Buddhist experience and discourse is completely accurate and valid, if one remembers these distinctions, though of course this might mean some careful fine-tuning. If I were sketching such an account I would have to distinguish many strands of Buddhist (and Christian) tradition, for not all of them would work in such a context (as they do not all "work" with each other), but it would be very important to be sure that I was not falsifying the traditions I drew upon.

This doesn't mean, note, that the Buddhist will wind up agreeing with me, any more than the great pagan philosophers all agreed with the Christian re-working of the philosophical heritage. The Church Fathers are quite clear that they "appropriate" and turn inside-out some of the terms ("logos" comes to mind) and conceptual structures they inherit. Aristotle would not have concurred with Aquinas about God. But, I would argue, there is a difference between the way that Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, both carefully and audaciously used Greek philosophy (in which he was extraordinarily well-versed), and the way Wilber more casually (as it seems to me) reduces the Messiah of the Jews to an Indian adept.

For the vast majority of the Christian tradition, the Incarnation is not at all a question of a human being ascending upwards, but of human nature being drawn up in response to a divine descent. This isn't to say that, ultimately, Wilber's conclusion might not be justifiable; but in order to show this, he would have to get there via the Christian tradition. Wilber's presentation in SES, seems to me merely to assume (on other grounds) that this is what Jesus must have been, and so winds up not so much dismissing as simply not engaging with, those who would demur. This is not just the Christian tradition, but a vast range of both thinkers and mystics from Islam, Christianity, and Judaism alike.

It's this non-engagement that strikes me as problematic. I of course don't argue that it stems from a Christological interpretation; it stems, as I said, from Atmanism. The Christology is just a symptom.

6 comments:

  1. I'm certainly not a Christian scholar but when I read the new testament I get the impression that everybody around Jesus was trying to decide what he *must* have been. I see him as a catalyst about whom something necessary--for the people of the time--crystallized. It would not surprise me at all if a truly resurrected Jesus looked at Christianity and said WTF!

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  2. No question-- the NT is explicit in raising the question, "Who do you say that I am?" The Gospels are (as I read them) designed to make this question inescapable. But they are also meant to point you to an answer. I don't think they can in themselves give the answer they believe is right. "These things are written that you may believe...", yes; but the Church has never pretended that the text of the NT by itself gives the faith it names. And Paul, e.g., is clear that "Christ crucified" is "a scandal to the Jews & foolishness to the Greeks;" he knew that people would come to this question with a whole lotta assumptions. One of the great services Kierkegaard did was to underscore for Christians again that the claim of the gospel was supposed to be shocking and counter-intuitive and in some sense frightening as well as "comic" (in the sense of an ultimately happy ending).

    Having said this, the scenario you describe --- "a truly resurrected Jesus look[ing] at Christianity and [saying] WTF!" --- has come up before (e.g., Dostoevsky), precisely within Christianity.

    On re-reading my post it also seems to me that I should say that I don't do enough justice to "atmanism" here, any more than Wilber (i.m.o.) does to philosophies of encounter. This is a bigger task. But I hope I don't just ignore it.

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  3. If the basic premise from which we start is that there is a supra-rational transcendent ground of reality then the various religions might be seen as attempts to grasp this ground in culturally determined ways. So much so ho-hum. Perhaps all the religions have the feeling that their brand is the best and clearest path to that ground and even the grand metaphysicians such as KW run off with the ball. How very difficult it is to be neither a Greek who believes there is a best expressed most rational theory, nor a Jew who has a revelation that trumps all others. Can we even imagine a future 'avatar' who arises out of no tradition? That's an 'atmanist' type assumption there.

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  4. Ah - you have a subtle and interesting point here. It's the kind of thing MacIntyre talks about when he says traditions are basically incommensurable until you learn another tradition as a "second first language." I think he's way, way overstating the case there, but he does have a point. I tried to explore the issue a while ago on the science side: how can we draw from scientific knowledge when we are not ourselves scientists? Now that I think about it, the analogy is probably quite productive, since Wilber also disagrees with the vast majority of biologists when he endorses the idea of irreducible complexity so central to the intelligent-design movement. Now doing this seems at first more excusable since Wilber has a degree in biochemistry, where he has no such training in Christianity. But, one must then ask, does one always need a degree or similar credential (like a monastic ordination) to disagree with the majority of a tradition about the tradition's central tenets? Every self-professed atheist disagrees with the majority of the Christian saints about the meaning of Jesus's life. Are they all doing it from simple misinformation? If the answer is yes, we seem condemned to a hopeless life of complete misinformation; we cannot hope to have enough specialized expertise to make any worthwhile claims about how the world really is.

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  5. The way that religions contradict each other may turn out to be a paradox like the preface paradox. On a certain 'horizontal' view there is conflict and contradiction but at the next level up there is resolution. It's a dialectical thing. Corbin speaks of:
    The transition from A to B to C, is what happens in the spiritual voyage. But the attainment of level C does not at all involve some return to the theoretical doctrine of level A. Instead it consists of taking everything at level A and raising it to level B. This is the anagogue, the anagogical way, or ascension.(from The Theme of the Voyage and the Messanger

    This coinage of Corbin's (is it?) is I think formed as a parallel to 'analogue' used theologically where an element on this sub-lunary sphere draws down as it were an element far above it and brings it to its own horizontal plane. Anagogue goes in the vertical direction and represents a true spiritual transformation or realisation.

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  6. addendum:
    Wikipedia has a little entry on 'anagoge'. The SOD has it also as "spiritual elevation esp. to understand mysteries". New to me but a very useful word

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