Boston University, draft of January 7, 2013
For the Religious Genius Project
Introduction
Of the many ways to understand religious geniuses, one of the most basic is to see them as virtuosi in engaging ultimate reality and ultimate dimensions of experience. The engagement with ultimacy is what makes their genius religious as opposed to some other kind. Their virtuosity is what sets them apart from others as geniuses. Many other factors are involved in the public recognition of them as religious geniuses, including being in the right place at the right time and having a public that grasps something of what makes them special. But the focus of this paper is on what things are ultimate such that engaging them with virtuosity makes people religious geniuses.
At the outset it should be pointed out that this approach construes religion as the engagement of something in the real world, namely, ultimacy, or ultimate realities, or ultimate dimensions of things. So this is not a highly subjectivist approach that understands religion mainly as the function of human behavior and experience, although those obviously are involved. Nor is this a strictly functionalist approach that understands religion as a function of something else, such as social cohesiveness (Durkheim) or psychological need (Freud), although these obviously are involved also. All cultures engage their geography, their weather, and their positions in various historical situations, and devise symbol systems, social organizations, and personal habits to do so. Just so, all cultures engage ultimacy in its many forms, and devise symbol systems, social organizations, and personal ways of life to do so, changing these as the ultimate realities change.
To be sure, this approach supposes and defends the thesis that the real world includes ultimate things. Most scientific approaches to the understanding of religion back away from any such commitment, studying at most how people “believe” there are ultimate realities. This stems from scientists’ desire to avoid “religious commitment”, which they believe would bias their science because religious commitment is “private” and not subject to any cognitive controls. But the practices of religion do involve engaging ultimate things just as meteorologists engage the weather (even though both often misinterpret what they engage). Philosophy need have no such artificial scruples and can therefore address religion more nearly at face value. Of course, philosophy needs to give an account and defense of ultimacy. This introduction will sketch out a complex hypothesis about ultimacy but will not defend it.[1] The rest of the essay will illustrate the hypothesis, which gives it considerable plausibility with regard to religious geniuses.
The monotheistic religions are explicit that ultimate reality is one: God, Yahweh, Allah; most other religions that recognize a number of gods usually affirm a supreme deity or ultimate principle: Shiva, Vishnu, Brahman, Emptiness, Non-Being, Dao, and so forth. Some of these conceptions involve multiplicity within the ultimate principle, as Shiva has Shakti, Heaven has Earth in Chinese religion, and the Christian God is a trinity. Theologians in nearly all religions have had high employment for centuries because of the controversies in articulating these concepts or symbols of ultimate reality. But all agree more or less that these conceptions answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. This is the “ontological question:” why is there something rather than nothing? The ontological ultimate reality is what answers to this.
Many if not most people probably have asked the ontological question at one time or another, prompted by the symbolism of their religious culture and by the extraordinary beauties and tragedies of life (something Paul Tillich called “ontological shock”).[2] Religions articulate problematics of belief and skepticism regarding the ontological source of existence, of gratitude, wonder, and sometimes deep nihilism as well as mystical union. But the most common forms of ultimacy engaged in life are more quotidian, and there are four of these, which can be called “cosmological ultimates”. The first is the ultimate of obligation or making right choices; all religions have problematics of obligation, including issues of discerning the right or the just, defining moral identity by choices, coping with moral failure, forgiveness, and the like, although different cultures articulate these in various ways. For religions, this is God the Creator (or Brahman or the Dao) in the guise of source of obligation and ultimate judgment. The second is the ultimate of wholeness or integrity, and gives rise to the religious problematics of attaining integration of the various components of a person’s identity, including membership in communities, as well as dealing with suffering and brokenness of many sorts. For monotheisms, this is the ontological ultimate in the cosmological guise of healer, comforter, and guide or draw to true selfhood. The third is the ultimate of engaging others relative to their own integrity; all religions have problematics of relating with proper compassion toward other people, especially those not in one’s in-group, and increasingly religions are becoming aware if they had not been so already of the need to relate to the natural environment. This is the ontological ultimate in the guise of the cosmological ultimacy of all creatures being as sacred and worthy as oneself, considered both on the individual level and as functions of communities by which people take their identity. The fourth cosmological ultimate is that of the question of meaning or the value of human life, individually and corporately construed. This is the ontological ultimate in the guise of the value-identity of people, and elicits problematics of salvation, meaningfulness, ground-and-destiny. Again, there are manifestly many different ways of construing the question of the ultimate meaning of human life.[3]
These ultimates, cosmological and ontological, are interconnected. How one makes good choices includes choices that affect one’s wholeness. How one deals with problems of personal wholeness affects engaging others in terms of their wholeness. All of this affects the value-identity one accrues and the meaning that life has in this regard. None of these would exist as problematics for dealing with ultimacy if the world did not exist, and so all are affected by how one engages the contingency of the world as such. Most of the core symbols in a religious culture address several or all of these ultimates, or can be interpreted in terms of each and in terms of combinations of each.
Nevertheless, each person deals variously with each of these problematics of engaging existence, obligation, wholeness, others, and meaning. We attend more to some than others, and do so on varying occasions. The point with regard to religious geniuses is that they too reach genius levels of virtuosity in different ways and to different degrees in each of these and perhaps are no geniuses at all in some. The thesis of this essay is that religious genius needs to be understood differentially with regard to each of the five ultimates and the following sections will lay this out in more detail, leaving the genius of engaging the source of existence itself until last.
Genius of Obligation
What makes morality and obligation religious is not that moral issues are religious in themselves. Rather it is that the fact of being obligated is an ultimate condition of human existence and engaging ultimacy is what religion consists in. No matter what the world is like, everything in it has form. From the human point of view, form is most directly important because people face future possibilities that often involve alternative ways of being realized, alternatives that have different values. To be sure, some philosophers think that values are only human projections and that the differences among the alternatives we must choose from are only “factual”. But it is hard to think that anyone believes that in real life. We frequently make decisions based on what we understand about the differences between the options in value. Most of those decisions are not Earth-shaking. Some are quotidian but important, such as choosing to eat healthy rather than unhealthy food; some are of life and death importance, as in making decisions about medical treatments or withholding treatments for oneself or someone in our responsibility; some decisions have to do with whether to go to war, with consequences for the well-being of entire civilizations as well as potential combatants.
Precisely because people do fact make decisions among alternatives with different values and have some control over those decisions and their consequences, people lie under obligation. For human beings, the ultimate status of form means an ultimate status to living under obligation. What people choose in their circumstances in turn contributes to their own moral identity. The content of a person’s moral identity is largely a matter of the circumstances and content of the choices available. The quality of moral identity has to do with how well the person chooses the better rather than the worse. But moral identity per se is not religious; it’s just moral. The religious dimension of moral identity has to do with how the person defines his or her relation to obligation as such.
Moses was a religious genius of obligation because he defined the Israelites’ relation to obligation as that of being under covenant with God to be His people. The content of the Sinai covenant defined certain aspects of the content of obligation for the people of Israel. Beyond Israel that content is important for Christians and Muslims. But the content itself was not so remarkable for its time and there are close parallels in religions of East Asia and South Asia. Even the ritual idiosyncrasies that were supposed to distinguish the Israelites from their neighbors were of a type that was more widespread. What was religious in Moses’ genius was that this covenant content was intended to define what it means, at least for Israel, to be related to obligation, namely to be in covenant with God. Keeping the covenant was the condition for entering into the presence of God. The whole covenant, including the purely ritual parts, was the key to engaging the ultimacy in having to live as a people making choices. The Levitical sacrifices were for the purpose of restoring the covenant, and hence the purity of the people as a whole and individuals within the community that allowed them access to God. It was not so much about restoring justice, although part of the Law had to do with punishments commensurate with the failures of obligation; even then, the punishments, for instance as levied in the Holiness Code, were for the sake of restoring the purity of the people when individuals polluted the land.[4] Of course, we know little if anything about the “historical Moses”, but the genius character ascribed to him in the accumulated mythology of the Torah and commentaries makes him a religious genius. He also might have been a genius political leader effective and leading through the Exodus; but political genius does not always, or even often, carry the connotation of religious genius.
Martin Luther King, Jr., was also a religious genius of obligation. He was not the first African American to fight for civil rights, to be sure, or the most intellectual—both W. E. B. DuBois and Cornel West are ahead of him there. He was a good, though not great, political strategist, and he had enormous courage like many of his colleagues in the civil rights movement, many martyred like him. But he was a religious genius because in his preaching he was able to bring a wide swath of Americans to a sudden confrontation with their obligation to fellow human beings whom they had unjustly oppressed. He awakened a sense of obligation that had been covered over by cultural rationalizations. His magnificent “I have a dream” was not significant because of the content of the dream but because it showed a largely callous public that everyone has a right to such dreams. King’s personal moral life left much to be desired. His personal life choices included being a womanizer and a plagiarist. But he was a religious genius of obligation because he was able to transform the relation of many Americans to obligations of a sort they had denied or defaced. His own moral character was not so exemplary. But his religious character was a profound and publically effective engagement of ultimacy for generations of Americans black and white.
The figure of Confucius, as presented to us in legendary form through many writings, was also a religious genius of obligation. His way of life has shaped an entire civilization. The content of what he taught is profound and makes for a subtle, flexible, and very deep way of life. But it was not original with him. In fact, he claimed to say nothing new, only pass on the traditions of the Ancients. Scholars nowadays believe he was more original than he let on. But what makes his teaching a matter of religious genius is that it defines what it is to be human as facing obligation. His central concept of jen, with a range of translations including humaneness, love, and human-heartedness, defined lying under obligation as being humane or normatively human. To be human involves many other virtues, such as righteousness, wisdom, propriety, courage, and the like. But humaneness requires choosing to be human, choosing to be a sage or a true human. His religious genius was to see that obligation as such is something that should be recognized and embraced. Failures in obligation count once with regard to their own content, for instance failing to be a friend. But they count again, religiously, because they indicate a disengagement from the ultimate condition of lying under obligation. Confucius taught, and manifested in his (legendary) character, the need for constant vigilance concerning whether one is properly engaging the obliged life.
The problematic of lying under obligation has many dimensions, including especially the dilemmas of discerning what good choices are, learning how to read the possibilities for choice so as to identify the values at stake, and then figuring out what to do with failure in choices. Moral codes attempt to identify the important things to look for in making choices. These elements are religious to the extent that they affect how people relate to being obligated as such. Religious genius of obligation is mastery at a high level of virtuosity of the engagement with being obligated itself. Perhaps many people are religious geniuses of obligation. The heroes, those who are known because they teach their genius lesson to others, are those whose genius has a public meaning that sets it apart from the customary way of life in their historical situation.
The Religious Genius of Wholeness
The “quest for wholeness” is an ultimate, and therefore religious, condition of human life because, like anything determinate, human beings need to integrate their components.[5] The components of human life are extremely various. A person’s body is perhaps the most important, or at least is the base of engaging all the other components. The body consists, among a myriad other things, of the person’s DNA, the conditions of nutrition throughout all stages of life, exercise and physical culture, coping with illnesses and accidents, and various displays to self and other that communicate self-worth, other-regard, and countless other signals; the body is closely related to clothing and the use of tools. Of near equal importance to the body is a person’s matrix of roles in family, friendship, and community structures (which are usually dynamic and changing). All these are components with respect to which a person needs to come to terms and balance with some poise. Then there are the components of education, career, defining roles in social and perhaps historical circumstances, and a host of other things. Cultures define the integral self, or soul, or mind in many different ways in relation to body, personal relationships, and life’s activities, some indicating a sharp distinction and others more continuities. However defined, there are “spiritual” components that need also to be integrated into the whole person. The issues of a person’s moral character are among the components to be dealt with.
In one sense, any person already has a pattern integrating all of life’s components: otherwise the person would not exist. But each of the components is laden with values of many sorts that should be respected. The body has many ways of being healthy, and many ways of being sick, weak, wounded, infirm, and broken. Part of the normative quest for wholeness is to have a strong and healthy body, relative to age and other circumstances. Families can be functional or dysfunctional. If a person’s parents are criminals then filial piety is a delicate project of respect and separation. The social components of one’s life might be positive projects of contributing to the life of a community, or they might be negative projects for changing an unjust community. The spiritual aspects of life might involve deep self-condemnation or joyous self-affirmation, with conversions and backslidings. Without suggesting that it is easy to know just what the value-laden characters of the components of life are, it still is clear that there is an ultimate normative dimension to finding integral forms or patterns of life that respect and do justice to those values.
Any old pattern of life is not good enough. Wholeness pits respect for the components of life against ease of personal integration. People likely to read this essay probably feel a disturbing tension between organizing personal life around the demands of career and family on the one hand and taking care of their bodies on the other. The people in a person’s life make competing demands. When a person seeks a “concept” or “image” of herself or himself in order to organize the components of life, such spiritual ideas often contain contradictions so that the person is sick at heart. The experience of many people is that the quest for wholeness is not merely a positive matter of improving things but a negative matter of suffering. Many people, in a variety of religious cultures, think that suffering is the main problem defining religion.
The legendary Gautama Buddha was a religious genius of wholeness (as well as engaging others). As the standard Buddhist story goes (we know very little about the person himself, even what language he spoke), the “quest for wholeness” in his time and situation was bifurcated between lascivious excess and extreme asceticism. The Buddha’s solution was to find the “middle way”, which was based on a philosophical conviction that the root of all brokenness and failure to be whole is suffering. Suffering in turn is based on an inappropriate way of being conscious, namely, to crave or identify intentionally with the objects of consciousness. The remedy for all suffering, relative to this root, is to disengage from all craving and learn just to observe the suchness of things passing through consciousness without craving them, cringing from them, or letting them define one’s project of wholeness. Note that this is something of the opposite of the West Asian sense of personhood, which is very much committed to intentionality, action, and the magnification of (good) desires. The “quest for wholeness” in the religions that personify ultimacy has to do with acting so as to integrate things. The Buddha’s contrary position was to abandon a sense of ongoing personal identity, to give up the “project” of integration and just let things be. Enlightenment means total acceptance, although of course there should be responses to matters of right and wrong and daily life must be attended to. But attending to daily life has nothing to do with personal wholeness. With respect to wholeness, an enlightened person is “empty”.
The genius in the Buddha’s religious approach to wholeness was profound and has provoked two and a half millennia of elaboration, often in very contradictory ways, each of which claims to represent the original Buddha. The late Mahayana project of becoming a bodhisattva through taking a vow and enduring as many lifetimes as necessary to wait for all sentient beings to be enlightened seems to be an intentional project of extraordinary grit and determination; yet the answer is that the bodhisattva is already a Buddha anyway.[6] The Buddha’s approach to moral obligation was quite conventional, and he argued in the Four Noble Truths that getting one’s life together in a moral way is a prerequisite for the serious meditation required for acquiring an enlightened consciousness. The most typical activities advocated by the Buddha for the attainment of wholeness through enlightenment have to do with mediation, and many traditions of Buddhist meditation have flourished in response to his genius.
St. Ignatius of Loyola was a religious genius of ultimate wholeness in a way almost directly opposite to the Buddha. Accepting the fairly common notion that wholeness in most regards consists in being a good disciple of Jesus, he took that to mean discipleship in the sense of a soldier. Martial discipline is an extremely tight form of integration and of course it involves the cultivation of physical skills and of learning to follow and give orders. But St. Ignatius’s special genius was to stress the importance of imagination. His “spiritual exercises” consist of ordered practices of focusing on special images, usually of Jesus and the events of his life. The focus is aimed to identify consciousness with the content of the images, to conform consciousness to it, especially to the bearing of suffering, the practices of forgiveness and humility, and the love of the unlovely. Through the imaginative exercises the pulls and tussles of the components of a person’s life are slowly abandoned, subordinated, or reshaped to having the contours of life defined by the mission to which the person is assigned as a soldier for Christ. To have wholeness is to be under orders, like a soldier, and to discipline the components of life to serve that mission rather than any other personal, familial, or social interest. Whereas Buddhist meditation is aimed at emptying consciousness of any inappropriate attachment or craving, Ignatian meditation aims to image the presence, suffering, humility, and love of Jesus so that this motivates complete devotion to the task in life that is assigned by others. The Ignatian aim is to replace one’s personal will to wholeness with Christ’s will for one’s wholeness.
The martial theme is not entirely absent from the teaching of Wang Yangming, the great Neo-Confucian of the early 16th century. He was, by profession, a military general and argued that the meditation one needs for wholeness is the kind that a general can have while directing a battle, absolutely focused on what is going on and so learned about warfare that the leadership responses seem spontaneous. He was a religious genius, however, because of his integration of the innermost movements of the heart with the step-by-step chain of events to relate to the things of the world and to get things done. His slogan of “the unity of thought and action” was based on his conviction, reaffirmed in his practice, that “principle” (li) or “coherence”, or “harmony” pervades and connects all things. An adept, for him, is “one body with the world”. The innermost recesses of the heart/mind are formed by the same principles that are manifest in things. For Wang, wholeness comes not from emptying consciousness attachments, which he condemned as quietism in Buddhism. Nor does it come from taking an external model of wholeness to which one should conform. Rather it comes from being in close contact with the things of the world and responding appropriately regarding how those things should be treated. Selfishness is the enemy of this openness and responsivity.
The Religious Genius of Engaging Others
Like any determinate thing, every person is in a world with other things and the person’s own life is defined in part by how it is determinate with respect to those other things. While some things are properly considered to be components of one’s life, most things have their own existence that is only partly determinate in terms of their relations with a particular person. The web of ways things condition one another constitutes the existential field within which things engage one another. Human beings are located in an existential field with other people, the social institutions of their culture, and the myriad levels of nature. The theme of “otherness” has become prominent in recent European philosophy, largely for the reason that much (but not all) Western philosophy since Kant has tried to define reality in terms of the structure of the knowing subject, and hence “others” are easily reduced to representations in a person’s experience. Yet we “know”, looking someone in the face, that this person is not reducible to representations in our own experience. Therefore it is important to engage the other as other.
This is an ancient theme. All the Axial Age religions have admonitions to love and be compassionate, and to be this way with everyone in some sense, not only with those in one’s ingroup. The recognition of the need to relate to non-human, perhaps non-living others has not been so ancient. Nevertheless, it is an ultimate condition of human existence to have to relate to others and other things in ways appropriate to their own nature and value, not just in ways that serve our own personal interests.
The Buddha was a religious genius of engaging others (as well as of wholeness), although this emphasis was a later, mainly Mahayana, projection back onto the legendary character of the Buddha. Ancient Buddhism shared with many forms of Hinduism and with Mahavira’s Jainism the cosmology that says that sentient beings move through many life forms through reincarnation of the soul. Instead of focusing the problem of otherness on the human community, as has been typical in West Asian and East Asian religions, the South Asian focus has been on the whole range of sentient beings, from the tiniest germ to high gods and goddesses, making for a radically different sense of “community”. The genius attributed to the Buddha in this regard is the commitment to compassion in the sense of the eventual enlightenment of all sentient beings. This means, following the popular cosmology, compassion to lower animals, compassion to wretched human beings who will need many more lifetimes to reach enlightenment themselves, and compassion to fellow bodhisattvas and the higher deities. The meaning of compassion is of course a matter of deep controversy in the many forms of Buddhism. But at the root is the sense that a person’s good consists in attaining enlightenment so that perfect wholeness of the Buddhist sort can be achieved. This cannot be achieved in most kinds of life, not even in every form of human life. Therefore compassion usually consists in whatever helps a sentient being to a better life next time. The Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva is that of a person who will go through many more lives, postponing his or her own Nirvana,, until all sentient beings have been coached through compassion to enlightenment. Living under the vow to do this is itself a kind of enlightenment, and the chief bodhisattvas are great Buddhist heroes. At the heart of the Buddha’s teaching in this regard is the continuing recognition of the integrity or individuality of a sentient being in transition through the many lifetimes required for enlightenment.
Operating with a similar cosmology of reincarnation and karma, many forms of Hinduism take a quite different approach to compassion. Shankara, for instance, the great Advaita Vedanta saint, said that the proper attitude toward others is to see them as not different from oneself. This is not a reduction of the other to oneself, but a rejection of distinctions in the ultimate reality of different selves. For Shankara, it is the superimposition of false ideas of difference that makes us think that we are different from one another. In fact, every self is atman, and atman at base is Brahman without qualities. Compassion therefore consists in cultivating a strong sense of identity with others, which includes a rejection of selfishness.
Jesus, by contrast, was a religious genius of engaging others because of his teaching that others should be loved precisely in their differences. He went so far as to say that we should love our enemies. Jesus, of course, was a Jew living at a time when the important ingroup-outgroup distinction between Jews and Gentiles was greatly exacerbated by the Roman occupation. His own life came to an end when he was caught up in the maneuverings of the Roman occupation forces with the High Priestly family overseeing the Temple, each trying to keep the peace while not ceding too much to the other. So Jesus’ advocacy of love of all people, including those in the outgroups and who are unlovely, even unlovable, was revolutionary. Our picture of Jesus, of course, comes from later interpretations of his life. St. Paul was the one who said the meaning of Jesus’ life was to extend the promises made to Israel under Abraham and Moses to all the Gentile world. Jesus as we have pictured him took his mission to preach this universal, outgroup-oriented, love to be his God-given identity and his love of God was part and parcel of his love of neighbors. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point is that “neighbors” are likely to be very different.
Confucius, or at least the early Confucians who spoke for him, said that humaneness, the primary virtue, is manifested in how one treats others. He advocated loving all people, but “with differences”. In opposition to the Mohists, who advocated loving all people equally, Confucius said that people are different and their relations with one are different, and therefore justice requires treating them in ways that recognize the differences. The way one loves parents and family members should be different from the way one loves friends, or members of one’s community, or representatives in government far away, and these again are different from the way one should love people in other lands whom one would never meet. This point is not inconsistent with the advocacy of compassion toward all sentient beings, gauged to their life form at the time. Nor is it inconsistent with Jesus’ call to love all people, especially those who are different and perhaps inimical to oneself. Yet it stresses the differences in how love might be appropriate for different people.
Mother Theresa is a religious genius of engagement in our time, famous for engaging the filthy, poor, and dying that few others would touch. She is a rightly honored model of self-less devotion to the most needy. But it should be noted that her conspicuous compassion has been criticized as politically immoral, diverting attention from the social need for better health care, for the elimination of poverty, and for more socially responsible ways of dealing with the destitute dying. To the extent this criticism is valid, Mother Theresa is not a religious genius of justice and righteous judgment!
The Religious Genius of Finding Meaning
“Finding meaning” is a disturbingly late-modern phrase for the ultimate condition of what a person’s life adds up to. Paul Tillich once wrote that the religious question in Christian antiquity was death and immortality; by the medieval period that had shifted to the question of guilt and punishment/forgiveness; in the modern period when the cosmology of life-after-death had lost much of its plausibility in the European Enlightenment, the religious question became that of whether life, understood scientifically, has any meaning.[7] Expressed philosophically, the ultimate condition of meaning is how to understand the value-identity of one’s life in terms of the larger picture of existence. Everything determinate has both the value that is integrated into its own self and the value effects the thing has on other things that are integrated into those other things. For human beings, a person’s value-identity consists of the values the person bears internally plus the values the person has caused in other people, in the social institutions of the person’s context, and in the natural environment.
The problematic of ultimate value-identity has many levels addressed by most religions. One is the attainment of some perspective from which a person’s value-identity can be appreciated. Precisely because people have effects on each other, and yet are in some significant essential measure are external to one another, it is difficult to get a perspective on a person’s cumulative value identity. Another level is coping with the fact that nearly everybody’s value-identity is not what it should be and that there are consequences of this. Two main lines of culture have interpreted the consequences: the karma theory according to which a person’s value-identity in one life is a causal factor for the kind of life the sentient being gets next time around, and the divine judgment theory according to which people are rewarded or punished in the afterlife. Both of these cultural lines have many different and often conflicting interpretations.
The most common temptation, always ultimately fruitless, is to find meaning in some large historical or cosmic narrative so that a person’s value-identity is to play some role well or poorly. The religious genius of the Bhagavad Gita (author unknown) is expressed in the advice Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu, gives to Arjuna the great warrior. Just before a great battle, Arjuna is lined up with his troops over against the enemy army which contains many of his relatives, friends, and teachers. Arjuna has a breakdown and slumps in his chariot because he does not want to do his part in the war, a crucial moment in his nation’s narrative. Krishna tells him that the narrative does not matter, that he cannot really kill his loved ones on the other side because of karmic reincarnation, etc., and that Arjuna has “a right only to the action, not to its fruits”. It matters not whether he wins or loses, the narrative is not important. What matters is only that he put himself wholly into being what he is, a warrior with a particular station in life. Life’s meaning is to be practiced and skillful at being what one is in relation to the ultimate, not in winning or losing, the stuff of narratives.
Soren Kierkegaard’s religious genius was to shift this purity of heart from skillful practice to authenticity. Kierkegaard pointed out that a “self” involves a relation of oneself to oneself as relating to others and to one’s circumstances, whatever those might be. But that relation of oneself to oneself is important only because it is the way one presents oneself in faith to God. No matter the content of one’s life, no matter how immoral or sinful, the person who presents that life to God in faith is accepted and that acceptance is the only value-identity worth having.
Whereas Christians and Confucians advocate that the meaning of life requires engaging it more robustly, most forms of Hinduism and some of Buddhism take the real meaning of life to be escaping it altogether. Both take the quotidian life of change to be problematic itself. The Hindu goal of moksha, or release, is conceived at the level of popular religion to be ending the cycle of rebirth. Shankara, again, is a religious genius of this sense of life’s meaning. Change itself is a delusion, he thought, but one that is the human reality until there is an actual realization of the ultimate underlying unity of all things in undifferentiated Brahman. Concerning Shankara’s texts there is controversy over whether such enlightenment is possible in this life. Does one have to die to end the cycle of rebirth? Among other things, the cultivation of indifference to this question is one aspect of enlightenment or the actualization of Brahman in oneself.
The Religious Genius of Engaging Existence
The religious genius of engaging the existence of the cosmos itself and its ultimate ground is implicit in the other instances of religious genius of ultimacy, in obligation, wholeness, otherness, and meaning. Each of those cosmological ultimates is radically contingent on the ontological act of creation that makes the world of determinate things. In fact, when alert to the feeling-tone of ultimacy in obligation, wholeness, otherness, and meaning, part of the mystery is awareness at some level of what would be the case if those ultimates were lacking—absolute nothingness: no form, nothing formed, no relations, no vale. Perhaps most religious people, including the religious geniuses, approach the ultimacy of existence as such through the mediation of those cosmological ultimates.
Nevertheless, some of the religious geniuses do engage the ontological ultimate of radical contingency of all determinateness on an act of pure making more or less directly. For the sake of illustrating the variety of these direct engagements we can illustrate five “types”, running from an emphasis on the immediate presence of the creative act in finite things to abandonment of the self in the depths of the creative act, and a balance.
Although there are many forms of celebration of the presence of the ontological creative act in the things of this world, including Sufi life, Pure Land Buddhism of some branches, and Pentecostal Christianity employing glossolalia, a near-legendary figure of extraordinary religious genius is Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. He emphasized the cultivation of the joyous feeling of God’s presence in everything of daily life. In this, he pushed back against the Kabbalistic theology of Isaac Luria what stressed the claim that the world is an emanation away from the Godhead. Rather, everything in life is to be celebrated as the full and vital presence of God.
Only slightly different in emphasis is the Muslim Sufi religious genius, Ibn al-’Arabi (there is some contention that Baal Shem Tov converted to Islam late in life, which would be consistent with the rough continuity between Hassidism and Sufism with regard to the presence of God). Ibn al-’Arabi (Alfarabi) insisted on the presence of God in all things but stressed the underlying unity of God. God’s unity is the root of his interpretation of the world.[8] Appreciating the presence of God includes appreciating the delicious unity of all things. Ibn al-‘Arabi was a very technical philosopher, so this rough summary is very rough indeed (Baal Shem Tov left no writings of his own and was known for his person as much as for his verbal teachings, by some accounts). But the profound emphasis on ontological and spiritual unity in God underlies the technical philosophy.
Abhinavagupta, the great Kashmir Shaivite teacher, represented the tradition whose metaphors for the ontological ground of determinateness were elaborations of consciousness rather than personal actions. In his view, the innermost root of the world is Shiva in the guise of pure empty consciousness. But Shiva is never without Shakti who is the expressive power of consciousness creating things as “groups” or harmonies. Ultimate reality in the ontological sense is a kind of vibration, like breathing, of the utter emptiness of Shiva and the active creativity of Shakti. Cultivated religious life aims to attune one’s own consciousness as much as possible to this double-figure of the indeterminate Shiva expressing the determinate powerful Shakti which is the ground of all things.[9] This shifts the focus a bit from concentration on the ontological ground manifesting itself in the things of this life to the virtuoso experience of the pulse of creation as such, a striking work of religious genius. In that experience, one’s personal identity loses much importance.
Meister Eckhart is a religious genius whom most would associate with deep mysticism. He famously recognized that “God” is God because of creating the world. Thus, the divine nature is a result, not cause, of the creation of the world. So behind God is the Godhead that is the real source of the creative act that makes God and the world. The interesting part of Eckhart’s theory is that the Godhead has to overcome nothingness to get the creative act started. The piety associated Eckhart’s mysticism involves the abandonment of the self as part of the creative order, a kind of plunge down through the imagined perception of the creative activity itself into the nothingness of the Godhead, the Abyss.
One of the most balanced positions with regard to the engagement of the ultimate ground of existence is that of the great American genius, Jonathan Edwards. For Edwards, the greatest “virtue” is what he called “consent to being in general”. Based on his own highly cultivated aesthetic experience, Edwards articulated “consent” to mean love, a propensity toward, and a delight in being in general. Being in general includes the created world and God as the creator of it. One implication of “consent” is that it acknowledges both unity and distance between the individual and being in general (which includes the individual).[10]
Concluding Reflections
The above sections have argued that religious genius is responsive to ultimate realities that we all face, though usually without much genius. Instead of working from a phenomenology of religion outward to induce categories of religious genius, the argument has taken off from a metaphysics of ultimacy and looked to classify different modes of religious genius in response to the five ultimates.
The illustrations of religious genius given are intended to exemplify engagements of the different ultimates and also to show how there is great variety among the different modes of engagement. In no way does this study assume that all religions are at bottom alike or that there is one figure for the religious genius. What is common to all is the nature of reality that each approaches from the resources of the cultures available and with the inspiration of genius. The illustrations are by no means scholarly studies, which would require much greater depth and detail and would need to cope with the issues of historical knowledge of the figures, which are finessed here. Legendary figures such as the Buddha and Moses are set alongside religious geniuses we know mainly from their texts, such as Abhinavagupta and Meister Eckhart.
The expression of these illustrations is intended to indicate how the religious genius exemplifies the mode of engagement under discussion as determined by the ultimate engaged. This by itself demonstrates that one can be a genius in one mode of engagement but perhaps not any or all of the others. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a case in point. This does not detract from the importance of the religious genius in the mode under discussion. If we were to focus on the religious geniuses rather than the types it would be appropriate to inquire in much greater detail into how their genius fares with regard to other types. Some geniuses might be superlative in engaging several or all ultimate realities. Probably few religious geniuses are seriously deficient in respect to engaging any one ultimate reality. The ultimate of obligation is present in the quest for wholeness and the engagement of others because choices are involved. The quest for wholeness determines in part how skillful an agent might be in choice or engaging others. And so on. A person who despairs of all life’s meaning is likely not to be very adept in relating to obligation, wholeness, others, or even the absolute contingency of the world on a creative ground. But a genius such as the Buddha who is superlative in the quest for wholeness might be quite pedestrian in moral vision and sense of obligation. A genius superlative in cultivating the character and roles of engaging others might be confused regarding obligation. These questions need to be examined for each of the figures to get a balanced assessment or appreciation of any.
The purpose of this essay has been to provide a framework of categories for types of religious genius that might guide further discussion regarding individual geniuses and how they do what they do.
[1] The hypothesis is defended at great length in Robert Cummings Neville, Ultimates: Philosophical Theology Volume One (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013).
[2] See Tillich’s discussion in his Systematic Theology, Volume One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 113.
[3] The philosophic theory underlying the distinction between the ontological ultimate and the four cosmological ultimates is this. For reasons detailed in Robert C. Neville, God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968/ revised edition; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), the world that needs an account for its very existence includes absolutely everything that is determinate; the ontological creative act that creates the determinate things cannot be determinate itself except as creator of the determinate world. But anything that is determinate is a harmony of components that has four transcendental traits: form, the components harmonized in that form, location in an existential field with other determinate harmonies, and the value achieved by getting these components together with this form in this existential location. These four transcendental traits are ultimate in the sense that anything in any cosmos whatsoever must exhibit them. There would be no ontological ultimate of giving rise to the world without a world given rise to; hence the ontological ultimate entails the four cosmological ultimates, and vice versa. The following sections of the essay lay out some of the main points of this theory while illustrating it.
[4] See Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil on the ultimate significance of impurity.
[5] See Carl G. Vaught’s The Quest for Wholeness (Albany: State University of New York Press,1982)
[6] See Sung-Bae Park’s Buddhist Faith and Sudden Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).
[7] Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).
[8] See William C. Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al’Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
[9] See Paul Eduoardo Muller-Ortega’s The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavaguptain the Non-Duial Shaivism of Kashmir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
[10] See Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).
