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Back to Politics
and Theology
On Difference in Religion
- Substance of a talk given to an informal
discussion group meeting near Brecon on Saturday 2nd July, 2005
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My thesis is broadly that each religion has
its own internal logic and that these logics are incompatible.
It may be that they are all relative to an absolute in which
they can be reconciled. That is the argument of Frithjof Schuon's
book, The Transcendental Unity of Religions. (1) But I
will argue that if there is such a unity it is more transcendental
than Schuon reckons. It is beyond human experience this side
of the grave. We derive little or no benefit from any particular
religion unless we experience it as an absolute or at least as
holding the promise of being an absolute, so any attempt to reconcile
the teachings of the different religions, to iron out their differences
is destructive of religion. We are obliged to regard other religions
as false because they are, necessarily false to the logic of
our own religion and we have no standpoint higher than that of
our own religion by which we might judge them to be true. Using
Biblical imagery we may regard this as a consequence of the division
of tongues after the fall of the tower of Babel.
Arriving at this conclusion has been difficult
for me. I have always been very reluctant to assert the truth
of one religious system as against another and I have tried hard
to find a standpoint from which it would be possible to respect
all the great religions equally. So I thought it might be possible
to develop this argument in the form of a brief and perhaps rather
sanitised intellectual autobiography.
'DEPTH' IN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
From a very early age I developed a lively
interest in myths and legends, meaning real myths and legends
of real peoples and not just any old fantastic tale. And I early
accepted the idea that these myths and legends were a means of
conveying truths that could not be conveyed by other means
that intrinsic to the definition of the word 'myth', for example
was the conviction that it had to be in one way or another true,
it had to contain a hidden truth. And this quickly broadened
out into a general interest in poetry and the arts, still informed
by the conviction that they were a means of conveying truth and
that if they were not a means of conveying truth they were not
very interesting.
It was fairly clear that that truth would
be 'religious' in character, otherwise it could perfectly well
be expressed in prose, and so I set to reading as much as I could
about religion the Upanishads, Farid al-Din Attar's
Conference of the Birds, Edward Conze's Buddhist Scriptures,
R.C. Zaehner on Zoroastrianism, the Epic of Gilgamesh, material
like that. Which I might say in parenthesis, was easily available
on the shelves of the very informally run Linen Hall Library
in Belfast. It has come under more efficient management since
and I somehow doubt that the religion shelves, if they still
exist, are as interesting and varied as they were then.
All this left me with the conviction that
human experience has depth. For reasons I won't go into, Yeats
was important in my life and a favourite quotation from him may
be in order (though I wouldn't have known it then):
'We proclaim that we can forgive the sinner,
but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers
and Bishops of all denominations. "The Holy Spirit is an
intellectual fountain" and did the Bishops believe, that
Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture,
in daily manners and written style ... No man can create, as
did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe, with
all his blood and nerve, that man's soul is immortal, for the
evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined,
men have turned
from creation to photography.' (2)
BLAKE ON THE UNITY OF RELIGION
The phrase 'the Holy Spirit is an intellectual
fountain' is adapted from William Blake (introduction to Jerusalem
chap 4) and from an early age I could have subscribed wholeheartedly
to the brief creed given by Blake under the title All Religions
are One:
'Principle 1st. That the Poetic Genius is
the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived
from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things
are derived from their Genius which by the Ancients was call'd
an Angel & Spirit & Demon .....
'Principle 3d. No man can think, write, or
speak from his heart, but he must intend truth. Thus all sects
of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weakness
of every individual .....
'Principle 5th. The Religions of all Nations
are derived from each Nation's different reception of the Poetic
Genius, which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.
'Principle 6th. The Jewish & Christian
Testaments are an original derivation from the Poetic Genius;
this is necessary from the confined nature of bodily sensation.
'Principle 7th. As all men are alike (tho'
infinitely various), so all Religions &, as all similars,
have one source.
'The true Man is the source, he being the
Poetic Genius.'
In school I knocked around with what might
be loosely called a gang who were younger than myself. What we
had in common was an interest in such things as beat poetry,
Black Power, the blues. Others in this little group ended up
in various of the Hindu-inflected movements the Divine
Light Mission (currently called Elan Vitale), the Krishna
Consciousness Society, the Guru Sri Chinmoy Lighthouse. I personally
discovered and was attracted by the Baha'i World Faith and I
was also very taken with (and still have a soft spot for) the
teachings of G.I.Gurdjieff. I organised a school debate on the
motion 'This house believes that Christianity is not the only
way to salvation' (the Christian Union turned out in force and
we lost). And in University I was secretary of the 'Philo Society',
which held meetings in which representatives of different religions
were invited to explain their beliefs.
RELIGION AND PSYCHOLOGY
In all this of course, though acquiring a
lot of knowledge, I had no coherent religious base of my own.
I was formally an Anglican and I liked the sober formality of
the Church of Ireland as I experienced it but with all these
other exotic infuences working on me its doctrine naturally seemed
narrow and superficial. I was puzzled as to why people who claimed
to be religious seemed uninterested in the wealth and variety
of religious phenomena throughout the world. My own inclination
was towards the poets expressing more personal religious ideas
and to the idea that spiritual truth was to be found in dreams,
visions and the subconscious. Which naturally led to an interest
in Jung and, as I would see it now, a confusion between the spiritual
and the psychological. 'Depth' was to be found in the subconscious,
the need was to integrate the conscious and the subconscious
worlds, which led to the 'long, enormous, rational disordering
of the senses' of the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud drugs'n'sex'n'rock'n'roll,
though in my case it was more like drugs'n'free form jazz.
We are of course talking about the late sixties
and these were ideas that were very much in the air. They led
to a great improvement in my social life but, eventually, they
produced a reaction, a suspicion of everything that could be
called psychological or spiritual (since I wasn't able to draw
the distinction), an insistence on immediate perceived concrete
realities and a taste for historical and political analysis.
I did not lose my interest in religion but it became sociological,
historical, 'objective', contingent on politics. Hence my thesis
on Controversies in Ulster Presbyterianism which led me
to explore a Calvinist theology I did not find personally attractive.
But I did recognise something of a fellow-feeling between these
Calvinist disputes and certain disputes within Marxism in which
I was getting involved. And I came to appreciate the atmosphere
of intellectual rigour, refusal of easy spiritual experience
and even of a subtle and mischevous sense of humour.
If I were St Augustine I would say that God
was working on me and in the 1980s, I was feeling a great desire
to pray but without any idea how to go about it. I was still
convinced that religion had to be homogeneous. It was impossible
for me to choose a religion as being better than others
yet I felt the need for a religious discipline. I was persuaded
that the much longed for depth requires an encounter with God,
with something other than the self. To quote Kierkegaard (a wonderful
quote I am at present unable to place precisely): 'Prayer is
to ordinary human conversation what ordinary human conversation
is to the chattering of a parakeet' (my attempt to do a Google
search on 'Kierkegaard', 'prayer' and 'parakeet' produced some
extraordinary results but not the one I wanted).
TRADITION AND PROGRESSIVE REVELATION
This led me back to the Baha'i World Faith,
which had interested me while I was still in school. The Baha'is
argued that all the great religions were true for their particular
place and time, they were part of a continuous process of divine
revelation. The Baha'i Faith, which had emerged in Iran in the
nineteeth century in the context of Shi'i Islam, was the revelation
for our own time when, with the development of global communications,
a unity throughout the world had become possible.
This teaching provided both a clear and distinct
religious doctrine and discipline of its own as well as a standpoint
from which the truth of all the great religions could be respected.
At the same time my religious seeking was
informed by my interest in the French painter Albert Gleizes.
Gleizes argued that the truth of religion was manifest not so
much in its doctrines as in its acts and in particular in the
works of art that it produced, especially the visual arts. The
visual arts manifest the spiritual shape or form of the society
that produces them. He saw history as developing in cycles. Religious
or he would say 'rhythmic' cycles alternated with
materialist or static cycles and these were visible in the arts.
The Baha'is also had a cyclical conception of history each
religion going through a process of growth followed by decay
followed by a new revelation, a new growth, a new decay. The
two ideas therefore seemed to me to be complementary with myself
wonderfully well placed to bring about their reconciliation.
Gleizes was a Roman Catholic who believed
that the Christian idea had expressed itself most clearly in
the western Church prior to the twelfth century. Then the materialist
idea had arisen, through the Gothic and the Renaissance, manifest
in an increasingly realistic, photographic art. Cubism he saw
as a sign of a return to the rhythmic religious idea. Such cycles
were characteristic of all the great religions, and compared
to this manifestation in the act the doctrinal difference between
the religions was a matter of relative indifference.
Gleizes was associated with a group of people
with different religious affiliations but who had what appeared
to be similar ideas, notably Ananda Coomaraswamy, Marco Pallis
and René Guenon. Coomaraswamy was a Hindu, Pallis a Buddhist.
Guénon was formally a Muslim though most of his writings
turned on Hindu doctrine. To these we could add Henri Corbin,
who wrote extensively on the Shi'i Muslim tradition, and the
Orthodox Christian, Philip Sherrard. They all had in common the
doctrine that all religions were 'exoteric' manifestations of
a single 'esoteric' teaching - the 'perennial wisdom', 'tradition',
'metaphysics'. The closer we come to the source of religion the
more the differences disappear or become irrelevant, as the rays
of the Sun come closer together the closer they come to the Sun
itself.
As part of this intellectual quest I naturally
discovered Orthodox Christianity and at that point something
happened which is rather outside the argument I have been developing.
I fell in love with it. I felt quite clear in my mind that nothing
could possibly be better than this. I fell into the position
which I had always from the outset refused - I found myself attached
to one possibility to the exclusion of the others. I experienced
what the Church is a place of encounter with something
incomparably greater than oneself, something that compels us
to recognise that we are at the bottom of the ladder, something
so great that it is beyond all human judgment or evaluation.
To quote Psalm 130, which I regard as the touchstone of religious
experience:
'O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes
are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too
great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted
my soul, like a child quieted at its mother's breast; like a
child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and for evermore.'
THE STORY SO FAR
My discovery of Orthodox Christianity, then,
represented the failure of one of the great efforts of my life,
the effort to find a standpoint from which all religious experience
could be seen as part of a single world-embracing phenomenon.
This ambition had led me to explore five possibilities:
1) The psychological approach, after the manner
of Jung. Religious imagery is related to the furnishings of the
subconscious as manifested in dreams and in experiments with
drugs. The subconscious is the collective property of all humanity,
consequently the entry into the subconscious is the assumption
of an experience that transcends the differences between the
religions and to go towards a unity that underlies them.
This is a way, however, that the great religions
have for the most part rejected. Consequently to assume it is
not to assume the teachings of the great religions but to reject
them, in favour of their fringe phenomena gnosticism, alchemy
etc. It is effectively to create a new religion. This new religion,
with its own doctrines and methodology, may or may not be true,
may or may not be better than the existing religions, but it
is not a standpoint from which they can, in their own integrity
and self-understanding, be respected.
2) Objective sociological or historical study.
This approach is intrinsically irreligious. It examines the external
manifestations of the religion, how they have functioned historically,
and how their doctrines may have contributed to that external
functioning. The religious mind revolts against it but the external
political, social, historical functioning is a fact and one can
see that similar circumstances can produce similar external religious
phenomena. We all go into sociological mode when we are thinking
about a religion other than our own and I for one would argue
that we should develop the ability to see our own religion in
this light as well. But it remains at a superficial and non-essential
level because religion is by definition internal and to do with
something other than its functioning in the immediately perceived
world.
3) Pick'n'mix. We go where we like, when we
like, like a bee sucking honey from all the available flowers
in the field. This option can be easily too easily
dismissed. It is impossible to engage fully in any coherent religious
practice without accepting its theoretical foundation so this
engagement will always necessarily be superficial and religion
implies, at the very least, depth. Nonetheless, I know people
who have been doing this for a long while and I find them very
sympathetic. Indeed I am inclined to be sorry for anyone who
has never done it. And I cannot help thinking it is better to
be superfically engaged with many things than deeply engaged
in something which is itself superficial.
4) Progressive Revelation. This is the Baha'i
doctrine. It sees all religions as true but relative to their
place and time. They are part of an ongoing process of revelation.
Promising as this is, it does not actually succeed in reconciling
all the existing religions. Insofar as the existing religions
differ from the teachings of the Baha'i Faith, it is assumed
that the message of the Founder of the religion has been misunderstood.
The other religions are obliged to fit into the Baha'i framework
and eventually all that remains really respected is the name
of the founder all the peculiarities of the religion are
regarded as errors (while I was with the Baha'is I developed
an argument that religious truth could change, that since religion
was to do with the Absolute and we are in the relative, religions
could contradict each other and still be true. I thought this
was the Baha'i idea, or at least compatible with the Baha'i idea,
but it was impressed on me that I was wrong). The Baha'i Faith
thus becomes a religion like the others. It respects the truth
of the other religions only in its own terms, much as Christianity
respects the truth of Judaism, or Islam respects the truth of
Christianity and Judaism.
ESOTERIC AND EXOTERIC
5) Finally there is the idea that all the
religions are different exoteric manifestations of a single esoteric
truth. Here is a doctrine that seems to allow for an intense
and intelligent engagement in one particular religion while maintaining
respect for the others. However, the same thing happens as in
progressive revelation. In that case all the religions are judged
according to their conformity with the new religion. In this
case all the religions are judged by their conformity with what
is often presented as the old, original religion. Thus for example
Schon's Transcendental Unity of Religions begins by arguing
that the Intellect the highest human faculty, the faculty
by which we can enter into union with the divine is itself
divine, or, what amounts to the same thing, that it is uncreated.
(3) This is a very fundamental challenge to Orthodox doctrine
which draws a clear distinction between what is uncreated and
what is created. Christ as the Union of Man and God is the union
of the created and the uncreated. But if the highest human faculty
is itself divine, then this distinction falls and with it the
whole drama of God's assumption of humanity and struggle with
death.
Schuon likewise insists that reincarnation
is a metaphysical impossibility, which does a similar violence
to the integrity of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. (4)
The esoteric/exoteric distinction implies
the existence of a caste above the level of the exoteric communions,
a caste who possess and transmit the real esoteric doctrine.
Orthodoxy too recognises the existence of different levels of
spiritual excellence. The highest level is not the hierarchs
of the administrative order, priests and bishops, but the saints.
And the saints write books. The Philokalia is a collection
of writings of the saints, it is the treasury of the highest
level of Orthodox life and thought (and has been made available
in English through the efforts of, among others, Philip Sherrard,
who is an admirer of Schuon, and G.E.H.Palmer who had been, I
was pleased to discover, a disciple of Gurdjieff).
Although the peculiarities of Orthodox doctrine
do not feature largely in The Philokalia, there is no
suggestion that it is formulating an esoteric doctrine held in
common with other religions or with other denominations of Christianity.
The writer who features most prominently, Maximus the Confessor,
had his tongue pulled out because of his insistence on denouncing
the monothelite heresy according to which the human and divine
natures in Christ possessed a common (divine) Will a doctrine
that seems to me not too far removed from Schuon's uncreated
Intellect. I don't see that the man who suffered for this distinction
would have seen no difference between Christianity and Buddhism.
Far from believing that the closer we come to the Sun the different
rays come together it seems to me that the higher or deeper we
go in any one religion, the greater the differences with the
other religions. It is from afar that they all look much the
same.
Where, we might ask, are these higher esoteric
philosophers? In Roman Catholicism mention is made of the Knights
Templar, guilty as they are of what in Orthodox eyes is the monstrous
sin of confusing the vocation of the soldier with that of a monk.
In Constantinople in the fifteenth century there was a flourishing
school of Platonic philosophy. When Constantinople fell to the
Muslims, many of the Platonists converted to the newly dominant
religion on the grounds that the differences between Orthodoxy
and Islam were merely exoteric. Had this idea been more widespread
Orthodoxy would have disappeared altogether, as it would when
the differences between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism were,
supposedly, reconciled at the Councils of Lyons and Florence.
I am brought back to the simple truth I outlined
at the beginning of this talk. Each religion, and each denomination
within the great religions, has its own logic and those logics
are incompatible. A religion is a discipline. To enter into that
discipline is to accept it as infinitely greater than ourselves.
We accept to be judged by it, we cannot stand above it. Its heights
are above the clouds and we cannot see them.
Schuon argues that, while recognising the
truth of different religions, we should nonetheless practise
one of them integrally. He uses the image of the Sun. There are,
he points out, many thousands of suns in the Universe, but so
far as we are concerned there is only one that we can call The
Sun. (5) I would add to this that we still do not know if any
of the other suns in the Universe nourish life.
ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE
I am still not myself prepared to declare
that the other religions or denominations within the religions
are false in the absolute, an absolute that I cannot myself attain;
but I do have to declare that theycannot be reconciled with the
logic of the religion in which I am myself engaged. If they are
true it is according to a logic which I cannot understand, which
I can never understand, which I should not try to understand.
I do not find this position difficult given that the one thing
we know for certain is that our knowledge in space and time will
always fall short of the Reality in Eternity. I am in agreement
with Philip Sherrard when he says:
'God in His non-manifest nature transcends
all forms, whether intelligible, imaginable or sensible. In this
sense He is beyond all determination and limitation. But if He
is to reveal Himself to human beings in their fallen state He
has to determine himself, and hence to limit Himself, in a specific
intelligible, imaginable or sensible form; for unless He does
so we cannot possess the concrete and determined inner vision
of God which alone makes it possible for us to worship Him. And
since God is infinite, there is nothing to prevent Him from choosing
to reveal Himself in an infinite number of limited forms, all
of which He Himself, in His non-manifest nature, infinitely transcends,
and all of which, both singly and collectively, fail to exhaust
the plenitude of His knowledge and wisdom: however many the forms
in which He reveals Himself, aspects of His full reality will
always remain undisclosed.' (6)
But I cannot agree with him when he says:
'It is the task of Christians and above all
of Christian theologians to recognize and affirm this presence
and this mystery not only within the boundaries of the historical
Church but also in those other testimonies to this presence and
this mystery that are to be found in other religions. It matters
little whether the religion in question has a historical character
or not. It is superfluous to ask whether it regards itself as
compatible with the Christian Gospel. The Logos in His kenosis,
His self-emptying, is hidden everywhere, and the types of His
reality, whether in the forms of persons or treachings, will
not be the same outside the Christian world as they are within
it. Yet these types are equally authentic: any deep reading of
another religion is a reading of the Logos, of Christ. It is
the Logos Who is received in the spiritual illumination of a
Brahmin, a Buddhist, or a Moslem. Indeed, if the tree is known
by its fruits, only spiritual blindness can prevent us from recognizing
that those who live and yearn for the Divine in all nations already
receive the peace the Lord gives to all whom He loves.' (7)
'These types are equally authentic ...' to
which the obvious answer is, how does he know? unless he is himself
standing in a position of judgement that is higher than the logic
of Orthodoxy. For an Orthodox Christian to say that Calvinism,
say, is true or 'Buddhism' (a term which of course covers a multitude
of different tendencies as does 'Christianity') is not only insulting
to Orthodoxy, it is insulting to Calvinism or Buddhism. Not only
is he setting himself up as a judge over something he maybe knows
a little bit (Orthodoxy), he is also setting himself up as a
judge over something he can hardly be expected to know at all
- unless by 'knowledge' is meant the accumulation of a large
amount of information. He claims he can discern the fruits of
the spirit. But he belongs to a religious tradition which reminds
him constantly that the devil himself can appear in the form
of an angel of light ...
REV JOHN PAUL AND SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CHURCH
Am I arguing then that there is no salvation
outside the Church?
The answer is simply that I do not know. I
believe that there is salvation within the Orthodox Church. I
have no grounds for thinking there is salvation anywhere else.
I mentioned earlier that I once engaged in
a major study of the Presbyterian tradition in Ulster. In the
course of this I was introduced to a man whom I continue to hold
in high esteem - Rev John Paul of Loughmorne. Paul was a member
of the most extreme of the Presbyterian sects - the Reformed
Presbyterians, or 'Covenanters'. As his contribution to the debates
of the 1820s he wrote a masterly Refutation of Arianism
and he was absolutely intolerant with regard to heresy within
the Church. But he was also absolutely opposed to any attempts
on the part of the state - even an imagined Calvinist state -
to impose religious conformity; and in particular he opposed
all legislation which discriminated against Irish Catholics.
He was a rigorous conservative in religion and an extreme (for
the time) liberal in his politics. (8)
Asked if there could be salvation outside
the church he replied that he could find no clear answer to the
question in the Bible and therefore had no means of knowing.
However, he went on to suggest that where the Bible gives no
clear guidance it is safest to assume the worst. Christians are
called to convert the world to Christianity. They are urged to
this work by the desire to save souls. That impetus would be
lost if we really thought that the souls did not need to be saved,
that they were all right as they are. (9)
THE GOOD PRE-MILLENNIAL DISPENSATIONALIST
There is, however, I believe, at least one
passage in which the Gospel talks about the possibility of a
spiritual life outside the church and that is the story of the
Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25 et seq). I have not studied Christian
exegesis as much as I ought to have done so I do not know if
my understanding of this parable is very original (I hope not)
but the core of the story, it seems to me, is the fact that the
Samaritan is a Samaritan. A heretic. The Samaritans were the
descendants of the people who moved into Samaria after the tribes
of Israel had been deported to Syria (2 Kings 17, 24 et seq).
They practised what an orthodox Jew would regard as a debased
form of Judaism.
Jesus is asked: Who is my neighbour? The answer
he gives, and compels the questioner, a Jewish lawyer, to accept,
is 'A false Jew.' If we were writing the story for a modern Catholic
audience we might call it the parable of the Good Protestant,
or for a Protestant audience, the Good Catholic, or for either
of them, The Good Jew.
Jesus is not suggesting that the differences
between the Jews and the Samaritans are a matter of indifference.
In His conversation with the Samaritan woman by the well, He
makes it clear that the differences are real and the Jews are
in the right 'Salvation is of the Jews' (John 4.22). We
might draw a comparison with the parable of the two sons (Matt
21.28 et seq). One says he will do what the father wants but
doesn't . The other says he won't, but does. Which of the two
did what the father willed? C.S.Lewis picked up the idea in the
last of the Narnia stories (will Walt Disney ever get round to
filming it?) The Last Battle. The warrior who fights
chivalrously for the false God is shown to have been really fighting
for the true God.
It is impossible not to see the virtues, the
heroism, the greatness, vastly beyond anything of which I am
capable, manifested by people who belong to religions other than
my own. It is impossible not to be moved by many of the stories
of their saints, by their achievements in the arts, by their
willingness to suffer for their beliefs. I feel entirely free
to enjoy them and to profit from them. But, though I can recognize
a theoretical possibility that these religions are true I have
no standpoint by which I can declare them to be true without
undermining the foundations of my own faith. The standards by
which I judge the usefulness of material taken from other religions
must, necessarily and exclusively, be derived from what I am
capable of understanding of the standards of the Orthodox Church.
In debate with representatives of other religions I must, necessarily,
insist that, according to the logic of my own belief, their beliefs
are false.
NOTES
(1) Frithjof Schuon: The Transcendental
Unity of Religions, Wheaton, Ill; Madras: London (Theosophical
Publishing House) 1993
(2) J.P.Frayne and C.Johnson (ed): Uncollected
Prose b y W.B.Yeats, London and Basingstoke (Macmillan) 1975,
pp.438-9
(3) Transcendental Unity, pp.xxix-xxx
(4) Ibid, p.88 (fn)
(5) Ibid, pp.29-30
(6) Philip Sherrard: Christianity - Lineaments
of a Sacred Tradition, Edinburgh (T&T Clark), 1998, p.70
(7) Ibid, pp.61-2
(8) There is an account in my essay The
grand principle of magistratical restraint in matters of religion
- A dispute in the Reformed Presbyterian Synod in Ireland, 183040,
accessible at www.politicsandtheology.co.uk.
(9) Paul: 'Review of the Rev Dr Montgomery's
Speech' in Bates, D, (Ed): Works of the late Rev John Paul,
D.D., Belfast 1855, pp.473-8
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