"Vocation at its deepest level is, 'This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.'"
– Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
The saints play a big role in Hick’s understanding of world religion. They are “pointers” toward the Transcendent, and look remarkably similar across traditions. In the following quotation, Hick engages and expands William James’ “Profile of a Saint.”
“William James’ ‘composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions’, is excellent, except that whilst he does not exclude the political form of saintliness he does not sufficiently stress it. This is understandable, for the phenomenon of the political saint has become much more prominent since his time. James lists the four cardinal features of, first, ‘a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power’; second, ‘a sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control’; third, ‘an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down’; and fourth, ‘a shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections, towards “yes, yes,” and away from “no,” where the claims of the non-ego are concerned’.
To these we must add more explicitly, I think, the rare attribute, evident in the greatest saints, of spiritual joy. This is not to be confused with the natural temperamental gaiety and happiness with which some people have the very good fortune to be endowed. As William James said, ‘There are [people] who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champaigne inscribed to their credit.’ They are not necessarily, however, less self-centred or more Real-centred than others with a naturally dourer temperament. But Teresa of Avila is representative of the great mystics of all traditions in having experienced the overwhelming joy of release from the ego as it becomes open to the Transcendent. This, she says, ‘gave me a joy so great that it has never failed me even to this day, and God converted the aridity of my soul into the deepest tenderness. Everything connected with the religious life caused me delight; and it is a fact that sometimes, when I was spending time in sweeping floors which I had previously spent on my own indulgence and adornment, and realized that I was now free from all those things, there came to me a new joy, which amazed me, for I could not understand whence it arose.’ This experience – either a quietly glowing inner peace and serenity or an outwardly manifest radiance of joy – is characteristic of the true mahatmas and saints.
It is this that William James refers to as an ‘immense elation and freedom’. Julian of Norwich, whose awareness of the divine reality took the form of visions and auditions of Christ on the cross, tells how ‘suddenly, as I looked at the same cross he changed to an appearance of joy. The change in his appearance changed mine, and I was as glad and joyful as I could possibly be ... Our Lord showed this to me to make us glad and merry.’ Evelyn Underhill, describing Francis of Assisi, Ruusbroec, Catherine of Siena, Richard Rolle, Catherine of Genoa, and John of the Cross, speaks of the ‘inextinguishable gladness of heart’, the ‘gaiety, freedom, assurance, and joy’, that seems to be a characteristic of the ‘unitive’ state which they reached after a long, arduous, and sometimes painful pilgrimage.
When we turn to the Hindu world we find that the ultimate, Brahman, is spoken of as sat–chit–ananda, being–consciousness–bliss, and that the experience of union with Brahman is an experience of this bliss. ‘I know nothing but joy, limitless, unbounded. The ocean of Brahman is full of nectar – the joy of the Atman.’ Again Shankara speaks of the goal of mystical practice as ‘the highest bliss’ and declares that in our deepest nature one ‘never ceases to experience infinite joy’. Again, the Buddha taught: ‘He that crushes the great “I am” conceit – this, even this, is happiness supreme.’ One of the perfections of the bodhisattva is joy (mudita). And so the contemporary Buddhist monk Nyanaponika says, ‘Let us teach real joy (mudita) to others. Many have unlearned it. Life, though full of woe, holds also sources of happiness and joy, unknown to most. Let us teach people to seek and to find real joy within themselves and to rejoice with the joy of others! Let us teach them to unfold their joy to ever sublimer heights.’ The Sufis of Islam are full of the joy of living in the divine love, which they describe poetically in ‘a great variety of images, most of them connected with love and wine’. ‘Oh, my spirit is joyful over Thee – may my spirit never be without Thee!’, sings Rumi.
At the same time, we must not imagine that the mahatmas/saints are perpetually cheerful, never weighed down by the pain and injustice around them. On the contrary, the more involved they are in the life and suffering of the world, the more they share its sorrows. For instance Gandhi, whilst he bubbled over with fun and delight much of the time, was emotionally devastated by the slaughter in the Punjab in the wake of the partition of India. And the more introverted mystics have generally been through their dark night of the soul, enduring a period of mental suffering and doubt from which they only emerged after a long ordeal. Nevertheless, despite its ‘dark nights’, and its agonies of suffering with those who suffer, the saintly or enlightened or awakened life is one that we can see to be intrinsically good and desirable, a state in which we would dearly love to be.
We spontaneously feel that such individuals are incarnating some of the higher possibilities of our common human nature. We sense that they are not only more unselfcentred but also, paradoxically, more truly fulfilled than ourselves. But in order to empathize with them we need to have participated, at least to some small degree, in their experience of the Transcendent, and to have experienced, again in however slight a degree, something like their inner illumination and joy. It is when we have known in some tiny momentary way that of which they speak, that we are entitled to trust their much greater and stronger and more continuous experience of the Divine, the Holy, the Real.”
One figure I think of when I picture the ideal “contemplative,” or saint, is Thomas Keating – largely because of the spiritual joy he seemed to radiate. Keating was a Trappist monk and was extremely influential in the development of the Centering Prayer movement in America. He passed away this week. Carl McColman wrote a nice piece honoring Keating here, and much of Keating’s teaching can be found on the Contemplative Outreach Youtube Channel.
Shinzen Young once remarked about contemplatives from various traditions that “they give off the same vibe.” Perhaps Keating, and others of his ilk, truly do experience the same transforming Reality which is open to us all.
Here is some brief audio from Keating entitled “What’s Next in Religion”:
One issue that becomes more difficult to deal with on a religious pluralist perspective is determining what is, and is not, an authentic "experience of the Divine." In conservative circles, this is a somewhat easier distinction to make as experience that aligns with Scripture and/or orthodox theology is generally considered authentic, while experiences which contradict the teaching of the Church (or the synagogue, or the Temple, or the Mosque) are considered inauthentic. There are also individuals, from all religious traditions, who claim that their spiritual experience has led them to commit acts which harm their neighbors and themselves.
So how do we determine the genuine from the inauthentic spiritual experience?
To this question, Hick gives a similar reply to that of Jesus, who, when counseling his followers on how to decipher between true and false prophets, answered, “By their fruits you shall know them.”
“The central criterion can only be the long-term transformative effect on the experiencer. A momentary experience, or an experience lasting minutes or even hours, is only important if its significance is integrated into one’s ongoing life. If, as in the case of the great mystics, their altered states of consciousness have a transforming and energizing effect in their lives, leading to a stronger centring in God, the Holy, the Real, and a greater love and compassion for their fellows, this is the evidence, accepted within each of the great traditions, of their openness to the Transcendent. It is of course the latter element, the love and compassion expressed in their actions, that we are able to observe and for which we therefore rightly look. This has always been evident to the mystics themselves.”
The “hard evidence” of a life changed, of the ongoing display of spiritual fruits – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in Pauline language – is the determiner as to whether one has had an authentic experience of God. For Hick, the saints from each tradition play a major role in helping us understand what is, and is not, authentic religion as they, by their character and display of authentic, natural, spiritual fruit, point us toward God.
Hick cites the example of St. Theresa of Avila, who speaks from her medieval Catholic perspective:
“…within the borders of Christian orthodoxy, as this was understood in late medieval Christendom, Teresa of Avila used the much more universal moral-and-spiritual-fruits criterion. It was accepted within the monasteries and nunneries that false as well as genuine religious experiences occurred, that these were sometimes hard to distinguish, and that one should therefore be constantly on guard against the deceits of the devil. That a revelation has come from God, and not from the devil, is assured for Teresa by its observable continuing effects in the soul. As Rowan Williams says, she ‘makes it very clear that, as far as she is concerned, the criteria of authenticity do not lie in the character of the experience itself but in how it is related to a pattern of concrete behaviour, the development of dispositions and decisions’. At one point she uses the analogy of someone who encounters a stranger who leaves her a gift of jewels. If someone else later suggested that the stranger had been an apparition, the jewels left in her hand would prove otherwise. Likewise, in the case of her visions, ‘I could show [any doubters] these jewels – for all who knew me were well aware how my soul had changed: my confessor himself testified to this, for the difference was very great in every respect, and no fancy, but such as all could clearly see. As I had previously been so wicked, I concluded, I could not believe that, if the devil were doing this to delude me and drag me down to hell, he would make use of means which so completely defeated their own ends by taking away my vices and making me virtuous and strong; for it was quite clear to me that these experiences had immediately made me a different person.’”
Regardless of the specific cultural/religious form it takes, the criteria of authentic religious experience is the spiritual fruit it produces.
After developing the idea of religious critical realism, Hick goes on to discuss the religious meaning of life. What is the end goal of the religious quest?
This is a difficult question to answer in the abstract, as each world religion has a unique conceptual system (or systems), vocabulary, etc. Nevertheless, Hick believes we can make some generalizations in this regard.
First, Hick notes that the major religions, each in their own way, display some form of “cosmic optimism” – a trust that Reality, often despite present appearances, is benign.
“‘Cosmic optimism’ is not a term that figures in the distinctive vocabulary of any of the world faiths. It is however a generalization of their distinctive affirmations about the Transcendent in its relation to human beings. The great monotheisms affirm that ‘as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is [the God of Israel’s] steadfast love towards those who fear him’; or that the heavenly Father of the New Testament is a limitlessly loving God; or that the Allah self-revealed in the Qur’an is ever gracious and merciful. Most Hindus are also, either ultimately or penultimately, theists; and the Bhagavad Gita says of Vishnu that he is ‘the great Lord of the universe and friend of all beings’. But turning to the non-theistic faiths, advaitic Hinduism affirms that in our deepest nature we already are the infinite reality of Brahman, but have yet to become what we truly are. Again, in a more totally non-theistic faith, in Buddhism it is affirmed that our true nature is one with the universal buddha nature of the universe, and again we have to become what in a sense we already are. In both cases they teach that we can, whether suddenly or gradually, whether on earth or in heaven, whether in this life or through many lives, receive or achieve the salvific transformation into a new relationship to, or a newly discovered identity with, that ultimate reality.
Each tradition draws a radical distinction between the state from which we desire to be saved or released, or out of which we need to awaken, and the limitlessly better state to which it shows a way. There is a deeply pessimistic view of our present predicament, combined with a highly optimistic view of what is ultimately open to us. The pessimism understands ordinary human life to be fallen into sin and guilt, or lived in disobedience and alienation from God, or caught in the unreality of spiritual blindness (avidya) and the consequent round of anxious suffering existence (samsara). But there is also the affirmation of a limitlessly better possibility available to us because the Ultimate is, from our human point of view, benign. By divine grace or divine mercy, or by a gradual transcending of the ego point of view and a realization of our own deepest nature, we can attain or receive our highest good. And in so far as this limitlessly better state is said to be available to everyone, the message of each of the great religions constitutes good news for humankind. I mean by the cosmic optimism of the world faiths then, that in each case, if their conception of the nature of the universe is basically correct, we can be glad to be part of it and can rejoice in and be thankful for our present human existence…
…When we speak of the ultimate goodness of the universe from our human point of view, we are talking about the total character of a reality which far exceeds what we can presently see and the physical sciences can ever discover. For it is clear from the evils that afflict humanity, and from the equally evident fact that the human potential is seldom fulfilled in this present life, that if the creative process is ever to reach its completion it must continue beyond this life. Thus the faith that, in the words of Julian of Norwich, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’ presupposes a structure of reality which makes this possible.
The great traditions and their sub-traditions have developed different pictures of this structure, and of the final fulfillment, as heaven, paradise, union with God, the beatific vision; or an absorption into Brahman in which separate ego existence has been transcended; or nirvana, or the universal realization of the buddha nature of all things. But it is important to note that the idea of a good outcome of the life process does not require that any one of these specific conceptions will turn out to be accurate. Indeed thoughtful people within each tradition have always been aware that the scriptural accounts of heaven/paradise are painted in a poetic imagery that points beyond our present imaginations; or in the eastern faiths, that the final unity that is sought is, once again, not thinkable in earthly terms.”
Thus the religious traditions, each in their own way, affirm that the reality we find ourselves in is good. Not in the sense that the things we encounter in our day to day lives are all pleasant, but in the sense that, from the religious perspective, our present experience leads, or can lead, to an ultimately good future. As Hick notes, that ultimate future hope is expressed in a variety of ways, even within each religious tradition. But each faith shares that hope and trust in the structure of existence.
To give some type of synthesis in how this final state is conceived, Hick speaks of our transformed relationship with the Divine:
“…we can, whether suddenly or gradually, whether on earth or in heaven, whether in this life or through many lives, receive or achieve the salvific transformation into a new relationship to, or a newly discovered identity with, that ultimate reality. “
In the contemplative streams of each major world religion, this salvific transformation is most often conceived of in terms of union, unity, or one-ness. Hick, in later chapters, gives examples of systems which entail both literal, and metaphorical, one-ness. He begins by discussing mystic thought in general:
“Mysticism has often been defined as the experience of union either with God or with an ultimate non-personal reality. Thus William James says that the ‘overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we are aware of our oneness.’ Likewise Evelyn Underhill says that ‘mysticism is the art of union with Reality’, and R.C. Zaehner says that ‘in Christian terminology mysticism means union with God’. Many other similar statements could be cited. However I shall argue that whilst the final state, far beyond this life, may well be one in which human individuality has finally been transcended, having served its purpose, talk of union with the Ultimate in this life must be understood metaphorically. Most theistic mystics have in fact used ‘union’ or ‘unity’ and/ or ‘deification’ or ‘divinization’ as metaphors for a union of love or an alignment of wills which does not entail literal identity. Others however, usually but not always non-theistic, have intended to speak of a literal numerical identity, a union without distinction. In order to understand where different authors stand on this question we have to be aware of the metaphysical pictures presupposed in their writings. For there are systems which allow for, and even require, a literal union with the Ultimate; others which allow for this but do not require it; and yet others which exclude it. As well as reading the mystics against their metaphysical backgrounds we also have to distinguish between texts describing a union which the writer claims to have experienced, and others referring to a unitive state to which the writer’s philosophy or theology points, but which the mystic does not profess to have experienced personally.”
Hick then cites examples such as Advaita Vedanta (a school of Hinduism displayed in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita), for the perspective of “literal unity”:
“The Crest-Jewell of Discrimination uses the analogy of the air and the jar. If there are a number of clay jars containing only air, and you break the jars, what remains? The answer is, the air, as an unbounded totality: ‘The air in the jar is one with the air everywhere. In like manner, your Atman is one with Brahman.’ Again Shankara uses the figure, also familiar in Christian and Muslim mystical literature, of a drop of water becoming part of the ocean. Shankara tells of someone who goes into deep meditation:
’His mind was completely absorbed in Brahman. After a while, he returned to normal consciousness. Then, out of the fullness of his joy, he spoke: The ego has disappeared. I have realized my identity with Brahman and so all my desires have melted away. I have risen above my ignorance and my knowledge of this seeming universe. What is this joy that I feel? Who shall measure it? I know nothing but joy, limitless, unbounded! The ocean of Brahman is full of nectar – the joy of the Atman. The treasure I have found there cannot be described in words. The mind cannot conceive of it. My mind fell like a hailstone into the vast expanse of Brahman’s ocean. Touching one drop of it, I melted away and became one with Brahman. And now, though I return to human consciousness, I abide in the joy of the Atman.’
Again Shankara says, ‘I am Reality, without beginning, without equal. I have no part in the illusion of “I” and “You”, “this” and “that”. I am Brahman, one without a second, bliss without end, the eternal, unchanging Truth.’…
… the mystic path is one of purification of the ego and its self-centred desires and concerns in order to find our true nature in unity with the Ultimate. The classic Vedantic saying, tat tvam asi, ‘that art thou’, means that each of us ultimately is Brahman. Catherine of Genoa provides a direct Christian parallel: ‘Once stripped of all its imperfections, the soul rests in God, with no characteristic of its own, since its purification is the stripping away of the lower self in us. Our being is then God.’ Or again, ‘My me is God.’”
And Rumi (as well as Evagrius, Neo-platonism as a whole, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus, Meister Eckhart, Ruusbroec, Theresa of Avila, the Kabbalists, and Eastern Orthodox mystics) for the perspective of “metaphorical unity”:
“Again Rumi writes, ‘No one will find his way to the Court of Magnificence until he is annihilated,’ and again, ‘With God, two I’s cannot find room. You say “I” and He says “I”. Either you die before Him, or let Him die before you.’ Such language is common among the Sufis. However, this ‘death’ of the self is not a ceasing to exist, but its transformation into spiritual union with the divine life. Rumi says, ‘The spirit becomes joyful through the I-less I.’ The self-naughted person lives, and lives in fullness of energy and joy; but it is now the divine life that is being lived in and through the fully surrendered servant of Allah. And as in the case of the Christian mystics, union is often seen as the most appropriate available metaphor.”
Regardless of how it is specifically conceptualized, from the perspective of the contemplative traditions, the religious meaning of life is to experience the joyful transformation “out of ourselves,” or beyond the ego, and into the Divine.
This is Marcus Borg giving a lecture on religious pluralism. Both Hick and Borg have been instrumental in my own understanding of world religion and how I understand my own home tradition. I recommend Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time for a written introduction to these ideas and as a possible way of understanding the Christian faith from within a pluralist perspective.
We now come to what I believe to be the most important, and unique, aspect of Hick’s thought – that of “religious critical realism.” This concept is the key to understanding his broader ideas about how the world religions fit together.
Hick defines critical realism as follows:
”The critical realist principle – that there are realities external to us, but that we are never aware of them as they are in themselves, but always as they appear to us with our particular cognitive machinery and conceptual resources – is thus a vital clue to understanding what is happening in the different forms of religious experience.”
Drawing on the work of Immanuel Kant, Hick begins by showing how critical realism can be understood in the natural world.
“Our awareness of the material world requires physical receptors, the five senses which enable us to see, hear, feel, taste and smell. These reveal our environment to us, but only those selected aspects of it in relation to which we have to act and react. For in selecting, our senses exclude much more than they let in. They have developed to aid our survival as organisms occupying our particular evolutionary niche, and they accordingly function as meshes through which only a certain range of signals can pass. As Brian Magee puts it, ‘If we think in terms of the metaphor of catching things in the network of experience, [the categories of thought] are the meshes of our net. Only what can be caught in them is available to us. Anything that passes through them untouched will not be picked up by us, and neither will whatever falls outside our nets altogether.’ For example, within the known electromagnetic spectrum extending from cosmic rays as short as four ten-thousand-millionths of an inch, to radio waves as long as eighteen miles, our senses only respond to those between sixteen and thirty-two millionths of an inch. We are likewise deaf to a vast range of acoustic stimuli, and insensitive to the great majority of chemical differences. We thus inhabit a humanly selected and simplified version of our environment. If the whole range of light waves affected us we would be unable to distinguish objects affecting our survival. If every sound wave registered in our consciousness, we would be so confused by the universal cacophony as to be unable to react to the sounds that we need to hear. And if, for example, instead of seeing water as the continuous shiny substance that we can drink, we perceived it as a cloud of electrons in rapid swirling motion, and the glass that holds it as a mass of brilliantly coloured crystals, themselves composed of particles in violent activity, we would soon die of thirst. We can only live in the distinctively human environment registered by our sensors, and this differs in many ways from that of other mammals, insects, birds and fishes…
...We have already noted that light waves impacting the retina of the eye are transformed, through a complex process, into our conscious experience of seeing the world as we humans perceive it. Light waves are not themselves coloured, but their impact is transformed within us into the experience of colour vision. Sound waves, which are not themselves noises, are transformed by our receptive apparatus into the experience of hearing noise. In broadcasting, the sound waves that the speaker emits in a studio are transformed into radio waves, which are then translated back by our receiver into sound waves, which we translate into heard sounds. Likewise TV waves are transformed into lines and dots on the screen, which we then transform into the experience of seeing coloured pictures. Consciousness of our environment always involves a continuous transformation of information from one mode into another. Different life forms, with their different sense organs and differently developed structures of consciousness, experience the world differently. For some (including we humans) the dominant sense, providing our normal framework of consciousness, is sight – a larger area of our brain is dedicated to processing visual than other stimuli. But for others (such as the mole) the dominant sense is smell, and for yet others (such as the bat) it is sound. Insects operate in terms of environmental features too small for large animals, such as the elephant, to be aware of them. The ant is not aware of the elephant, and the elephant is not aware of the ant, although both are part of the same vast network of life. And within this network the same virtual infinity of information is reduced in different ways by different selective mechanisms, and transformed into fields of consciousness with different structures and qualities. That the world is perceived in different ways by differently constituted observers is thus well established. To take us a little nearer to the way in which the Transcendent is experienced by some as an all-powerful cosmic Person and by others as an infinite non-personal reality, consider the difference between, say, the table that we experience as a solid, hard, brown, partly shiny, enduring three-dimensional object, and the account of it given by the physicists as mostly empty space in which infinitesimal packages of discharging energy are moving about at a great pace. None of these have any of the properties of the table that we perceive – neither colour, weight, extension, density, nor even fixed position.”
Thus, according to the principle of critical realism, we don’t experience things objectively “as they really are,” but only through the filter of our unique sensory organs and conceptual frameworks. A bat experiences reality in a much different way than a human. According to critical realism, we don’t have a “truer” experience of reality than a bat; we just each experience the same reality differently, according to the equipment we are endowed with. In Hick’s example of the table, the table doesn’t have the objective, fixed attributes of “hardness,” “brownness,” or “shininess,” even though we experience it as such through our unique sensory equipment.
I am here reminded of Bertrand Russell’s famous “The Problems of Philosophy” in which he makes similar observations:
“To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Anyone else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is 'really' of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected. For most practical purposes these differences are unimportant, but to the painter they are all-important: the painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the colour which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy--the distinction between 'appearance' and 'reality', between what things seem to be and what they are. The painter wants to know what things seem to be, the practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are; but the philosopher's wish to know this is stronger than the practical man's, and is more troubled by knowledge as to the difficulties of answering the question. To return to the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table--it appears to be of different colours from different points of To return to the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table--it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others. And we know that even from a given point of view the colour will seem different by artificial light, or to a colour-blind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be no colour at all, though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged. This colour is not something which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the spectator and the way the light falls on the table. When, in ordinary life, we speak of the colour of the table, we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real; and therefore, to avoid favouritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular colour.”
This idea, that we don’t experience things “as they are,” but only through our particular sensory equipment and conceptual frameworks, is the key to understanding Hick’s view of world religious experience. According to religious critical realism, when individuals from different traditions experience “the Divine,” we may very well be encountering the same reality, but interpreting it through the lens of our traditions – our given conceptual frameworks.
“The forms that this awareness takes are human constructions created from material within the inherited imagery of a religious tradition and from each individual’s life story and psychological make-up. If our tradition has conditioned us to think of the Transcendent in personal terms, and to practise I–Thou prayer and worship, we shall be conscious of a personal divine presence, or a divine call, claim, leading or revelation. And so Christian mystics have received visions and/or auditions, seeing and hearing the figure of Christ on the cross, or shining in heavenly glory, or of the Virgin Mary or one of the saints as mediators of God’s presence. Within the neighbouring Islamic world, mystics have their own different visions. Al-Ghazali says of a certain stage of the inner path, ‘The mystics in their waking state now behold angels and the spirits of the prophets; they hear these speaking to them and are instructed by them.’ Devout Hindus sometimes see visions of the gods. For example, one tells how, as a fourteen-year-old walking home one day from school, the lord Krishna met him coming out of a rice field, and embraced him. ‘Since then’, he says, ‘I had no other thought but to serve only Krishna, and I became a sadhu.’ But if, on the other hand, our tradition has taught us to think of the Ultimate in non-personal terms and to practise a non-I–Thou type of meditation, our religious awareness will take one of the quite different forms described in eastern mystical literature.”
Hick ends his discussion of religious critical realism by referring to the concrete example of the experience of Julian of Norwich:
”At this point it may be useful to clarify the distinction between non-realism, naive realism and critical realism. If we take as an example (to be described in chapter 14) Julian of Norwich’s visions of Christ and her hearing him speak of the limitless divine love, the non-realist interpretation is that the entire experience was a self-induced hallucination – not in any sense a revelation, not an expression of the ‘impact’ of the Transcendent upon her. The naive realist interpretation – which was probably her own understanding of her experiences – is that the living Christ was personally present to her, producing the visions that she saw, and uttering in Middle English the words that she heard. But the critical realist interpretation, which I believe to be correct, is that she had become so open to the transcendent, within her and beyond her, that it flooded into her consciousness in the particular form provided by her Christian faith. She was aware of the goodness –from our human point of view – of the Real as the unconditional love of a personal God, expressed in the characteristic fourteenth-century form of the bodily agonies of Jesus on the cross. Her experience was thus a genuine contact with the Transcendent, but clothed in her case in a Christian rather than a Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic or other form. In different symbolic worlds, what was for Julian a divine love expressed in the voluntary sufferings of Christ is expressed in other modes. It is known, for example, in the figure of Vishnu who, in the Bhagavad Gita , is ‘as a father with his son, a friend with his friend, a lover with his beloved’. In Buddhism the ultimate Dharmakaya, in itself beyond human conceiving, is expressed in the infinite compassion of the Buddhas. And the ninety-nine names, or attributes, of Allah in the Qur’an include love, beneficence, mercy, forgiveness, forbearance, generosity, compassion. The mystics of Islam have accordingly been intensely conscious of the divine love. ‘Love is affection without bounds,’ says Rumi. ‘Hence it is said that Love is truly God’s attribute, while it is the attribute of His servants only in a derivative sense ... Know that Love and Affection are Attributes of God.’ In these and many other ways the impact of the transcendent reality upon us receives different ‘faces’ and voices as it is processed by our different religious mentalities. Religious experience, then, occurs in many different forms, and the critical realist interpretation enables us to see how these may nevertheless be different authentic responses to the Real.”
This principle – religious critical realism – drives Hick’s broader understanding of how the world religions fit together from a religious pluralist perspective. It allows one to respect each tradition as an “authentic experience of the Real,” and account for the variety of forms that that experience can take.
After arguing that, at a minimum, reality is capable of being interpreted in Theistic terms, in the chapter Windows on the Transcendent, Hick provides what he believes are "windows" that lead to this worldview. Essentially Hick here is providing arguments for the existence of God.
In the previous chapter, Hick has already alluded to the Teleological Argument for the Existence of God. Someone promoting the teleological argument looks at the structure of the universe and observes that there are elements that seem to have been designed to reach the telos – the goal – of the creation of intelligent life. Apologists using this argument often point, as Hick does, to various physical constants such as the "Q ratio," the charge value of an electron, the relation between electron and proton masses, the value of the "strong force" and "weak force" between nuclei, and others. The values of these physical constants need to be incredibly precise to form a universe capable of life as we know it. For instance the value of Q must be very close to .00001 for galaxies to even form. This is also sometimes referred to as the "fine-tuning" argument. Hick believes the data of seemingly fine-tuned physical constants opens the possibility of an intelligent Creator.
Hick's other "Windows on the Transcendent" include the Window of the Mind, Windows in the Natural World, and Windows in Human Life.
The Window of the Mind
Under the heading The Window of the Mind, Hick argues that the nature of consciousness itself leads us to consider the existence of an encompassing non-physical reality – God/Brahman/Dharmakaya/Tao, etc. To make his argument, Hick looks at various theories of mind including the mind-brain identity theory and epiphenominalism, both of which he finds unsatisfactory. The mind-brain theory states that the mind literally is the brain. That there aren't two "kinds of things" going on during a changing state of mind, one physical and one mental, but that they are somehow, the same, physical, thing. Hick finds this borderline incoherent.
"Suppose a surgeon has exposed an area of a patient’s brain, and because this contains no pain nerves the patient is conscious and able to report what is going on in her mind. Suppose she is visualizing a seaside bay, the waves sparkling in the sun, a harbour with moored fishing boats at the foot of a grassy cliff, and on top of that a ruined castle. It makes sense – whether true or false – to say that the electrical activity in the brain which the monitors are recording is causing this particular content of the patient’s consciousness (the ‘qualia’ in the philosophical jargon). It also makes sense – again whether true or false – to say that the visualizing could not occur without this particular brain activity. But does it make sense to say that the visualized scene literally is activity in the grey matter which the surgeon can see and touch? Surely this is not even a coherent possibility. There are no pictures or colours, no images of sea and harbour and fishing boats and castles on a hill, in the brain. There are synaptic connections between the millions of neurons, and electricity flowing through a region of these connections in a pattern which somehow either produces or is produced by this particular mental effort of imagination. But the extended and coloured picture which the patient is consciously visualizing is not itself any quantity of neurons or any flow of electricity."
In regards to epiphenomenalism – the belief that consciousness is non-physical, but that it is simply a temporary by-product of the physical activity in the brain and therefore unable to causally influence anything – Hick again finds this unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, he argues that, if consciousness is simply a by-product of physical events, there is no reason for consciousness to have developed evolutionarily. On the epiphenomenalist theory, it doesn't really "do anything"; the world would go on just as it would have had consciousness not developed. There is no survival value. Second, Hick argues that this theory rules out the possibility of true (i.e. "libertarian") free-will.
"There is also another anomaly of a different kind involved in any physicalism which involves either mind/brain identity or a purely epiphenomenal non-physical consciousness. For although there can be the illusion of freewill (‘compatibilist’ freewill) in a physically determined world, there can be no genuine (‘non-compatibilist’ or ‘libertarian’) freewill. But in that case, as Epicurus pointed out long ago, ‘He who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize another who says that not all things happen of necessity. For he has to admit that the assertion also happens of necessity’. In other words, if someone’s thought, ‘My every thought is physically determined’, is true, that thought itself is not the outcome of a process of free critical thinking but is an event determined by physical causes. Two people discussing together, one arguing for and the other against determinism, would be like two differently programmed computers producing different outcomes. It would require a non-determined programmer, exercising free rational judgment, to know which of them is programmed with the correct premises and the correct method of calculation. But according to determinism there are only the physically determined computers. To try to avoid this dilemma some have suggested that there is subatomic randomness within the causal processes in the brain, and that it is this randomness that makes free will possible. But this does not help. Randomness or chaos are just as incompatible with freewill as rigid causal determination. If every thought is either rigidly or randomly determined, we could never be in a state of rationally believing this to be the case. For rational believing presupposes a degree of intellectual freedom, the freedom to exercise judgment, and if all our thoughts are the result of either physical determination or random chance, we have no such freedom. In short, we cannot rationally believe ourselves to be totally determined entities."
For Hick, consciousness as a true determining agent, which we must assume in order to logically function in the world, is a mystery which should lead us to consider the existence of the ultimate non-physical reality – God. He concludes:
"...we are left with the mysterious but undeniable fact of consciousness as a non-physical reality, a reality which we have to assume is capable of free self-determining activity. This opens a window onto the possibility of the kind of non-physical reality to which the religions point as God, Brahman, the Dharmakaya and the Tao."
Windows in the Natural World and Human Life
Hick goes on to briefly address other aspects of the world which may be "signals of transcendence" depending on our interpretation. Hick lists:
(1) our experience of the beauty of the natural world,
"All of this (beauty in the natural world) can induce an awe, a responsiveness, a sense of wonder that is felt as a point of contact between our own spiritual nature and a greater spiritual reality within, around, and beyond us. "
(2) our experience of love among family and community,
"Yet other signals of transcendence come through our human neighbours. Love, not meaning here only sexual attraction, but going beyond this to a deep mutual commitment and caring for one another; or the sense of receiving a great gift and responsibility in the birth of a new life; or an encounter with the mysterious boundary when a loved one dies and yet continues to be loved; or co-operation and unity of spirit in a common cause, motivated by a common faith or ideology; or mutual support in the face of danger (in which even the madness of war can bring out qualities of heroism and altruism); or being part of a community in family, tribe, nation, the human race – all of these can evoke in a mind so disposed a sense of reality transcending our human concerns and yet impinging upon us through them, inscribing in our minds a great question mark that silently invites a response."
and (3) the testimony of "the saints" – those who have been transformed by their experience of the Divine to such a degree that they appear almost tangibly different than the rest of humanity.
"Even more powerful signals of transcendence come through goodness as embodied both in ordinary and in saintly people. In order to get away from the ecclesiastical associations of the word ‘saint’ I shall sometimes speak instead of mahatmas, great souls. A mahatma is a person who has undergone –usually very gradually –a transformation from natural self-centredness to a re-centring in the Transcendent, the Holy, the Divine, the Ultimate. The ego point of view has been very largely transcended and the individual has become ‘transparent’ to a greater reality that is now in varying degrees embodied, or incarnated, in him or her. The saints are crucial for our understanding of the nature of reality, and I am going to say more about them later. Part V could in fact have been incorporated at this point, and if any readers are inclined to read it next they should feel free to do so. As we have seen, humans have always tended to experience the natural in terms of the supra-natural, although of course that distinction would not have occurred to our early ancestors. They did not need any special pointers to the Transcendent because it was for them part of the normal fabric of life. But today most of us do need special pointers. And we can find them above all in the mahatmas, the great spirits of all traditions. It remains possible that the lives of those great spirits are based on delusion. But if we identify, and then discount, the pervasive naturalistic assumption of our culture, it is equally possible that the saints are not mistaken but are in fact more closely in touch with reality than the rest of us. In the end we are taking a cognitive and spiritual risk when we accept them as guides worthy to be followed, and equally so when we dismiss them as self-deceivers. The risk is, on the one hand, that of fooling ourselves by wishful thinking, and on the other hand, that of shutting out of our consciousness, at least for now, an immensely important fifth dimension of reality. "
So Hick ultimately argues that the apparent teleology of the cosmos, the nature of consciousness, anthropology (earlier in the book he referenced man having "an inbuilt tendency to experience the natural in terms of the super-natural"), our experience of natural beauty, the experience of love between individuals and in communities, and the testimony of the saints should lead us to consider the existence of God, a transcendent non-physical reality.
Other "arguments for the existence of God" which Hick doesn't mention include the cosmological / first mover argument, the argument from objective morality, the difficulty accounting for abiogenesis (the proposed natural explanations for "first life," which is also capable of reproduction), the apparent teleology of genetic code, etc.
I have long found the argument from the nature of DNA to be intriguing in this regard. Our DNA is encoded information. It is hard to imagine coded information that has a teleology of its own (i.e. it has functions it is "designed" to complete) originating from anything other than some kind of intelligent source. This is part of what caused Anthony Flew, controversially and toward the end of life, to become a theist. The following quotation is from his There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind:
"A third philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to the origin of the coding and information processing that is central to all life-forms. This is well described by the mathematician David Berlinski, who points out that there is a rich narrative drama surrounding our current understanding of the cell. The genetic message in DNA is duplicated in replication and then copied from DNA to RNA in transcription. Following this there is translation whereby the message from RNA is conveyed to the amino acids, and finally the amino acids are assembled into proteins. The cell’s two fundamentally different structures of information management and chemical activity are coordinated by the universal genetic code. The remarkable nature of this phenomenon becomes apparent when we highlight the word code. Berlinski writes: By itself, a code is familiar enough, an arbitrary mapping or a system of linkages between two discrete combinatorial objects. The Morse code, to take a familiar example, coordinates dashes and dots with letters of the alphabet. To note that codes are arbitrary is to note the distinction between a code and a purely physical connection between two objects. To note that codes embody mappings is to embed the concept of a code in mathematical language. To note that codes reflect a linkage of some sort is to return the concept of a code to its human uses. This in turn leads to the big question: ‘Can the origins of a system of coded chemistry be explained in a way that makes no appeal whatever to the kinds of facts that we otherwise invoke to explain codes and languages, systems of communication, the impress of ordinary words on the world of matter?’ Carl Woese, a leader in origin-of-life studies, draws attention to the philosophically puzzling nature of this phenomenon. Writing in the journal RNA, he says: ‘The coding, mechanistic, and evolutionary facets of the problem now became separate issues. The idea that gene expression, like gene replication, was underlain by some fundamental physical principle was gone.’ Not only is there no underlying physical principle, but the very existence of a code is a mystery. ‘The coding rules (the dictionary of codon assignments) are known. Yet they provide no clue as to why the code exists and why the mechanism of translation is what it is.’ He frankly admits that we do not know anything about the origin of such a system. ‘The origins of translation, that is before it became a true decoding mechanism, are for now lost in the dimness of the past, and I don’t wish to engage here in hand-waving speculations as to what polymerization processes might have preceded and given rise to it, or to speculate on the origins of tRNA, tRNA charging systems or the genetic code.’ Paul Davies highlights the same problem. He observes that most theories of biogenesis have concentrated on the chemistry of life, but ‘life is more than just complex chemical reactions. The cell is also an information storing, processing and replicating system. We need to explain the origin of this information, and the way in which the information processing machinery came to exist.’”
Thomal Nagel, himself not a traditional theist, makes a similar observation in Mind and Cosmos:
“With regard to the origin of life, the problem is much harder, since the option of natural selection as an explanation is not available. And the coming into existence of the genetic code—an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can read the code and carry out its instructions—seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable given physical law alone.”
There is of course an ongoing philosophical debate between theists, atheists, and all shades in between. Hick believes that some combination of these arguments should lead us to seriously consider the existence of God.
To the extent that "logic" leads us to answer the question of God in the affirmative, I think that the cumulative effect of some of these arguments at least opens the door in that direction. Personally, though, I believe it takes some sort of intuitive experience to lead an individual into "spirituality" or "towards God," an experience which almost forces one to consider those categories.
Hick will go on to argue that the reality we find ourselves in is capable of being interpreted in a variety of ways in order to preserve our cognitive freedom. We can choose to respond to God/Spiritual Reality, but are not forced to. In the process he uses the concept of levels of reality or levels of significance, noting that we often intuitively recognize a "moral level of significance" on top of our physical reality:
"...at the personal level of awareness, situations often carry a practical meaning that transcends their purely material character. Suppose I am driving along a country lane and find a crashed car with its occupant severely injured and crying out for help. At the purely physical level of awareness this is a particular configuration of metal, plastic, oil, flesh, blood, and various sounds and smells. As such, it has no moral quality whatever. But as a moral being I am also aware of another level of significance. I am conscious of a claim upon me to try to help the injured person. An ethical meaning thus superimposes itself upon the physical meaning of the situation. In comparable circumstances people anywhere in the world are automatically aware of this, for a moral capacity appears to be part of our nature as social beings."
Just as we sometimes recognize a non-physical, moral, level of significance to reality, we also sometimes recognize a spiritual level of significance to reality. Hick continues to emphasize the need for our cognitive freedom in relation to both moral and spiritual claims upon us:
"We turn now to the religious awareness which (according to our big picture) is superimposed upon physical and moral awareness. Here our cognitive freedom is at its maximum. Although we seem to have an innate tendency to experience the natural in terms of the supra-natural, we are nevertheless under no compulsion to do so...
...If our big picture is basically correct, the ultimately Real can only enter our consciousness in the range of forms made possible by our own conceptual systems. Because we are persons, much the most common form is deity, a divine Thou with whom a relationship of devotion and mutual love is possible. In terms of the monotheistic traditions first, why should not the personal divine presence be unmistakably evident to us? The answer is that in order for us to exist as autonomous finite persons in God’s presence, God must not be compulsorily evident to us. To make space for human freedom, God must be deus absconditus, a hidden God – hidden and yet readily found by those who are willing to exist in the divine presence, accepting the divine claim on the living of their lives. If we were from the beginning set ‘face to face’ with God we would never be able to make a free response to the Deity. There could be no question of freely loving and choosing to worship One whose very presence utterly overwhelms us. ‘Only because of the intensity of His manifestation is He veiled, and only because of the sublimity of His Light is He hidden from view’, says the Sufi Ibn ‘Ata’Illah. We must, as finite and imperfect creatures, have the freedom partially or wholly to shut God out of our lives as well as to welcome God into them. In the case of non-theistic awareness of the ultimate, the same basic principle holds, although in a different form. According to T.S. Eliot in ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘Humankind [in our ‘fallen’ or pre-enlightened state] cannot bear very much reality’. This is affirmed in the Buddhist Bardo Thodol, where it is said that at the moment of death the soul confronts the clear light of reality. Those few who are able to embrace, or be embraced by, the light are immediately united with the ultimately Real. But the great majority, who are not ready for this, have to continue further round the cycle of rebirths. For generally, both in Buddhist and Hindu thought, enlightenment, liberation, awakening, whilst it may finally occur in a moment of time, only happens at the end of a long process of spiritual growth. It cannot be forced. The readiness has to come from within. This is why religious awareness does not share the compulsory character of sense awareness. Our physical environment must force itself upon our attention if we are to survive within it. But our supra-natural environment, the fifth dimension of the universe, must not be forced upon our attention if we are to exist within it as free spiritual beings."
In the end, Hick argues that his "Windows on The Transcendent" can logically lead us toward the call of God/Spiritual Reality, but that we are nevertheless under no compulsion to respond.
Although most in today's academic world begin with an assumption of naturalism/materialism, Hick argues that the Universe is, in fact, ambiguous. That is, it can be interpreted in a variety of ways including those which presume a God/Spiritual Reality, and those which do not.
In his chapter entitled The Big Bang and the Ambiguity of the Universe, Hick talks about the current scientific understanding of the creation of the Universe – the Big Bang. In the process he references what some have called the teleological argument for the existence of God – the idea that the Universe shows design or that it leads to a telos, an end goal, which includes the development of intelligent life.
"We know now that the form that the expansion has taken was determined by basic conditions which, if they had been even slightly different, would not have produced galaxies, including planets, including life, including us. There had to be very precise values for a number of basic constants for the universe as it is to have come about. One example is that in order for a universe of galaxies to develop there had to be just the right degree of non-uniformity in the initial state. The astrophysicists refer to this degree of non-uniformity, consisting in the energy difference between peaks and troughs in the density of matter, as Q. Q has to be very close to 0.00001 in order to account for the present-day galaxies and clusters. To quote Martin Rees,
If Q were much smaller than 0.00001, galactic ‘ecosystems’ would never form: aggregations would take longer to develop, and their gravity would be too weak to retain gas. A very smooth universe would remain forever dark and featureless ... On the other hand, a rougher universe, with Q much larger than 0.00001, would be turbulent and violent. Lumps far bigger than galaxies would condense early in its history. They would not fragment into stars.
Other such conditions include the electric charge of the electron, the ratio of the electron and proton masses, the strength of the strong force between nuclei. These are some – and only some – of the precise conditions needed if the universe as we know it, with ourselves as part of it, was to come about. In fact it looks as though our universe has been precisely designed to produce intelligent life. Martin Rees does not himself believe in a creator God, but he does acknowledge the extraordinary series of coincidences that has been necessary to produce ourselves:
A universe hospitable to life – what we might call a biophilic universe – has to be very special in many ways. The prerequisites for any life – long-lived stable stars, a periodic table of atoms with complex chemistry, and so on – are sensitive to physical laws and could not have emerged from a Big Bang with a recipe that was even slightly different. Many recipes would lead to stillborn universes with no atoms, no chemistry, and no planets; or to universes too short lived or too empty to allow anything to evolve beyond sterile uniformity. This distinctive and special-seeming recipe seems to me a fundamental mystery that should not be brushed aside as merely a brute fact."
Hick's point in this chapter by citing the possible teleology of the cosmos is simply to argue that the Universe can be interpreted theistically. The reality we find ourselves in is open to a host of explanations, not just explanations that assume materialism. As Hick notes below, each worldview can be internally consistent while taking into account the other side(s).
"So in the west today religious faith is on the defensive in the public mind. This is a reversal of roles. A couple of hundred years ago it was the naturalistic thinker who had to show the dogmatic religious believer that the universe is ambiguous and does not have to be understood religiously, whereas today it is the other way round. It is now the religious person who has to show the dogmatic naturalistic humanist that the universe does not have to be understood as solely purposeless matter. The reality is that the universe is to us at present ambiguous as between religious and naturalistic interpretations. There can in principle be both complete and consistent naturalistic and also complete and consistent religious accounts of it, each including an account of the other."
After presenting "the big picture" of reality as he sees it, Hick acknowledges that his position is a minority one in today's world. In contrast to any kind of religious outlook, modern society, in Hick's opinion, begins from a starting point of Naturalism.
"Naturalism, then, is the belief that reality consists exclusively in the multiple forms of discharging energy that constitute the physical universe. This includes our earth and the human and other forms of life on it, and hence the multitude of human brains and their functioning, which in turn includes the production of thought, language, feeling, emotion, and action. The status of such supposed non-physical realities as God, Brahman, Dharma, Tao, the soul or spirit, is that of ideas in the human mind, so that before there were human mind/brains to create them, they did not in any sense exist. Naturalism is thus equivalent to the qualified materialism which does not deny the existence of mentality, but holds that it is either identical with, or totally dependent from moment to moment upon, the electro-chemical functioning of the brain. In our western world, beginning around the seventeenth century, the earlier pervasive religious outlook has increasingly been replaced by an equally pervasive naturalistic outlook, and during the twentieth century this replacement has become almost complete. Naturalism has created the ‘consensus reality’ of our culture. It has become so ingrained that we no longer see it, but see everything else through it."
I'm not as convinced as Hick that Naturalism – the belief that physical matter is all that exists – is all-pervasive in society. Perhaps in more academic circles, and perhaps more in Hick's homeland of Great Britain, but maybe not as much in modern America. I would argue that, although modern Americans aren't as monolithically orthodox as they used to be, we are still a religious and/or spiritual people. Regardless, in a more academic setting, you are more likely to have to argue for a non-Naturalist worldview than to assume it.
To assume Naturalism, for Hick, is to assume a very bleak outlook on the world. In his chapter Naturalism as Bad News for the Many, Hick quotes Bertrand Russell, who gives a sober summary of this worldview:
"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built."
Although those born is comfortable situations can ignore this depressing "big picture" and take solace in the simple joys of life, they are only for a moment. And not only that, but the vast majority of humans throughout history have not been born in a time and place that allow them a comfortable and enjoyable existence. Countless have been born into poverty, disease, slavery, early death. Naturalism, for Hick, leaves neither the comfortable nor the uncomfortable with any future hope. It is "bad news for the many."
I am beginning a series on John Hick's The Fifth Dimension. In this book, Hick argues that Transcendent Reality – what various traditions call God, Adonai, Allah, Brahman, the Tao, etc. – is an actual element of reality and that our relation to It, what he calls the "fifth dimension" of our nature (he never explicitly states this, but I believe the first four would be the three dimensions of space and the additional dimension of time), is an essential aspect of our being.
John Hick was a religious philosopher and expounded religious pluralism – the idea that the world's religious traditions point to "the experience of God," but that no particular tradition has a corner on truth. I believe Hick lived within the Church until his death, interpreting his tradition as a "true myth." He also wrote significantly about liberal understandings of Christianity, for instance in The Metaphor of God Incarnate.
In the Introduction to this book, Hick very briefly traces primal religion through the beginnings of man, for instance noting that Neanderthals seemed to have beliefs in the afterlife as well as ritual burials. The archaeological evidence from the beginning of man's history have even led some to label homo sapiens as homo religiosus – religious man; we are beings that seem to have "an inbuilt tendency to experience the natural in terms of the super-natural."
After touching on primal religion, Hick turns to the "Axial Age," during which most, if not all, of the world's enduring religious traditions were developed.
"... around the middle of the first millennium BCE, in a band of time stretching from about 800 to about 200 BCE, remarkable individuals appeared across the world, standing out from their societies and proclaiming momentous new insights. In China there were Confucius, Mencius and Lao-Tzu (or the anonymous writers of the Tao Te Ching) and Mo-Tzu. In India there were Gautama, the Buddha; Mahavira, the founder of the Jain tradition; the writers of the Upanishads and later of the Bhagavad Gita. In Persia there was Zoroaster. In Palestine there were the great Hebrew prophets – Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, the Isaiahs, Ezekiel. In Greece there were Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. This immensely significant hinge in human thought has come to be known as the axial age. If we see Christianity as presupposing Judaism, and Islam as presupposing both Judaism and Christianity, all of the present major world religions trace their roots to this axial period.
Pre-axial or archaic people generally just accepted the given conditions of their lives. They did not stand back in thought to engage in critical reflection. They did not envisage alternatives that might lead to a fundamental dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs. Life was for them, as one anthropologist puts it, ‘a one-possibility thing’. But during the axial age, in large areas of the world, there were several mutually reinforcing developments: the formation of cities; the emergence of individual as distinguished from communal consciousness, first in rulers and religious leaders and then increasingly widely; and a sense of the unsatisfactoriness, the felt incompleteness of our ordinary human existence, found somehow lacking in a higher quality that nevertheless stands before us as a real possibility."
In the Axial Age, Hick argues that a growing sense of incompleteness or unsatisfactoriness of life developed in the major traditions. In the West, this was primarily interpreted through the lens of sin and guilt, while in the East it was interpreted mainly as spiritual misunderstanding or "false consciousness." In either understanding, the solution was to fundamentally shift our primary concern from fulfilling our self-will – a centeredness on self – to a new grounding or centeredness in The Divine, The Transcendent, The Ultimate.
"The ‘western’ religions call this general distortion of human life sin, thus identifying guilt as the problem. The ‘eastern’ religions call it spiritual blindness, thus identifying false consciousness as the problem. But whether we regard moral evil as the expression of false consciousness, or false consciousness as the expression of sin, the distortion itself is a manifest reality; and it is from this that the post-axial religions offer to free us. Their function is to be enabling contexts of the transformation of human existence, a transformation from sinful and/or deluded self-centredness to a radically new orientation centred in the Divine, the Transcendent, the Ultimate, thus freeing what they variously call the true or selfless self, the atman, the universal buddha nature, the image of God within us. This radical change is a re-centring which produces an inner peace, serenity, joy, purity of heart, and clarity of moral vision."
Of the Transcendent Reality which we are to find our grounding in, the mystics can only say that It is ineffable – beyond our human understanding to conceive. God can be experienced, but not fully understood intellectually.
"The fifth dimension of our nature, the transcendent within us, answers to the fifth dimension of the universe, the transcendent without. In speaking of this, the limitations of language create a problem to which there is unfortunately no satisfactory solution. We want to refer to that which, according to the religions, is the ultimate object of human concern. In a western context we speak of God. And it is possible to use this familiar term with the stipulation that it points to the ultimate reality without however defining it, and so without prejudging whether that reality is personal or non-personal or even such that this duality does not apply. But in practice the long-established associations of the word as referring to an infinite divine Person are generally too strong for this stipulation to be effective. And so we resort to such terms as the Ultimate, Ultimate Reality, Absolute Reality, the Real, the Transcendent, the Divine, the Holy, the Eternal, the Infinite – with or without capitals. I shall use all of these, and even the grammatically improper ‘ultimately Real’, as a reminder that no one of them is entirely adequate. But I shall tend to favour either the Transcendent or the Ultimate or, even more, the Real, because this latter is the rough equivalent of both the Sanskrit sat and the Arabic al-Haqq. However we shall be continually up against the fact that language has developed in our struggle to cope with the material environment and that when we use it to refer to the transcendent it inevitably has non-literal meanings (i.e. not in accordance with the ordinary dictionary meanings of words). It is now allusive, suggestive, metaphorical, poetic, pointing rather than defining. And so we have continually to try to focus, not on the pointing finger of language, but on that to which it points. The mystics of the great traditions affirm almost unanimously that the Real is beyond human conceiving. It is ineffable or, as I prefer to say, transcategorial – outside the scope of the categories with which we think."
In his Introduction, what Hick has basically described as his "Big Picture" for understanding the structure of the universe is The Perennial Philosophy – that there is a Spiritual Ground to our existence, that this Reality can be experienced within the soul of each created being, and that our ultimate good is to align, ground ourselves in, or even "become one with," this Reality.
Hick will spend the rest of The Fifth Dimension expanding on this idea and arguing that it provides a compelling view of the nature of reality.
From time to time I'll shout out to great blogs out there. I regularly read Richard Beck who blogs at Experimental Theology. He recently did a series on post-Evangelicals and the lack of a "tribe" which I really resonated with. I am post-Evangelical and miss a lot about the communities I grew up in. I also now feel adrift – a lone wolf without much of a home.
One option for dealing with this that comes to mind is community based purely on spiritual experience, such as Quakerism. As I've mentioned before, if I land anywhere as far as an official religious structure, it'll probably be there.
This is my favorite post from that series.
I also occasionally read Peter Enns, and resonate with his similar thoughts here.
I've done a lot of things for a living. Right now I drive a bus.
My bus is small, designed for people with disabilities and the elderly who have trouble getting around town. So I get a chance to talk to my riders.
Last week, I picked up an older asian woman, and we had a long ride together. On the way, she played some music from her phone.
I didn't recognize the language, so I asked her what the lyrics said. Her English was broken, so we struggled to have a conversation about it, but she told me they were "prayers to God." She said they helped her "have a healthy mind and spirit." It was beautiful music and I enjoyed listening on the ride, even though I didn't understand the words. As a side note, she also told me she was Buddhist, so to say that "Buddhists don't believe in God" is too simple. Buddhism is far too diverse for those kinds of statements.
The encounter reminded me of an old co-worker I used to drive to work with. She is Hindu and the music she played in the car was often prayers/chants in the Hindi language. I found it beautiful.
Singing your prayers.
Michael Pollan of all people has a new book about the history and potential current uses of psychedelics in America. In How to Change Your Mind, Pollan reviews the scientific research around the use of these substances (focusing mostly on LSD and psilocybin) and even documents his own "trips."
Aldous Huxely, The Doors of Perception, The Perennial Philosophy, "mystical experience," scientific understandings, the mind/brain problem, William James – it's all here. And from a guy who mostly writes about food!
Coincidentally, the Buddhist Geeks have recently been doing a series on the use of various substances to induce "mystical experiences."
I don't know that I would ever go down that route (and my hunch is that many of the historical contemplatives I study also wouldn't suggest it, likely seeing it as a "craving for experience" instead of a cultivation of detachment and a simple love of God), but the topic is one of the most interesting in modern discussions of spirituality.
"Despite Eckhart's longtime reputation as an honorary Protestant and his enthusiastic reception among nineteenth-century Romantics and Idealists, mainstream Protestants, particularly German Lutherans, have been slower to embrace the master fully because of his association with "Catholic" mysticism. The great church historian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) proclaimed that "mysticism can never be made Protestant without slapping history and Catholicism in the face." As theologian Karl Barth (1886-1930) argued, mysticism propagates a path to salvation "that completely bypasses the biblical history of salvation and the Last Days." Since the 1960's Protestant believers have been worried less by the Catholic context of Meister Eckhart and other mystics than by the latter's growing association with several New Age – and presumably unscriptural – approaches to enlightenment. That cautiousness continues today, although many American Protestants, including evangelicals, are increasingly discovering worthwhile spiritual insights in the words of the medieval master.
Most commonly since the mid-twentieth century, the master has been praised as a bridge to Asian religions and philosophies. In his correspondence with Thomas Merton, Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) called Eckhart "the one Zen thinker of the West." The just man's inner Christ nature described by the medieval master looks remarkably similar to the internal Buddha nature of Mahayana tradition, as does Eckhart's combination of the contemplative-active life of love. Letting-go-ness lines up nicely wiht Zen "no-mind" (wuxin) as well as the Taoist "no action" (wuwei). The Buddha also remained wary of human God-talk and aspired to a unity with the ultimate similar to Eckhart's deification. The many resemblances are indeed striking.
Several modern observers have also notes Meister Eckhart's kinship with parts of the Hindu Tradition, particularly the Advaita Vedanta school. The Tamil writer Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) exlaimed that "Eckhart's sermons might well be termed an Upanishad of Europe," noting the master's "astonishingly close parallel to Indian mods of thought; some whole passages and many single sentences read like a direct translation from Sanskrit." Here too, some Eckhatian terms seem to have other religious equivalents, such as Brahman for the ground, and neti-neti (not his, not that) for the ineffability of the divine mystery. Above all, both Eckhart and the Vedanta school emphasize the necessity of intuition to experience the entirely of reality, which then leads to loving kindness.
Both Islam and Judaism also have their own strong mystical traditions, and here too many notable similarities to Meister Eckhart's teachings emerge. Like Eckhart, his near contemporary, the great Sufi master Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) sought a religious philosophy that would above all be practical for genuine spiritual seekers. His Perfect Human, like Eckhart's Just Man, has realized the divinity within – the inseparableness from the divine essense in the eternal Now – and has dedicated himself or herself to a life of perfect love. The fantastically popular Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi (107-73) prefigures his Christian counterpart's language and message even more strikingly. With evocative images and meticulously crafted phrasing, Rumi describes his own relentless pursuit of union (fana) with "the Beloved." The experience of this mystery, which most non-Sufis reject as heretical, is like no other. Coincidentally, a Jewish contemporary of Eckhart and Rumi, the mystic philosopher Abraham Abulafia (140-91) taught a similar kind of divine union, known as mediative Kabbalahism, which remaines likewise controversial among modern Jews.
Meister Eckhart's seemingly universal applicability among virtually all the world's religions accounts for his particularly popularity in the rapidly growing belief in religious syncretism, also known as perennialism (and sometimes called religious pluralism). This is the conviction that all the world's religions share a common essential truth, which has since been fractured into various rituals, doctrines, and other structures. Given that Meister Eckhart in fact sough such a universal religious philosophy, it's little surprise that he has proven such a superstar among its adherents. The Neoplatonist Agostino Steuco (1497-1545) coined "perennial philosophy," to describe a common, transcendent truth evident in both classical Greek philosophy and later religious traditions. Steuco's idea lay largely dormant until spreading among the Deists of hte eighteenth century and even more spectacularly among the Transcendentalists, Universalists, and Theosophists of the nineteenth century. In 1945, Aldous Huxly (1894-1963) published The Perennial Philosophy, in which Eckhart plays a prominent role, taking the universalist perspective into popular culture. Since then, perennialism has become closely associated with various New Age writers as well as some ecumenists among Christian denominations.
At least on the surface, Eckhart could qualify as the patron saint of the perennial movement. Like its modern advocates, he rejected the materialism of human society to seek a hidden, spiritual truth. He was also remarkably inclusive in his sources for past wisdom, consulting not just Christian thinkers, but also Jews, Muslims, and ancient pagans. Although a Christian (and member of the clergy!), he stressed individual, internal transformation over external rituals or doctrines. His approach was egalitarian, not requiring a high degree of learning or other special gnosis. And above all, his sermons were practical and encouraging, full of colorful metaphors, memorable aphorisms, and answers to anticipated questions. There was but one goal, union with God, which modern followers refer to as ultimate reality – and Eckhart would not disagree with the characterization."
– Joel F. Harrington, Dangerous Mystic
"Meister Eckhart's mature understanding of letting-go-ness was comprehensive. Not only must the sinner let go of the world and sin, but also of all the traditional remedies proposed by the Church: pious acts of devotion and petitionary prayer aimed at flawed human notions of "God." The seeker had to let go of all images, desires, and thought itself. Only then was he or she ready for the final step in Eckhart's way to God, which is to be silent and let God work and speak within. Typically, the seeker was more aware of God...in a quiet places, but that requirement, Eckhart clarified, reflected human imperfection more than divine nature, for God is equally in all things and places. Most importantly, he continued,
all your activity must cease and all your powers must serve [God's] ends, not your own...No creaturely skill, nor your own wisdom nor all your knowledge can enable you to know God divinely. For you to know God in God's way, your knowing must become a pure unknowing, and a forgetting of yourself and all creatures. Now you might say, 'Well, sire, what use is my intellect then, if it is supposed to be empty and functionless? Is that the best thing for me to do – to raise my mind to an unknowing knowledge that can't really exist? For if I knew anything at all it would not be ignorance, and I should not be empty and bare. Am I supposed to be in total darkness?' Certainly. You cannot do better than to place yourself in darkness and in unknowing."
– Joel Harrington, Dangerous Mystic (italicized words are direct quotes from Eckhart's sermons)
The similarity of Eckhart's thought to The Cloud of Unknowing here is obvious.
Some irony from scholastic theologians, and perhaps for today's "Systematic Theologians" out there...
"Seven years had passed since Eckhart's previous professorship in Paris. Although he had continued to work on his Opus Tripartitum during that time, progress had been slow amid all his travel and administrative work on behalf of the order. Eckhart's second regent professorship in Paris offered him the time and resources to make significant progress on the Opus. Ironically, it was at just this point that his ambitious intellectual pursuit of God appears to have hit a deeply troubling impasse – namely the outer limits of human reason. It was a paradox that Aquinas too had discovered during the composition of his own Summa: 'Man reaches the peak of his knowledge of God when he realizes that he does not know Him, understanding that the divine reality surpasses all human conception of it.' Shortly before his own death, in fact, the Angelic Doctor had experienced a deeper understanding of the divine that 'made everything I had written seem as straw.' For Aquinas and Eckhart, all human perceptions, however logical, remained limited by the derivative and subsequently partial nature of our own understanding...
Over the past several years, the master had become increasingly intrigued by an alternate way of knowing God – the intuitive or 'mystical' approach embraced by his spiritual father, Augustine. According to Eckhart, Augustine had grasped that theologians were always trying to balance the understanding of God offered 'through a glass darkly' by reason with other wisdom obtained more directly by nonrational experience of the divine. Now Eckhart decided that knowing God intuitively from within was no longer merely a complementary method to knowing God from without through rational inquiry, but was in many important ways superior to it. The master never completely abandoned his philosophical work, but he increasingly acknowledged its inadequacies, particularly in reaching his own ultimate goal of achieving direct experience of the divine."
– Joel F. Harrington, Dangerous Mystic
I'm not sure what to make of Jungian psychology, but I came across this statement today in his Man and His Symbols:
"Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless."
Its enigma is as limitless. One thing a meditation practice will teach you is that you do not know yourself. Not that you are analyzing yourself during meditation, but I think it makes you overall more aware of all the various drives, motivations, traumas, etc. swimming around in your mind. I often think of the psyche as an ocean with no bottom.
One of the hopes of having a regular practice is that the psyche is pliable. That we can actually be changed, through the practice, in a deep and lasting way.
But I'm not sure we'll ever really know who we are. I think what matters is the healing – the positive change – if such a thing is actually happening. Not the self-knowledge.
"I was asked, 'Some people shun all company and always want to be alone; their peace depends on it, and on being in church. Was that the best thing?' And I said, 'No!' Now I see why. He who is in a right state, is always in a right state wherever he is, and with everybody. But if a man is in a wrong state, he is so everywhere and with anybody."
– Meister Eckhart, Quoted in Dangerous Mystic
The "right state," according to Eckhart, is a state of detachment from our own self-will.
"In true obedience there should be no trace of 'I want so-and-so,' or 'this and that,' but a going out of your own."
If a man is in the right state, he is at peace in any situation, at any place, with anyone. If he is in the wrong state, it doesn't matter where he is or who he is with. Internal state trumps external circumstances.
I just got through reading this biography of Meister Eckhart. Very good.
The popular image of Eckhart is that of a pure mystic, probably out in an isolated cottage somewhere, absorbed in the presence of God, maybe occasionally counseling a wandering seeker.
Eckhart was a professor at the University of Paris. He held several official positions in the Dominican order of the Catholic Church. He was extremely well educated in scholastic theology and philosophy. But, like Aquinas, Eckhart eventually became disillusioned with academic theology and its ability to lead a soul to God. Rather, he turned to experience, teaching that each individual could find God by turning within in silence.
Also his first name wasn't Meister, but rather just Eckhart. Meister is a title meaning "master" or "teacher." I did not know that.
Great, engaging read.
The last few days I've left the computer at home, gone out with a stack of books, and got to it. I often read on a Kindle app on my computer or iPad, but recently I've returned to good old-fashioned books.
It's better for your soul.
A few observations:
1. I have got into more good conversations with people at coffee shops or book stores in the last few days than I have in the previous few months. It's partly because when you're not "plugged in," you present yourself as more open to being engaged. It's also partly because I feel like I am thinking more clearly without screen time. I want to engage people in conversation more. It feels natural. I'm in "the real world."
2. We have way more capacity for sustained attention than we think. Being on a device lends itself to constant distraction. Read a passage, check your email, read a passage, look up a book on Amazon, check the news, watch a video, check the price of my cryptocurrency investment, read a blog, read a passage.
Without the screen, I can give my full attention to what I'm reading for a significant amount of time. I just got through reading a 500 page novel and a 300 page historical study. No way I could do that on my iPad. Even if I go back and forth between a few books during a specific reading time, it's just different. I'm fully in it.
An interesting study on this ability (or inability) for sustained attention is found in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
3. I don't worry about my stuff being stolen when I go to the bathroom. I go to the bathroom in complete peace.
The author of The Cloud of Unknowing recommends that an aspiring contemplative cultivates three habits.
"Nevertheless, anyone who aspires to contemplation ought to cultivate Study, Reflection, and Prayer, or to put it differently, reading, thinking, and praying."
Reading. Thinking. Praying. I think I do those things better when I'm not on or near a screen.