The Ways of Wisdom: Towards a World Theology

Extending the Convivencia: Towards a World Theology

Anthony Mansueto

The present period is characterized by an unprecedented degree of intercultural interaction. Indeed, in many parts of the world, it is no longer possible to think in terms of a single hegemonic civilizational tradition. This has, in turn, created new problems for both public discourse and personal spirituality. Lacking a common language, both literally and figuratively, or a common set of assumptions about what it means to be human, makes it almost impossible to deliberate around the problems of public life. Individuals, meanwhile, are increasingly carving out spiritual paths for themselves which involve engagement with diverse religious traditions. But this presupposes a form of discourse which addresses common spiritual questions in a way which considers answers from across the full range of humanity’s religious traditions --and which engages the diverse ways in which those traditions have framed the fundamental questions themselves. There have been two principal responses to this situation. The first is secularism which, following nineteenth century social theory, expects that religion will largely disappear, at least from the public arena, as societies modernize –and that this is a good thing. Secularism as a prediction has lost most if its credibility, unable to explain the resurgence of public religion in nearly every major society on the planet. Secularism as a hope has not fared much better. This is, we will argue, because secularism has served as a cover for what we call the “secret religion of high modernity,” which seeks what were historically regarded as spiritual aims –transcending finitude and/or contingency, what amounts to divinization— by means of innerworldly, civilizational progress. This high modern project has failed, leaving nihilism and despair in its wake. The second approach, which John Milbank has adroitly termed “plural fideism,”1 recognizes the existence of competing discourses around fundamental questions of meaning and value, and their presence in the public arena, but regards them as incommensurate and incapable of being brought into meaningful dialogue with each other, much less be engaged in a common process of public deliberation. This plural fideism is, in a certain sense, constitutive of the postmodern condition, with its high levels of tolerance and low levels of ideological engagement. This alternative is inadequate for the simple reason that it makes deliberation around ends essentially impossible and provides no means by which individuals can make rational, autonomous decisions regarding spiritual questions. This paper will argue for the development of a new form of discourse which not only brings humanity’s diverse wisdom traditions, philosophical and religious, into meaningful dialogue with each other, but actually makes it possible reasoned engagement with specifically theological questions across those traditions. Such a discourse would be an extension on a global scale of the inter-religious theology which developed during the period of the Convivencia in medieval al- Andalus when Jews, Christians, and Muslims not only lived in an atmosphere of mutual

1 John Milbank, “Only Theology saves Metaphysics: On the Modalities of Terror,” unpublished paper accessed at http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php

1 tolerance but engaged properly theological questions (e.g. the relative superiority of each other’s prophets) using a common philosophical framework. We call this discourse a “world theology.” Our argument for such a discourse is simple. First, it represents simply an extension of the trajectory of intercultural dialogue and religious rationalization and democratization which brought theology into being in the first place, a dynamic which was cut short by the emergence of the secret religion of high modernity. Second, it is required by the current situation to support both the reasoned engagement of fundamental questions in a pluralistic public arena and the spiritual seeking of an emerging sector of global citizens who have made humanity’s diverse spiritual heritage their own and no longer make spiritual decisions within the confines of their native traditions. This proposal will, undoubtedly, meet sharp objections from certain quarters. Theologians operating within particular religious communities, will argue that as fides querens intellectum the discipline of theology presupposes membership within a particular religious community and a faith commitment to that tradition’s authoritative tradition. It may also be argued that the term theology is not really appropriate outside of the Abrahamic traditions, which have well defined concepts of revelation. Finally, postmodern critics of will argue that the idea of a world theology represents a manifestation of the sort of rationalizing, totalizing cosmopolitanism –the cultural supplement of the world market—which Derrida has called “globolatinity.”2 The paper will answer objections from both quarters, and conclude with a sketch of the method of a world an agenda of questions which it must address.

The Origins of Theology

Theology, as a discourse about God, has a complex origin. On the one hand, it is a product of the process of religious problematization, rationalization, and democratization which began during what Karl Jaspers3 called the Axial Age. By religious problematization we mean the process by which religious ideas which had formerly been taken for granted were subject to various types of contestation –rational, poetic/literary, etc. By religious rationalization we mean a shift from myth to philosophy as the principal way of approaching fundamental questions of meaning and value. Where myth approaches these questions using images and stories, philosophy uses concepts and arguments. By religious democratization, we mean an opening up of dialogue around fundamental questions of meaning and value to a wider public which extends beyond the hereditary priesthoods which controlled such discourse in most communitarian and tributary societies.

The West

The Hellenic Contribution These processes are most apparent in Greece. Let us consider the questions of problematization, rationalization, and democratization separately. With respect to the problematization we can point to two distinct stages. First, expanded trade leads people to notice the existence of divergent mythologies. Texts such as Hesiod’s Theogony attempt to reconcile these divergent

2 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, (London : Routledge, 2001) 3 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953)

2 stories. Second, the emergence of petty commodity production with its agnosticism regarding questions of value leads to growing skepticism about traditional beliefs and values and the emergence of doctrines such as Sophism. With respect to religious rationalization we can trace a step by step movement from Homer, for whom the gods are essentially characters in a story, superhuman perhaps, but no less individuals with distinct personalities, through Hesiod, for whom they have become personified natural forces, the natural philosophers (Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus) for whom anthropomorphic gods have given way to abstract natural forces (water, air, fire), and finally Pythagoras and the post-Pythagorean philosophers (Xenophanes, Anaximander) who describe the first principle in mathematical terms (the Infinite, the One, etc.). What about democratization? Much has been made of the Hellenic poleis, both by those who regard it as the first step in a protracted democratic revolution, and by those who point out, quite correctly, that they were far from being popular democracies, but were, rather, more like warrior republics or merchant and landowner oligarchies. But the more important democratization took place at the religious level, a point first recognized by the French “left-traditionalist” Pierre Simon Ballenche, who developed a sophisticated argument showing that the class struggles of the ancient world were in fact struggles over the cult, marks of an attempt on the part of the lower classes to gain full access to religion and thus claim their full humanity4. Thus the mystery cults made accessible to initiates from all lineages and social classes secrets of immortality which had once been the property only of the priestly lineages. Elected religious leaders in many cities replaced these lineages in the critical offices of basileus and epyomous archon, the two chief magistrates responsible for organizing the traditional and new religious festivals respectively and thus in the aristocratic Areopagus which was henceforth composed of former magistrates. Greek drama carried this process further, allowing playwrights without any formal religious standing to present reinterpretations of traditional religious stories which spoke to the new struggle of life in an increasingly urban and mercantile society. And of course philosophy makes the fundamental questions of meaning and value a matter of public debates in which everyone can, to the extent of their ability, participate. Indeed, it is possible to read the democratic revolutions in Greece as first and foremost a struggle for full religious participation. These three processes flowed together to lead to the emergence of the dialectical tradition represented by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The development of petty commodity production led to rapid economic differentiation and the peasantry fell rapidly into debt bondage why the traditional ruling classes centered around the sanctuaries were displaced by large landowners and merchants. But then something interesting happened. A series of rebellions in the fifth and sixth centuries halted this process, and imposed a kind of compromise. The reforms of Solon and Pericles guaranteed the land rights of the peasantry, providing credits and other protection against debt peonage and permitted them to participate in the political arena. But these reforms also left intact the landholdings of the ruling classes, who were forced to turn to chattel slaves to work their large estates5. This combination of a formally democratic political arena and fundamental class conflicts imposed on the ruling classes the task of securing the consent of a majority which did not share their interests. Thus the function of the rhetor, whose job it was to sway the masses in the public assembly. The sophists were first and foremost teachers of rhetoric, who trained rich young men in the arts of persuasion, so that they could ably serve their families’ interests in the public arena.

4 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, (London: Blackwell, 1991), 69 5 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, (London: Verso, 1974), 29-32, 38

3 Trained by the sophists, these rhetors could “make the worse appear the better cause,” so that in a few short years people began to doubt that there really was any such thing as the beautiful, the true or the good. Where in the tributary state there was still one common end, even if it was deformed and turned to the interests of a single warlord, here the state became simply an instrument of purely private ends. The polity itself lost all integrity. It is this context that the emergence of dialectical philosophy must be understood. Socrates developed the dialectic largely as a way of demonstrating the internal incoherence of the sophistic position. Plato went further, charting a way by means of which the intellect could rise to a first principle in terms of which the universe could be explained and human action ordered. Aristotle, writing at the very end of the axial age and at the beginning of the era of systematic metaphysics, completes the task by actually making an argument for the unmoved mover. In each case the aim is to reground the idea of the Good, which then provides a criterion in terms of which the structure of human society can be judged and justice restored to the polis.

The Semitic Contribution On the other hand, theology is also the result of a complex intercultural interaction –the case of the West the confrontation between Hellenic and Semitic cultures, and above all between dialectical philosophy and the religion of Israel. Israel, to be sure, underwent its own Axial Age rationalization and democratization. The emergence of the cult of yhwh was at once a product of, and a catalyst for a revolutionary transformation within Canaanite society, which called into question old meanings and proposed new ones6, and while it gave birth to a new hereditary priesthood, it was led by prophets who were drawn from many different social strata. The name yhwh itself probably derives from an epithet attached to the name of the god El, who was ba’al’s father and the actual high god of the Canaanites but not, for the most part, the object of an actual cult. Revolutionary Israel appealed above the head of ba’al, as it were, to his father, who they worshiped as ‘el yahwi sabaoth yisrael: God who brings into being the armies of Israel. Gradually, however, Israel recognized that the same power which had liberated them from their oppressors was in fact the creative power behind the universe as a whole. We thus see a movement from the still largely anthropomorphic ‘el yahwi sabaoth yisrael, to the God revealed in Exodus 3:13ff, who tells Moses that His name is eyeh asher eyeh. Eyeh is the imperfect indicative form of the verb “to be” indicating that this God is Being itself, acting still. In the same passage we also find the revelation of the name yhwh, which is the causative form of the verb “to be,” and points even more clearly to the recognition of God as the power of Being as such. And certainly the religious discourse of the Pharisees and of the Rabbinic Judaism which emerged out the Pharisaic tradition, while not philosophical, was highly rationalized. Something like what eventually came to be called theology in the West emerges first and foremost as an effort to bring the Hellenic and Semitic traditions into dialogue with each other. The seminal figure in this regard is Philo of Alexandria, who uses Middle Platonic categories both to argue for the credibility of the Jewish tradition and to explain images derived from that tradition, using what came to be known as a allegorical hermeneutic. But unlike later philosophers who used such a hermeneutic, Philo affirmed that the Jewish scriptures contained a wisdom which was higher than that accessible to philosophy, even if philosophy could help us to understand it. This pattern was sustained by early fathers of the Christian Church, who used the emerging

6 Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979)

4 Neo-Platonic philosophy of the period to argue for the credibility of the new religion and to explain its doctrines. In the process, however, the scope and effect of properly theological discourse was expanded. Theology did not just attempt to justify or explain Christianity’s often paradoxical claims --e.g. that Jesus was both divine and human, and that God was both one in Being and three persons; it helped to generate them. These claims are not, after all, obviously present in the Christian scriptures, and represent an attempt to think through, using a mixture of imaginative language and rational dialectics, the nature and significance of Jesus of Nazareth and what he tells us about God and humanity’s relationship with God. The same is true of the whole discourse around human nature, sin, and grace, the fall and redemption which developed in the West. A second type of discourse, similar to Christian theology, developed in Dar-al-Islam: what is known as kalam7. The word it self means “speaking” in Arabic. Kalam, like Christian apologetics, arose out of an intercultural encounter –in this case that of the Arabic speaking Islamic invaders or liberators with the Hellenistic world they incorporated into Dar-al-Islam. Like Christian apologetics, Kalam initially attempted to demonstrate the reasonableness of the most basic claims of Islam –the existence, unity, and justice of God—and to engage some of the problems which emerged from core Islamic principles: divine sovereignty and human freedom, the status of sinful believers, and the tension between the principle of “commanding right and forbidding wrong,” on the one hand, and prudent government on the other. The Mutazilite’s argued that human beings can, in fact, rise rationally to knowledge of God and of basic moral principles, that human beings are free and responsible for the evil in the world, and that divine punishment is proportional to the evil done, and that one need not command right or forbid wrong if doing so would actually diminish the good in the world or increase the evil. They also favored an allegorical interpretation of the scriptures, though they did affirm the existence of truths which are beyond human reason. Also as in Christendom a competing trend emerged –the Asharites— who stressed divine sovereignty, the weakness of reason and the necessity of revelation, the inscrutability of divine decrees, and the necessity of submission. Kalam, in this sense, was distinct from falasafa, or philosophy, in that–even where it was rationalistic— the questions it addressed were posed by revelation and directed at justifying or explaining core Islamic principles.

Having analyzed the emergence of theological discourse in the West, we are now in a position to ask whether or not a comparable form of discourse emerged in other civilizational traditions. In India we have many of the same elements which generated theological discourse in the West. We see, for example an axial age period of problematization in which meaning itself is called into question (by the Caravakas, who denied the existence of a first principle in favor of a hedonistic materialism). We see a process of rationalization in which a rational dialectics emerged which challenged and partly supplanted mythological discourse as a means of addressing fundamental questions of meaning and value. This rationalization is already apparent in the Upanishads, which rationalize key concepts from the Vedas, but it is most advanced in the heterodox traditions, and especially in Buddhism, which at least initially disdains imaginative discourse of any sort, and eventually in the six acceptable darshanas or philosophical schools which emerge

7 Patricia Crone, God’s Rule, Government and Islam, (New York: Columbia, 2004)

5 in response to Buddhist dialectics. We also see a process of democratization in which debate around fundamental questions of meaning and value is extended beyond the Brahmin elite. Finally, see a process of intercultural interaction –specifically that between the pastoral-nomadic Aryans who moved into India between 1500 and 1000 BCE and whose penetration of the entire subcontinent extended well into the Silk Road Era.8 This said, India might seem to reflect a very different situation. For the Vedic tradition the scriptures are sacred not because they are revealed, but rather because they are themselves eternal. Indeed, it is the pronunciation of the words of the Vedas themselves which are understood within at least some schools to bring the gods into being. This means that “theology” did not arise out an effort to render credible, using an indigenous dialectics, the revealed wisdom of a foreign people, as was the case in the West. Rather, the forms of religious discourse in India which come closest to theology in the Western sense emerge out of an attempt on the part of Brahmin groups to answer the critiques mounted by the Buddhists and other heterodox groups. Matters are, however, rather more complex. Buddhism first emerged in the culturally distinct Himalayan foothills, which where warrior republics, the gana-sanghas remained prevalent. And the Brahmin resurgence which began around 200 BCE and which extended into the first several centuries of the common era (it was not until around 600 CE that Buddhism was no longer a major force on the subcontinent) was accompanied by an engagement with the indigenous traditions of the non-Aryan peoples of the subcontinent whose traditions are reflected above all in the Epics (e.g. the Mahabharata) and the Puranas. Indeed, it is to these traditions, and not to the Vedas, that “modern” Puranic Hinduism owes its deities and its rituals. And it was engagement with these traditions, as much as with Buddhist dialectics, which led to the emergence of something like a properly theological discourse in India. In what does this discourse consist? I would like to suggest that the discourse of essentially all of the six acceptable darshanas is ultimately at least partly theological in character. This may seem like a stretch, especially in the case of the Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools which address mostly logical-epistemological and cosmological questions respectively, and which are colored by an empiricist and atomistic outlook. But Nyaya logic and epistemology developed largely as a counterpoint to Buddhist dialectics, and are directed at defending a doctrine of language and a theory of knowledge compatible with commitment to the sacred status of the Vedic scriptures. It is not possible to go into detail in this context into the differences between Buddhist and Hindu logics, but the affirmation of testimony as a valid basis for knowledge by the Nyaya school should suffice to illustrate the fact that this school, its empiricist thrust notwithstanding, aims at validating the authority of the Vedas. The case for the theological character of the other darshanas is much simpler. While they also engage epistemological and cosmological questions, the Samkya/Yoga, Mimamsa, and Vedanta schools are all, fundamentally, attempts to engage the fundamental question raised by Buddhism –whether or not anything has inherent existence-- and to do so in (several very different) ways which all, nonetheless, validate the authority of the Vedas. The Samkya/Yoga school presents a nontheistic and dualistic theory of cosmic and spiritual evolution in which the Vedic concept of creation through sacrifice is reinterpreted in an ascetic and specifically yogic fashion, so that the interaction between purusa (spirit) and prakriti (matter) becomes a means of the gradual

8 See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1998, Satischandra Chaterjee and Dhirendramohan Datta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1954) and Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to 1300 (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002)

6 liberation of the latter. The Mimamsa school defends a traditional doctrine in which it is the word, and especially the word of the Vedas, which has inherent existence. The Vedanta school, finally, focuses on the concept of Brahman, the creative power of being itself, and explores its relation to the individual self, the reality of which (against the Buddhists) is affirmed. These broad schools of thought in turn have numerous trends within them, many of which link the high theology of, for example Advaita (nondualistic) or Dvaita (dualistic) Vedanta with popular cults of Siva or Krisna respectively.

China probably presents the most unlikely site for the emergence of a properly theological discourse. As in the West and in India, there is an Axial Age process of religious problematization, rationalization and democratization (though it might be argued that it begins much earlier, in the Chou dynasty). There are also significant inter-cultural interactions –with the Islamic and to a lesser extent Manichean and Christian West, and especially with Buddhist India. But in China there is not only no tradition of revealed wisdom; there is also no body of texts which is regarded (as the Vedas are in India) as eternal. There is, however, a body of texts which are regarded as the product of a supra-rational wisdom –i.e. a wisdom which derives from high order meditative practice, rather than discursive reason. I am speaking of the Mahayana Buddhist Sutras, many of (such as the Avatamska Sutra and the Saddharmapundarika Sutra which, the existence of Sanskrit versions notwithstanding, almost certainly originated in China or in Chinese influenced Central Asia. We also have a sort of reverse apologetic –a Neo-Confucian literature directed at vindicating indigenous Chinese traditions against the Buddhist assault. The most important such texts is probably Pei We’s (267-300 ) chong you lun or Justification of Being, which “argues that nature (ziran) is what is so (ran) by itself (zi) and that Nature is in ‘being’ rather than nonbeing because nonbeing cannot create by itself.9” The struggle between Buddhism and Confucianism over the question of being was replicated in a struggle internal to the indigenous Chinese traditions between Confucianism and Taoism over the same question, though the Taoist position was never so radical as the Buddhist10. The outcome of this struggle is, furthermore (as in the case of Western and Indian theologies) a synthesis which recognizes both the foundational role of rational dialectics and the existence of a higher wisdom (here the product of mediation rather than revelation) which is necessary for the full realization of human potential. This development is most apparent in the dao xue or Neo- Confucian synthesis of the Sung Dynasty and later, in the work of thinkers such as Zhu xi and Wang yang ming.

What all of these various forms of theological discourse have in common is 1) an underlying recognition of the possibility of a achieving authentic wisdom (i.e. authentic knowledge regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value) by means of a rational dialectic, 2) the recognition of the existence of a higher wisdom accessible only by revelation, meditation, or

9 Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 93-95. 10 See Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) as well as Collins, A Sociology of Philosophies and Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism.

7 some other supra-rational means, 3) a recognized or unrecognized cultural distance between the two forms of wisdom, and 4) a recognition of the need to justify rationally the possibility of suprarational wisdom and, conversely, to defend the role of reason in explicating and drawing out the implications of that wisdom.

We need now to look at the fate of theological discourse thus understood in the modern world.

Theology and Modernity

The advent of modernity had a complex and contradictory impact on the development of theological discourse. As we have argued elsewhere, following Milbank11 modern civilization is founded on a fundamental shift in ontology. Most of the civilizations of the Silk Road Era were founded on an analogical metaphysics. For such a metaphysics the divine was understood to differ qualitatively from the universe, which nonetheless participated in it. This is the ontology, for example of Thomas, who understands God as Esse as such, but also of Vedanta tradition and of dao xue. Even where the idea of God was rejected, as in most forms of Buddhism, an analogous concept played a parallel role –e.g. the idea of the tathagatagarbha in Hua-yen Buddhism. An analogical metaphysics almost always supports a natural law ethics which values the full development of human capacities, but also values the development of higher order capacities more, and thus serves as a standard by which rulers can be held accountable for the impact of their rule on human development and civilizational progress. Modernity, on the other hand, is predicated on a univocal metaphysics in which the difference between God and the world is purely quantitative.12 God exists in the same way we do, but is just infinitely powerful. Or, alternatively, there is no God. This univocal metaphysics can be reflected in either the idea of a sovereign God of the sort preached by the Reformers, or by the Asharites in Dar-al-Islam, or else in the high modern ideal of effectively building god, or divinizing humanity, by infinitely extended scientific and technological progress. This idea emerged as a result of the enormous expansion of European power which began in the High Middle Ages, with the Crusades, the Reconquista, and the conquests of Africa, the Americas, and eventually of Asia. These conquests helped bring into being sovereign nation states, which created a basis in experience for a new idea of God, while also catalyzing the process of primitive accumulation which was necessary in order to spark the industrial revolution and capitalist development. Neither the new absolute monarchs nor the emerging bourgeoisie wanted to be subject to challenge by philosophers or religious leaders holding them accountable before the bar of natural law. The development of a univocal metaphysics led theology in two very different directions. For those who upheld the existence of a sovereign God in the Protestant or Asharite tradition, the role of reason was substantially diminished and theology was increasingly reduced to the interpretation of the scriptures. For those who upheld the high modern ideal theology was, on the other hand, displaced first by a philosophy which tried as much as possible to reinvent itself on the model of mathematical physics (this is the moment of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) and eventually by mathematical physics itself, which became the architectonic discipline for the

11 Anthony and Maggie Mansueto, Spirituality and Dialectics, (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), Milbank, Theology and Social Theory 12 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory

8 modern world --a tendency which reaches its reduction ad absurdum in the work of late modern theorists such as Frank Tipler.13 A critical, humanistic variant of modernity also emerged as a kind of Averroist counter- reaction to the Augustinian emphasis on the sovereignty of God. Where the Augustinians and Reformers rejected the accountability of faith to reason, the Averroists rejected the accountability of reason to any higher wisdom. This tradition, which leads from ibn Rusd through Gersonides and Spinoza14 to Hegel and eventually to the early Marx and Lukacs, conserved something like an analogical metaphysics of Esse but sought an autonomous, innerworldly liberation from contingency by means of a political practice which was eventually to make humanity “the unique subject-object”15 of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process. Where Protestant theology contracted into hermeneutics and positivistic modernism abandoned theology in favor of theoretical physics, critical humanistic modernism reduced theology to social theory. Most modern theology outside the fundamentalist camp holds historic theological commitments in tension with modernism, usually of the critical humanistic variety. For Liberal Protestantism and for those Catholics who have taken the Liberal Protestant response to modernity as their model, the result was the emergence of a scientific approach to the interpretation of the scriptures (the historical critical method, together with such later developments as sociological, structuralist, and poststructuralist criticism), coupled with an enhanced sensitivity to the problems of interpretation. But the originalist16 tendency of the Reformers, together with their reduction of theology to hermeneutics, remains. For Catholicism, which has always placed a higher value on the role of philosophy in theological method, the natural tendency has for Marx to take the place of Aristotle, leading to a least a partial identification of Christian redemption with the innerworldly liberation promised by socialism –or else to a rejection of the rationalizing tendency of the Catholic tradition altogether, precisely because it points in this direction, in favor of neo-Augustinianism which has difficulty distinguishing itself from Protestantism.17

Theology in the Current Situation

Modernity, as we defined it above, has never been uncontested. Indeed, at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, Western thought has been dominated by thinkers as diverse as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida who have called radically into

13 Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, (New York: Doubleday 1994). 14 Idit Dobbs Weinstein, Idit. “Gersonides: The Supercommenator on Aristotle: The Decisive Forgotten Link Between Averroes and Spinoza,” in Maroth Miklos, ed. Problems in Arabic Philosophy, forthcoming and “Necessity Revisited: Spinoza as a Radical Aristotelian," Spinoza by 2000. Vol. 5, Yirmiyahu Yovel, ed., forthcoming 15 Georgi Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971). 16 By originalism I mean the idea that the earliest layer of the tradition is the most authoritative. For liberal Christians this is generally the teachings of the historical Jesus (thus the “new search for the historical Jesus”); for the “neo-orthodox” who accept modern science and historical criticism but reject liberal optimism, it generally means the original preaching of Paul. 17 For a comprehensive treatment of the debate around the theology of liberation see Segundo, Juan Luis. 1985 Theology and the Church. New York: Harper; Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal 1984 "Instruction Regarding Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation," United States Catholic Conference , 1986 "Christian Freedom and Liberation," United States Catholic Conference, and Mansueto, Anthony. 2002a Religion and Dialectics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

9 question both the possibility and the value of the modernist utopia. The neo-orthodox theologies of thinkers like Barth and Niebuhr form an integral part of this trend. The past two decades have, however, witnessed a deepening of the crisis of modernity. This is largely a result of the crisis of socialism, which offered an alternative way to realize the modernist utopia, and channeled most popular and politically effective discontent into modernist projects. With socialism severely chastened, if not dead (and I would argue that China and its leadership remain meaningfully socialist), an underlying and long standing current of dissent from the modernist project has come to the surface. In many cases this is reflected in a reversion to early modern ideologies (I would put most fundamentalisms in this category) or in simply continuing to live modernity while no longer believing in it (postmodernism). In either case we face a profound civilizational crisis. This crisis comes, furthermore, at a time when humanity’s principal civilizational traditions have been brought into contact with each other in a way that is qualitatively new. During the Silk Road Era there were several partial dialogues, of the sort identified above (Christendom, Judaism, and Dar-al-Islam; Dar-al-Islam and Hinduism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Buddhism and the indigenous Chinese traditions). And modernity forced all traditions into dialogue with itself. But now we find ourselves in a situation where all traditions are in contact with each other, and where ---precisely because of the emerging civilizational crisis— people are looking beyond their own traditions of origin for answers to fundamental questions of meaning and value. Christians, Jews, and secular modernists, for example, are engaging Buddhist doctrines of sunyata (emptiness) and pattica samupadda (dependent origination); socialist China is founding Confucius Institutes around the world as a way of projecting Chinese cultural authority; and everyone (but perhaps Islam especially) is still struggling with modernity. This creates a new situation and a new task for theology. Rather than justifying the credibility of and explaining the supernatural (revealed or mystical) wisdom of just one tradition, or merely interpreting sacred texts, theology is now being asked to explore fundamental questions in a way which takes into account the answers posed by the most diverse traditions. People in the West, when they ask “what, if anything, does it all mean?” for example, no longer just ask “Does God exist?” but also engage the Buddhist metaphysics of dependent origination which grounds meaning without God. People asking about the end to which humanity is ordered engage not only traditionally Western concepts of the beatific vision or modern Western ideas about civilizational progress, but also Hindu and Buddhist ideas about liberation, enlightenment, bodhisattvahood, and nirvana. Thus the need for a world theology. The emergence of such a theology does, however, face serious objections. The first of these comes from theologies which operate within particular religious traditions: theology, because it presupposes a supra-rational wisdom, whether revealed or acquired through meditation, can only operate within a religious tradition. Supra-rational claims are, by nature, incapable of rational adjudication, and may even be incommunicable. We have, to a very large extent, already addressed this objection by showing that Christian theology and the parallel discourses which emerged in other religious traditions already involve a confrontation and engagement between very different religious traditions. And while the way in which the relationship between faith and reason (or supra-rational prajna in the case of Buddhism and Hinduism) is handled differs significantly both between and within traditions, it is safe to say that in general any formulations which contradict reason are regarded as illegitimate (the exceptions being such early modern theologies as Asharism and Protestantism), and that there remains significant space for reason even in engaging truths which are, strictly,

10 indemonstrable. One may for example, be unable to demonstrate or refute the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is possible to make an argument for or against its credibility, to show that it adds to or detracts in some way from our understanding of God. But it is this privileging of reason even in the realm of the revealed and the supra-rational which leads to the second objection which will likely be raised against any proposed world theology: that it represents a triumph of just precisely the “globolatinization” against which the current revival of religious theory and practice is directed. As Carl Raschke explains

According to Derrida the “Latin” is the word for the West. The Latin is what overreaches with its sumptuous signatures of power and meaning; it is a perfection of the organizational, a vast economy of coding as well as a “reterritorialized” … system of administration necessary for the expansion of a planetary sociopolitical apparatus …

As in Old Rome, the notion of “religion” functions as an aggregate signifier for the “re- binding” (re-ligio) together of previously profuse and dissociated particularities of faith and devotion with their own indigenous or “territorial” characteristics into a grand ideology of “unity in diversity.18”

Against this,

The fundamentalist war machine is quintessentially a jihad of de-territorialized faith- nomads exploding, like the Islamic armies after the death of Mohammed, across the vast and crumbling empire of technoscientific rationality19.

John Milbank makes a similar claim (albeit from a very different theoretical orientation) when he argues that the current revival of religion represents a form of resistance to the “enclosure of the sacred” by capitalism, which he regards as a kind of Christian heresy, and calls for a renewed Catholicity which, he says, is ultimately incommunicable with other traditions20. A world theology, from this point of view, is simply a way for global Capital to immunize itself against the revolutionary claims of the new religious resistance. My answer to this objection is twofold. First, as we suggested in the forgoing analysis, contemporary fundamentalisms represent not an explosion of authentically premodern “archaic” or “indigenous” traditions, but rather a reassertion of early modern theologies centered on divine sovereignty. While such theologies are associated with a sort of resistance to globalization, this resistance is not anticapitalist. Rather, it reflects the position of those sectors of capital which are not benefiting from globalization (e.g. especially technological backward sectors such as the extractive industries) and which need to constrain global integration without empowering the working classes. A particularist spirituality of authority and submission does precisely this. Second, far from merely integrating diverse traditions into a singe ideology of “unity in diversity” in service of “technoscientific rationality,” the world theology which I am advocating would give a seat at the table to just precisely the sort of rationality which modernity has excluded: a rationality concerned with meaning and purpose, principles and values, rather than

18 Carl Raschke, “Derrida and the Return of Religion: Religious Theory after Postmodernism,” in Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory 6:2, 1-2 19 Raschke, “Derrida and the Return of Religion,” 3 20 John Milbank, “Geopolitical Theology,” unpublished paper accessed at http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers.php

11 just processes and means. It would help crate a new global public arena constituted by deliberation around fundamental questions of meaning and value. And this is the precondition for calling into question the global market allocation of resources, which depends precisely on an agnosticism regarding values. What will such a theology look like? Its agenda first of all, will be defined by the questions humanity itself is posing now, situated in the context of our ongoing conversation, as a species and as a cluster of civilizations, regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. What, if anything, can we know about fundamental questions of meaning and value? What is the role of reason? Revelation? Mysticism? Where does the universe come from? Is it ultimately meaningful? Is there a God? If so, what is God? If not, is there some other way to ground meaning (e.g. dependent origination) or is the universe meaningless? What does it mean to be human? What is human excellence? To what end (if any) are we ordered? How do we get there? What is a just society? What is the proper relationship between temporal and spiritual ends and the institutions responsible for them? The method of this theology will include, at the very least, the following elements:

1) a rigorous social analysis of the situation to which it is speaking, including ecological, technological, economic, political, and cultural factors,

2) an historical-critical and sociological analysis of the sacred texts and traditions relevant to the questions being addressed, and

3) the element of theological argument as such, i.e. of actually making and defending a judgment on the disputed question, and of answering objections.

This latter task involves the use of rational dialectics –the same method as that used by philosophy— with the exception of the fact that the standard of demonstration cannot be as high, because in many cases the questions posed and the principles invoked to answer them transcend the limits of human reason. It is unclear, for example, how one would demonstrate definitively the reality of a state (the beatific vision, for example) which if real is a possible object of experience, but which cannot be experienced by any of the partners to the discussion. In such cases what one hopes for is not definitive demonstration, but rather an argument that a given answer is more credible than the alternatives. What such a theology will do –in collaboration, of course, with philosophy-- is to make possible the creation of a public arena which is pluralistic and democratic, but which takes seriously –which indeed is constituted by deliberation around -- fundamental questions of meaning and value. Specifically, it will allow a pluralism which avoids both secularism, which pretends to banish such questions from the public arena, but in fact takes them as resolved by one or another version of the modernist ideal and plural fideism, which recognizes the persistence of such questions, but tries to restrict them to the private sphere, only to find them erupting inconveniently in the public arena when one or more traditions make claims about public life. Instead, a world theology will create a practice of deliberation around fundamental questions across traditions, at once taking for granted that meaning is contested and problematic, and allowing for the possibility of persuasion. Rejecting both the peace of submission and the “final solutions” which are constitutive of modernity, we acknowledge once and for all that a pluralistic and democratic society really is Dar-al-Harb (a house of war). And yet we seek Convivencia

12 none the less, fearlessly giving our ideological adversaries the aid and comfort of our arguments, while demanding that they give us the same. We recognize that it was in the gift of such arguments over nearly three millennia ago –in the crucible of intercultural encounters during the Axial Age and the Silk Road Era — that not only theology as a discipline but our religious traditions themselves were born. A world theology is, in this sense, simply an extension of the conversation which began theology in the first place, a conversation which started before faith and before reason as we have come to understand them and in the course of which faith and reason and the boundaries between them were defined. It is humanity’s conversation about itself and its world, about its arche and telos and about the problem of God. It is the ancient condition of a new era –that of a global humanity-- which has been emerging for a very, very long time.