On Lord Krishna’s Self-Revealing in Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita

Even as much as divine entities reveal themselves to particular human beings, our finiteness cannot completely perceive or know such an entity as it really exists. Created as limited beings with limited perception and far from perfect knowledge, it is impossible for a deity’s self-revelation to be received by us mere mortals in its totality because we are not gods. Even if a divine eye were made available to us, as Lord Krishna does for Arjuna in the Hindu mythic tale, the Bhagavad Gita, our minds are finite and subjective rather than unlimited and objectively able to comprehend reality in itself.[1] Before discussing the Gita, I want to draw on a bhukti (devotional) poem very briefly to demonstrate that human perception and knowledge of the divine in the form of a personal deity only goes so far relative to a deity both not only in regard to it going beyond its form (or forms), but also just in terms of being able to grasp the form (or forms) in its completeness.

The Tantric Saundarya Lahari (Ocean of Beauty) “presents a goddess [Devi, Lord Shiva’s consort] who is unfathomably deep and of whom knowledge is precious and rare; yet She is nonetheless luminously visible . . . to those [worshippers who] are willing to gaze upon Her. Devi’s names and manifest form do not express adequately who She is, yet attention to appearances opens the way, now, to the deeper realities one seeks.”[2] One may seek them, but they must remain beyond; this is the religious instinct. The appearances merely open the way; they don’t get the devotee to the deeper reality of the deity. How could any visible appearance do justice to elucidating Devi, the goddess who is “Power itself, and the source of the power of other” deities?[3] Going further, ontologically, “She is the all-encompassing divine reality of which even [Shiva]—and even Herself in a smaller, imaginable form—are only parts.”[4] Hence, her existence itself can only even be imagined, as inhabiting a form, only so far. “She is transcendent and yet irresistibly approachable to devotees who wish to praise Her.”[5] Again, “She is transcendent and unimaginable, but She is also astonishingly nearby, a woman so beautiful that She satisfies those who behold Her.”[6] The unimaginability, which transcends forms, should not be minimized or overlooked even in the religious practitioner’s bhakti devotion of Shiva’s consort.

Moreover, symbol, myth and ritual can only go so far in bringing people to an experience or knowledge of the divine as it really is, ontologically speaking.[7] By implication, the notion in German idealist philosophy that reason can get us to things in themselves is farcical. After all, reason to Nietzsche is just another way in which instinctual urges manifest—reason and the passions being a false dichotomy.

There is more to a deity than meets the eye (source: Indiadivine.org)

That we can go only so far in religious transcendence is clear in the Hindu mythic tale, the Bhagavad-Gita, with which virtually every adult Hindu is familiar. In the myth, the deity Krishna under the guise of a charioteer reveals to Arguna, which means ignorance, not only the ethical teaching that a person should do the duty of one’s casted profession, but also how the deity really looks or is. Even in giving Arjuna a “divine eye,” however, Arjuna cannot “see” and know Krishna’s infinite existence in its completeness, both in terms of forms (suguna Brahman) and as reality and awareness themselves (nirguna Brahman).

To be sure, a religious practitioner can experience transcendence to some extent, and this can assuage suffering that we experience in our realm in our daily lives.  “For, the man whom these [pairs of opposites: heat and cold, pleasure and pain] do not distress, the wise one [for whom] pain and pleasure are the same, O Purusharshabha—he is fit for immortality.”[8] The translators of this passage of the Bhagavad-Gita point out in a footnote that immortality “here stands for spiritual liberation (moksha). As Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1948) remarks in his fine commentary on this verse: ‘Eternal life is different from survival of death which is given to every embodied being. It is the transcendence of life and death.’”[9] Indifference to whether pain or pleasure is being felt renders a person fit to transcend, and thus also be indifferent to life and death. Such a person is a seer-of-reality: that of “the nonexistent (asat) there is no coming-into-being; of the existent (sat) there is no disappearance.”[10] Such perception of the real paradoxically extends beyond the limits of regular human perception. Such a seer knows that no one “is able to accomplish the destruction” of “immutable (avyaya) [Reality].”[11] So, a person’s “eternal embodied [Self, atman]” can also be said to be “the Indestructible, the Incommensurable” in contrast to one’s finite body.[12] Therefore, the eternal Self (atman) “is not born nor [does it] ever die . . . This unborn, eternal, everlasting primordial [Self] is not slain when the body is slain.”[13] So it is but an illusion for Arjuna to think he is killing other Selves on the battlefield. Therefore, he should not be distraught, for as a person, after “discarding worn-out garments, seizes other, new ones, so does the embodied [Self], [after] discarding worn-out bodies, enter other, new ones.”[14] Hence, there is nothing immoral about helping a person along in this process on a battlefield. A transcendent perception gives rise to knowledge of the true nature of a person’s self, and both the perception and the cognition enable a person to view even civil war differently and thus not be distressed about being duty-bound to kill opposing soldiers. This transcendent-based rationale for doing one’s duty is qualitatively different than a justification that is wholly within our realm (i.e., not transcending it), such as, “You better kill the enemy before he kills you.” Such an appeal to self-love (and self-interest) is dependent on the illusion rather than seeing through it to grasp the real Self (atman) perceptually and cognitively.

However, if the real or true nature of a person’s eternal Self (atman) is actually beyond the limits of human perception and thought, as (pseudo) Dionysius might say, then a human “seer-of-reality” would not truly be able to perceive a person’s indestructible, and thus eternal, Self (atman). Lord Krishna, of course, tells Arjuna that it is possible for humans to perceive a person’s atman. We cannot conclude from this that human beings can see Vishnu as Krishna (and it is not vice versa) in the supreme Lord’s true existence.

For the “Blessed Lord” declares himself to be “unmanifest in form”[15] and to “move unrecognized in all beings.”[16] If the “omnipresent, whole, primordial, all-doing, all-seeing, all-knowing,” is indeed “the Seer-of-all, the Self-of-all, facing everywhere,” yet unmanifest in form and unrecognized in all beings, then the very notion of a “Seer-of-Reality” can only go so far.[17]  In other words, “the Blessed Lord” goes beyond the limits of human perception and cognition; only the Lord is the “Seer-of-all.”

Being embodied as Arjuna’s charioteer, Krishna tells the ignorant Arjuna, “Fools scorn Me in the human body [which I have] assumed, ignorant [as they are] of My higher state-of-existence: [as] the Great Lord of [all] beings.”[18] This is not to say that non-fools can see Krishna’s “higher state-of-existence,” for the infinite goes beyond the limits of finite beings. I submit that even people who, according to Krishna, can perceive the indestructability of all that exists, which includes a person’s Self (atman), and that that which does not exist cannot come into being, which the twentieth-century European philosopher Sartre also asserts, cannot perceive or know the god’s “higher state-of-existence” because it extends beyond the limits of human perception and cognition (i.e., ideas), as (pseudo) Dionysius claims of the Abrahamic deity.

So we can distinguish three levels of perception so far. A fool does not perceive the atman, or eternal Self, of another person, and thus is in distress about being duty-bound to kill a cousin on the field of battle. The seer of others’ respective Selves is not in such distress because the perception of the real nature of a person’s Self gives rise to the knowledge that the Selves of other people in an opposing army cannot be destroyed. Finally, there is perception of the Supreme Lord in its higher, or real, state-of-existence, which Krishna tells Arjuna is not possible for humans to have. This is not to leave Hindus with a negative theology wherein the deities are ineffable, which means that they cannot be perceived or known by humans.

Arjuna tells Krishna, “You are the Primordial God, the ancient Spirit (purusha).”[19] In the Rig Veda, most but not all of the primordial body of purusha is made into the world; there is thus more of that original human body writ large that is beyond our world and thus beyond our grasp.[20] So we can say that there is more of Krishna too than can be grasped in terms of stuff of our world.

Consider this distinction concerning what people can know of Krishna. “He who knows Me, the world’s Great Lord, as unborn and beginningless, is not bewildered among mortals, [but] is released from all sins.”[21] Yet not even “the hosts of gods nor the great seers know My origin. For I am the beginning of the gods and of the great seers (and of all other entities] everywhere.”[22] Even a seer faces a limit, beyond which knowledge on the Supreme Lord cannot go. It is one thing to know that the Great Lord does not have a beginning, and quite another thing to know the origin of that which is “the origin of all. From Me everything emerges.[23] Arjuna tells Krishna, “You are the supreme Brahman, supreme abode, supreme purifier, the eternal divine Spirit, primordial God, unborn, all-pervading.”[24] This does not mean that Arjuna can perceive the true or higher existence itself and the origin of Krishna as a bodily incarnation not only of Vishnu, but ultimately, when believed and worshipped as the Supreme God, of Brahman.

Also, there is a limit to how much of Krishna’s form and how any forms that humans, including Arjuna, can grasp. Arjuna admits to Krishna, “neither the gods nor the demons know [this] manifest [form of] Yours.”[25] And yet Arjuna later asks Krishna, “If, Lord, You think it possible for me to see that [form of Yours], O Lord of Yoga, then do reveal to me [Your] immutable Self,” to which Krishna replied, “behold My forms, [which are] a hundredfold, a thousandfold, of various kinds, many-colored and many-shaped.”[26] Even though Krishna tells Arjuna, “you will not be able to see Me with this your own [physical] eye. I will give you the divine eye,”[27] Krishna tells Arjuna, “there is no end to My extent”[28] and “(t)here is no to My divine powers-of-manifestation.”[29] Arjuna addresses Krishna at one point as, “O, [You of] infinite form.”[30] Even a divine eye can only see so much of Krishna’s manifestations, for “Very-difficult-to-see is this My form which you have seen. Even the gods are forever hankering after a glimpse of this form,” Krishna tells Arjuna.[31]  So even though “sees” Krishna as “(t)ouching the world-sky, flaming many-colored, [with] gaping mouths and flaming vast eyes, . . . seeing Your [many] mouths [studded with] gaping mouths and flaming vast eyes,” which can be said to be a manifestation/form of Krishna as a personal deity, and thus being classifiable under suguna Brahman, as distinct from formless nirguna Brahman, Arjuna cannot grasp any infinite form in its totality.[32]

It follows that Arjuna and the gods inferior to Krishna cannot perceive or know Krishna as nirguna Brahman itself, which is formless. Krishna says, “By Me, unmanifest in form, this entire universe was spread out.”[33] Later, Arjuna tells Krishna, “You are the Imperishable, existence and nonexistence and what is beyond that.”[34] In this sense, Krishna is formless, which goes beyond what Arjuna can see even with a divine eye, since even the gods can barely grasp Krishna manifesting  as a form that can be classified as suguna Brahman.

Arjuna demanding to know Krishna in its all of its real existence is in ignorance. Krishna could ask Arjuna the rhetorical question that Yahweh gives to Job, who “darkens counsel by words without knowledge,” when he demands of the supreme deity of the Hebrews why the deity has made Job, an innocent and righteous man albeit ignorant of God’s ways, suffer so.  Yahweh turns the table on Job, by demanding, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”[35] Similarly, Krishna as the Supreme deity could say to Arjuna, who demands that Krishna talk “without reservation” and “extensively” about his “powers-of-manifestation,”[36] How dare you presume to make such a demand! How could you, with your finite mind, grasp all of my powers by which I manifest Myself in the world?  “I am the beginning, the middle, and the end of [all] creations.”[37] To expatiate “extensively” and “without reservation” would be to go beyond the limits of Arjuna’s finite brain. A supreme deity goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotion).[38] Hence, Krishna points out that “(t)here is no end to My divine powers-of-manifestation,” so what he has “proclaimed about the extent of [His] powers-of-manifestation was by-way-of-example” rather than exhaustive.[39]

Also like Job, Arjuna repents to Krishna for having shown “disrespect”—in this case, in jest while Arjuna was “playing, reposing, sitting, or eating.”[40] Interestingly, when Arjuna says, “I beg Your pardon,” he also says that he has come to realize that the Supreme Lord (i.e., Krishna as Brahman) is “unfathomable.”[41] Arjuna has come to this realization because Krishna had just granted Arjuna’s request to see the Supreme Lord’s “lordly form” even though Arjuna addresses the deity as, “O Supreme Spirit,” as if spirit has a form.[42] In short, the lesson here is that even when the divine reveals itself completely (or in itself) to us, we cannot grasp that of the divine that lies beyond the finite limits of human perception and cognition (i.e., our ideas and ability to reason).

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1. Kant uses the expression, “things in themselves,” in contrast to appearances. Shankara also distinguishes reality from appearances.
2. Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and theVirgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 157. I question Clooney’s choice of luminous, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as “producing or reflecting bright light, especially in the dark,” because it connotes being able to see the goddess well, even though She is “unfathomably deep.” Perhaps numinous is a more fitting description of the visibility of the goddess, as such a light connotes or implies that more of the deity is beyond the visible picture or diagram, and thus is inherently mysterious in a religious (i.e., transcendent) sense.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 164.
5. Ibid., p. 157.
6. Ibid.
7. Once at an Easter Vigil liturgy, just after all the activity of the long-running rituals suddenly ended, I had the sense of the space itself vibrating visually. I was seated in the front row in a large church, so the activity was close to me, and my eyes had been riveted for more than an hour. I know that my eyes were just readjusting to the sudden absence of movement; even so, I had a sense almost by analogy of the relationship between ritual as prep for experiencing existence itself even of space itself as the outer shell of what the divine is like as it really exists. Put in terms of Hinduism, it was as if the long temporal duration of concentrated intentionality in the activity of ritual directed to a personal deity enabled attention at the end of the liturgy to focus on Brahman itself, though only by analogy because reality and awareness themselves, of the whole, are beyond the limits of human perception, cognition, and sensibility (i.e., feeling).
8. The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation, trans. Georg and Brenda Feuerstein (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), ch. 2.15, p. 97. 
9. Ibid., p. 97n22.
10. Ibid., ch. 2.16, p. 98. 
11. Ibid., ch. 2.17, p. 98. 
12. Ibid., ch. 2.18, p. 98. 
13. Ibid., ch. 2.20, p. 99.
14. Ibid., ch. 2.22, p. 99.
15. Ibid., ch. 9.4, p. 191.
16. Ibid., ch. 9.6, p. 193.
17. Ibid., ch. 9.5, p. 192
18. Ibid., ch. 9.11, p. 193.
19. Ibid., ch. 11.38, p. 237.
20. Francis X. Clooney relates purusa in the Rig Veda to Krishna extending beyond the world. Lecture, Harvard University, October 7, 2024. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
21. The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation, trans. Georg and Brenda Feuerstein (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), ch. 10.3, p. 203.
22. Ibid., ch. 10.2, p. 203.
23. Ibid., ch. 10.8, p. 205.
24. Ibid., ch. 10.12, p. 205.
25. Ibid., ch. 10.1, p. 207.
26. Ibid., ch. 11.4-5, p. 221.
27. Ibid., ch. 11.8, p. 223.
28. Ibid., ch. 10.19, p. 207.
29. Ibid., ch. 10.40, p. 219.
30. Ibid., ch. 11.38, p. 237.
31. Ibid., ch. 11.52, p. 244.
32. Ibid., ch. 11.24, p. 229.
33. Ibid., ch. 9.2, p. 191.
34. Ibid., ch. 11.37, p. 236.
35. Book of Job 38:4.
36. The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation, trans. Georg and Brenda Feuerstein (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), ch. 10.16 and 10:18, p. 207.
37. Ibid., ch. 10.32, p. 215.
38. Pseudo-Dionysius.
39. The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation, trans. Georg and Brenda Feuerstein (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), ch. 10.40, p. 219.
40. Ibid., ch. 11.42, p. 239.
41. Ibid., ch. 11:42, p. 239.
42. Ibid., ch. 11.3, p. 221.

On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

In the Book of Exodus, the anthropomorphism as a narrative device in myth is not problem-free, so it is important to emphasize the leitmotif of distance between God and humans. “Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”[1] God remembers, which is an interesting anthropomorphism considering that omniscience is a divine attribute. That God remembers the covenant seems to imply that God had not been paying attention when the “Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with hard service.”[2] So as to avoid the obvious incompatibility of omniscience and needing to remember, one commentator claims that the word, “’remember,’ when used with God as subject, typically means that God has determined to initiate action.”[3] But perhaps the two things—recalling and deciding—merely occur together (i.e., positively correlated) rather than mean the same thing even when applied to God as the subject. God is depicted nevertheless as being distant, moreover, looking upon the Israelites rather than being among them, and coming “down to deliver” the Israelites, which is a fundamental change from Genesis, where God is so close that God makes clothes for Adam and Eve once they realize they are naked.[4]

“What was God doing, during those years the Israelites suffered under the Egyptians?”[5] It is as if the hands-on deity had gone up to attend to other business, and turned back to the Israelites because their groans had reached a sufficient volume or intensity. Then God would be with Moses as he returns to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Alternatively, being omniscient and omnipotent, God may have been allowing the increased subjugation of the chosen people so they would experience their dependence on God, but the Israelites could not fathom this divine plan and thought instead that their god had been away. Such a divine plan is distinct from the infliction or permitting of suffering by God as punishment for the Israelites having violated the covenant. As one commentator admits, the Israelites in Egypt “are not accused of having done anything wrong.”[6] So the prophets’ association of the absence of God with “judgment for Israel’s sins” cannot apply here.[7] As in the Book of (righteous) Job, no “rationalization of the absence of God is ever attempted, but the issue,” according to one commentator, “is resolved by the coming of the God who saves.”[8] I disagree that the issue of God’s absence in the midst of undeserved suffering in the case of the Israelites in Egypt is resolved by the return of God, even if only in terms of God’s attention, for unlike Job, no wager calling for the slaves’ undeserved suffering to test their faith is mentioned in the text. In my view, the absence of God when the Israelites’ servitude was especially harsh is simply necessary for there to be the harshness, which in turn serves as the reason why leaving Egypt makes sense. God is anthropomorphized by the author here as God needing to remember, as a human does, for this narrative purpose. Were it the case as in Wisdom of Solomon that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them,”[9] then presumably there would be no need for the Israelites to leave Egypt, and thus for God to save them.

In Exodus 3, there is also distance, but here the reason is easily understood. God at the burning bush tells Moses, ”Come no closer! . . . for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”[10] Here it is not that God goes off as if on other business; rather, it is humanity that should maintain a distance from God out of respect for God’s inherent holiness. Indeed, as one commentator states, “’Holiness’ has been identified as the quality of divinity itself . . .”[11] The definitive quality in experiencing holiness as analyzed by Rudolf Otto in his book, The Idea of the Holy, can be understood to be the numinous quality in which a wholly other, or “supernatural,” presence is sensed or inferred in the immediate context of liminality, as if the person were momentarily suspended between two types of existence or fundamental modes of reality. This core of holiness goes beyond what we can grasp as rationality or moral goodness and even “defies language.”[12] To use the term, “supernatural,” for instance, does not do the phenomenon justice.

Furthermore, sensing of a numen in a liminal situation is more fundamental than are the qualities of being fascinated and terrified. The latter two can be considered to be reactions rather than as primary. Projected outwards, God can be said to be fascinating or angry, but more to the point is God’s transcendence tangent to our realm. Put another way, something holy has sufficient deep significance to be sensed as ontologically different, or “other,” in a fundamental way.  God is the very definition, referent, or epitome of holiness.

Mankind is already tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve by Exodus. Therefore, in Exodus, “Moses said to the Lord, ‘The people are not permitted to come up to Mount Sinai; for you yourself warned us, saying, ‘Set limits around the mountain and keep it holy.’”[13] So even though “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God,” they “took their stand at the foot of the mountain.”[14] Even the priests were to stand at that distance from God, who had “descended upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain.”[15] After God spoke to the people, who then said to Moses, “do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”[16] “Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.”[17] Although “God’s appearance on the mountain is . . . described as both frightening and attractive, daunting and fascinating,”[18] the thick darkness, itself ontologically significant next to daylight, as the experience of a full solar eclipse may intimate to a degree, suggests the liminal presence of a numen—that something that is fundamentally other than ordinary is now present in our world.

Drawing on Otto’s terminology, the mysterium experienced from the sense of a transcendent, numinous presence can be understood to be more fundamental than the tremendum (terrifying, as daunting, as distinct from simply being afraid[19]) and fascinans (fascinating) qualities of a religious experience of the holy. Including the presence of mystery is perhaps just another way of saying that a religious experience, unlike experiences in other domains such as science, politics, and even ethics, go beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. In this way, Otto can be situated with the Christian theologian of the sixth century, (Pseudo) Dionysius.

One implication of the Otto-Dionysius “synthesis” or “nexus” is that even the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible falls short, as evinced in the Book of Job. Job’s “friends,” who insist rather harshly that Job must have been impious to suffer so, invite Yahweh’s anger, for in the “repeated attempts to reinterpret Job’s situation against all appearances in accordance with [Wisdom] teaching, they demonstrate that the attempt to interpret human fate according to fixed rules can become deeply inhuman.”[20] Initially sympathetic, lying on the dirt with Job for seven days, the “friends” essentially kick the guy when he’s down because they think they know God by building “entirely on the [Wisdom] teaching and its infallibility.[21] Thus, “God’s wrath burns against [Job’s friends] because,” God says, they have “’not spoken of me what is right.’”[22] God says to Eliphaz the Temanite, “’My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’”[23] Job’s three “friends” must “seek atonement” by performing a sacrifice to God; paradoxically, the “friends” “have to rely on Job’s petition on their behalf.”[24]

In contrast, Job does not try to “force God’s actions into any kind of theory,” then he recognizes the inappropriateness of his attitude after a dressing-down by God.[25] Job tells God, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in  dust and ashes.”[26] Job’s realization and repentance tells us that God’s initial claim that Job is a righteous man is correct after all. Job is blameless, not perfect, for he calls “God to account, indeed even accusing him” at one point, but he does so without the assumption of infallibility because, unlike his friends, questions the traditional human teaching that a “recognizable link” exists between what a person does and how much one suffers.[27] God rightly applies blame instead to Job’s self-righteous “friends,” for they have spoken of God without understanding, as they presumed that they could not be wrong about that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought and thus of theories. Humans cannot “understand God’s actions in terms of comprehensible and manageable rules.”[28] Faith seeking understanding should not put the cart before the horse, lest Aristotle’s notion of misordered concupiscence—putting a lower good above a higher one—apply.

Admittedly, it is tempting to stop at the anthropomorphist language of myth, or even to take that language literally, but God as wholly other necessitates mystery that goes with the inherent distance between us and a transcendent referent. Throughout the natural history of religion, the human proclivity to fixate on divine attributes at the expense of the distant mysterium of the divine, which relativizes even viewing it as a being (beings as entities being familiar to us in our realm), can at some point in a person’s experience of the divine compromise the sense of mystery and distance itself in yearning for that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought, senses, and feelings. It is thus important to keep in mind God’s command to stay off the mountain and the quality of mysterium in Otto’s theory, which, as a mere theory, does not exhaust God’s ways.

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1. Ex 2:23-25
2. Ex 1:13-14
3. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):5.
4. The quoted text is from Exodus 3:8.
5. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):4.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. 3:1
10. Ex 3:5
11. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):26.
12. Ibid., p. 31.
13. Ex. 14:23
14. Ex. 14:17
15. Ex 14:20, italics added.
16. Ex 20:19
17. Ex 20:21
18. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):28.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
21. Ibid., italics added. Ignorance that presumes that it cannot be wrong evinces the arrogance of false entitlement, as if the creature were above its Creator.
22. Ibid., p. 354. God’s statement is in Job 42:7.
23. Job 42:7.
24. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
25. Ibid.
26. Job 42:5-6.
27. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
28. Ibid., p. 357.

Hinduism and Judaism on Deities and Transcendence

A basic tenet of the Advaita (non-dualist) Hindu philosophy of Shankara holds, “If saguna points to brahman’s immanence, nirguna points to brahman’s transcendence. . . . superiority should not be accorded to the nirguna mode of discourse.”[1] Being a non-dualist, Shankara held that brahman is one, since reality or existence is unitary, and thus brahman as existence and reality of all is indivisible ontologically. Applying David Hume’s separability thesis from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the distinction between nirguna and saguna can be understood as one made only by human reason, which does not mean that nirguna and saguna are separate entities. In short, we make the distinction; it does not belong to brahman itself. Lest it be thought that nirguna brahman has no analogue in Western philosophy of religion, we need only bring in Spinoza, whose nirguna-like God is so different from the saguna-comparable Abrahamic personal deity that both Judaism and Christianity banished his texts; Judaism excommunicated him. The tremendous qualitative difference between saguna and nirguna brahman can be useful to anyone trying to understand why Judaism excommunicated Spinoza, which is not my task here. Rather, taking nirguna brahman as reality or existence of everything, which, like Spinoza’s notion of God, itself has awareness, I want to stress both how much this differs in kind (i.e., qualitatively) from both Hindu deities and the Abrahamic deity, and the more fundamental point that brahman is One. In spite of the qualitative difference, keeping the Hindu concept of nirguna brahman in mind while thinking about the personal deities that are consistent with saguna brahman is useful.

Nirguna brahman is simply unrecognizable as God in the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity and Islam), whose deity is personal (i.e., an intelligent being), and thus can be classified under saguna brahman. Yet as Hume points out in his Natural History of Religion, anthromorphism (i.e., applying human qualities onto non-human entities) applied to the original idea of divine simplicity says more about us than the divine. Hence saguna is not sufficient to account for transcendence. As Dionysius wrote, God (or the divine) goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (emotion). Nirguna brahman is a concept that meets this need—if there is such a human instinct for transcendence as defined by Dionysius, while saguna satisfies the desire of the human mind, as postulated by Hume, to comprehend things that have at least some degree of likeness to ideas (from sense impressions, according to Hume) that are already in the human mind.  I first discuss the transcendence of nirguna brahman, which bringing in Spinoza will facilitate, after which I consider saguna brahman by looking at creation and, related, the word “God.”

The Taittiriya Upanishad twice (2.4.1 and 2.9.1) “describes brahman as that from which all words, with the mind, return, having failed to reach. Even the Vedas, in speaking about brahman, are constrained to use conventional words derived from everyday usage and, since these emerge from our experiences of finitude, they can never directly signify brahman. . . . Words are mere pointers to that which is beyond the meaning of all words and definitions.”[2] This is vintage Dionysius on God going beyond human ideas. The orientation is to beyond, or beyondness itself, rather than to what is familiar. As Hume writes, the human brain has a lot of trouble holding onto something like sheer beyondness, and it is difficult to yearn experientially for a naked beyond sans even the distinction between substance and attributes (or accidents). Hence the human need for saguna brahman in Hindu philosophy and a personal God in the Abrahamic religions. Nevertheless, nirguna brahman even as a transcendence-oriented concept can help us to keep saguna brahman and the Abrahamic deity from becoming human, all too human.

Reflecting on saguna brahman and the Abrahamic deity with nirguna brahman in mind can highlight the qualitative difference between gods and mere mortals. “To posit omnipotence as an attribute of brahman . . . does not mean that brahman possess (sic) the attribute of omnipotence in the same way that a lotus has the color blue as its attribute. The act of creation and being in relation to the creation does not alter the unity of brahman’s nature.”[3] Indeed, nirguna brahman transcends substance and attributes altogether. So rather than stipulating the law of karma from past lives as Shankara does to obviate the problem of evil, or limiting God’s omnipotence to that which is logically possible as Aquinas does, treating brahman’s omnipotence as qualitatively different than what it means for a human to have an attribute, and thus power in this case, may be sufficient to solve the problem of evil, at least in the case of Hinduism. Brahman’s holding of an attribute is, in other words, “wholly other,” and thus we cannot say using language that an all-powerful brahman is responsible for evil and thus is not good.

We can draw on the notion of nirguna brahman even in the West because the notion exists in Western philosophy of religion, even if in apparent opposition to the dominant conception of the divine as a personal deity. “The essential nature of brahman is indicated by the words satyam (reality), jnanam (awareness), and anantam (infinite).”[4] This is how Spinoza describes God as “reality or nature,” by which he means everything that exists. As God is a mode, according to Spinoza’s philosophy, God has awareness, but God is not a personal deity, as that would reek of anthropomorphism, and Spinoza was no fan of humanism in spite of the fact that his Jewish congregation and the Catholic Church excoriated him for being an atheist. Similarly, Nietzsche has been wrongfully accused of the same thing, even though he was pointing out the internal contradiction in a particular conception of God (i.e., Abrahamic). At any rate, Spinoza’s conception of God is in sync with distinguishing nirguna brahman from saguna brahman, in that the latter represents specific deities but without any doctrine of creation. Spinoza would agree that “the attribution of creatorship to brahman is limiting and defective. The world is also devalued when it is regarded as the product of a nonessential nature of brahman.”[5]

For Spinoza, God is not apart from the world (i.e., all that exists/nature), but is the entire world. Thus, he has been said to be a pantheist. Similarly, the original body, prior to the creation even of the gods, of purusa merges pre-creation materiality with the divine, though later Shiva and Vishnu were said to be purusa (i.e., the original body, out of which the multiplicity in the world comes).   Spinoza’s God is of course not a personal deity, as such a conception of the divine is anthropomorphic.  

Spinoza’s claim that redemption from suffering is like a person realizing, by reasoning, that one is not a specific wave, but instead the entire ocean, which analogously represents the whole of nature, or reality, and thus God. This is very similar to saying that atman is essentially brahman. The entire ocean has awareness, and is everything, and is not created, so Spinoza can once again be interpreted as viewing the God as being like nirguna brahman.

Keeping nirguna brahman in mind, we can hedge against excessive likeness of even saguna brahman to us. The suggestion in the Taittiriya Upanishad (3.6.1) is that brahman chooses to create the world from the limitless bliss-nature (ananda) of brahman, an “outpouring of the fullness of brahman and not an act motivated by any sense of incompleteness.”[6] Shankara “does admit the fact of desire on the part of brahman.”[7] But the desire does not presuppose or come out of a lack of something in brahman. Shankara writes, “What then are these (desires of brahman)? They are by nature truth and knowledge, and they are pure by virtue of their identity with brahman.”[8] Thus, the desires are not like ours, as that which we desire is not identical with us, but, rather, is external and extrinsic to us. Even the notion of the purpose or telos of brahman is qualitatively different than what it is for a human being to have a purpose. “While being cognizant of the limits of reasoning and the inadequacies of analogies, it is not impossible, with the aid of the Upanishads, to glimpse the significance of brahman’s desire to share its plenitude through self-multiplication. The desire for meaning, as numerous personal stories in the Upanishads reveal, is fundamental to the human being. The meaning of human existence, however, cannot be understood apart from the purpose of the one who brought all things into being.”[9] The one here must be saguna brahman, whose purposes include creation.

Unlike in the Abrahamic religions, the world is not “fallen” in the Hindu creation myths. “If the world . . . is seen positively as the outcome of the intentional creativity of brahman, expressing and sharing the fullness of brahman, the world does not have to be negated or rejected.”[10] Christianity comes to this only by the sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ on the Cross; creation is redeemed, or restored, to a right relationship with God.

Also unlike case of the Abrahamic deity, God, Hindu creation is not ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing), for purusa already exists to be cut up as a sacrifice that gives rise to the world and the gods as we know and experience them. However, the fact that the repeated phrase, “And God said,” which immediately precedes God distinguishing or separating things, does not precede the earth as “a formless void,” which is not empty but is of “waters,”[11] may suggest that Yahweh distinguishes things rather than creates ontologically ex nihilo. That is, the message may be like that of Wittgenstein, wherein naming or stating is crucial to classifying something as something (and as distinct, or separate ontologically) from something else. It follows that the name of God is very important, even ontologically. That is to say, the word, “God,” is, according to Karl Rahner, “itself a reality” because the word “asks about reality as a whole and in its original ground.”[12] By implication, the word and its unique reality are qualitatively different from all other words and the sort of reality that they have. Just look at the salience of God’s name in the following passages from the Hebrew Bible:

“(A)ll the people of the earth will know your name.” (1 Kgs 8.43) According to Rendtorff, this means that “(t)o know the name of God means to acknowledge God himself.”[13] “Swearing by the name of YHWH is also an act of confession: ‘Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name’ (Deut 6:13; 10.20).”[14] In Deuteronomy, “there is repeated discussion of the ‘place which the LORD will choose to let his name dwell.’”[15] “Here God will be present in his name.”[16] Deuteronomy “makes it clear that the prime concern is not with where God ‘lives,’ but with the presence of the divine name.”[17] I submit that this takes the significance of language too far, which I think Wittgenstein does too in claiming that there is no pre-classification awareness of something as a something prior to it having a name. I submit that God’s attributes, such as omnibenevolence and omnipotence, are more critical than God’s name, for, as Rendtorff points out, there are four names for God in the Hebrew Bible, and the name of something simply points to it, whereas the qualities and character of something are interior and inherent. Again, recalling nirsuna brahman is helpful; that brahman transcends and thus relativizes substance and attribute (or, peripatetically, accident) suggests just how integral the attributes of any personal deity that can be classified under saguna brahman are to the divine nature. Bringing in Dionysius, if God goes beyond the limits of human cognition, then God goes beyond words, and thus names. In other words, transcendent reality transcends the unique reality of the Abrahamic God’s name.

So, we can and should go beyond the Biblical statements, “We trust in your holy name” (Ps 106.21) “whose name is holy.” (Isa 57.15) Rendtorff makes the crucial point that, “But above all it is God himself who hallows his name.”[18] God’s name is holy because God is holy, not vice versa. Holiness is not based on the name of a god, and ultimately not even in a god’s qualities or attributes, but, rather, on that which any word for “God” (as per saguna brahman) points to, which in turn is ontologically not limited to human experience, cognition, perception, and emotion. If there is a human instinctual urge, or even attraction, to think beyond thought and yearn or reach beyond even reality or existence, then the momentum of secularity in modernity must be more a rejection of hollow or worn-out institutional religion than a permanent shift away from religion per se. Even the atheist David Hume posited such an enduring urge of the mind to behold divine simplicity, which our minds muck up by anthropomorphizing that which is transcendent into something familiar, and thus, human, all too human.

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1. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 90.
2. Ibid., p. 89.
3. Ibid., p. 90.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pp. 92-3.
7. Ibid., p. 93. See Taittiriya Upanishad (2.6.1).
8. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 95. 
9. Ibid., p. 97.
10. Ibid.
11. Gen. 1:1-3.
12. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, William V. Dych, trans. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978): 49-50.
13. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005): 592.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 594.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 593.

Religious Transcendence

I contend that the core of religion is its quality of transcendence beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion. This is not to say that nothing may be said of the divine, but that the stuff of our realm does not exhaust the mystery. We can’t have God utterly figured out, for it would be impious of creatures of finite knowledge to presume such knowledge that would fill up the dark hole of absolute mystery. I turn to the Christian theologian, Karl Rahner, and to the Hindu Rigveda to support this point, which is valid, I submit, for anything that is (or can be counted as) a religion.

In chapter two of Foundations of Christian Faith, Karl Rahner reflects on “that transcendental experience in which a person comes into the presence of the absolute mystery which we call ‘God,’ an experience which is more primary than reflection and cannot be recaptured completely by reflection.”[1] In other words, the theologian reflects on a human experience that is more primary than reflection. Similarly, he claims that the word, God, “is itself a reality,” which, unlike the word itself, is presumably beyond reflection.[2] Borrowing from Pseudo-Dionysius, we could say that both the transcendental experience and the metaphysically real referent of the word God go beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotion). The key here is go beyond, which is different than “is entirely beyond.” So we can hang what Hume refers to as anthropomorphic ornaments on the experience and reality, which thus need not be utterly ineffable. Both the experience and the reality go beyond our reflections, and thus our words, and this should situate our attempts to provide descriptors such that we do not take them as absolute and exhaustive. Even divine revelation, Augustine writes, arrives in our realm as through a darkened window. Hence, a person having a transcendental experience comes into the presence of absolute mystery—a point that Hegel seems to relegate under the presumed clarity of revelation. To the Christian, according to Hegel, the proclamation “God is dead” means that “the truths of faith are not in heaven but fully revealed in and for the finite world.”[3]  That is, the content of Christianity “is that God is revealed to human beings, that they know what God is.”[4] Augustine’s darkened window is assumed to be transparent, as if the taint of the fall had no impact on our reception of revelation. Dionysius’ “goes beyond” is utterly ignored. In short, Hegel risks idealizing our realm and extirpating the continuance of absolute mystery.

I submit that the inclusion of a transcendent referent even though it inherently goes beyond the limits of our cognitions, perceptions, and sensibilities is essential to the domain of religion and renders it sui generis, and thus properly subject to its own criteria, rather than those of history, ethics, or science. This is the thesis of one of my research projects. I submit that transcendence as “going beyond” is present not just in Christianity, but in Hinduism as well. For instance, “going beyond” is depicted in X.90 of the Rigveda in the person of Purusa in the following verses:[5]

“Having covered the earth on all sides, he extended ten fingers’ breadth beyond.” (v. 1)

“he is master of immortality when he climbs beyond (this world) through food.” (v. 2)

“So much is his greatness, but the Man is more than this: a quarter of him is all living beings; three quarters are the immortal in heaven.” (v. 3)

“Upon his birth, he reached beyond the earth from behind and also from in front.” (v. 5)

“From his head the heaven developed.” (v. 14)

According to Jamison and Brereton, the “ten fingers’ breadth” by which Purusa “exceeds the world measures from the Man’s hairline to his mouth” and is thus of “the imperceptible world of thought.”[6] Also beyond the world lie immortality (v. 2) and heaven (v. 3). Indeed, heaven developed from his head (v. 14). This ethereal beyondness lies beyond our realm, or world, and thus beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility. In the cosmological myth of the primordial Purusa, a transcendental experience can thus be associated with the nature of Man—in particular, with our mind—what Feuerbach would say is simply human nature. But as coming from the mind, the experience may be construed as being of thought, rather than going beyond the limits of cognition as Dionysius claims. If so, going beyond the world in the Rigveda (X.90) is not as transcendent. Thus it may be asked whether the absoluteness of mystery is eclipsed. If so, it would not necessarily be as compromised as in the case of Hegel’s view the human capacity for knowledge of God, for beyondness itself is salient in Rigveda X.90. That is to say, what is beyond the world is specified only to a limited extent (e.g., heaven, immortality). Yet it is presumably from thought—the area between the hairline and the mouth. Thought may begin us on the road to a transcendental experience (and notion of the divine), but the key lies in being willing to go beyond thought into the presence of absolute mystery. 

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1. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, William V. Dych, trans. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), p. 44.
2. Ibid., p. 50.
3. Jeffrey Kosky, “The Birth of the Modern Philosophy of Religion and the Death of Transcendence.” Pp. 13-29 in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond. Regina Schwartz, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004): 22.
4. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, p. 130.
5. The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Vol. 3, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P Brereton, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 1549-550.  Bold added.

[6] Ibid., p. 1538.

Pope Francis on Families and the Environment

On a trip to Indonesia in early September, 2024, Pope Francis signed a declaration on religious harmony and environmental protection at the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta with the mosque’s grand imam. The Pope said that our species was facing a “serious crisis” bought about by war and the destruction of the environment.[1] Of war, the tremendous destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and Gaza that had been taking place was doubtless on the cleric’s mind. Of the environment, climate change was undoubtedly on his mind. In addition to volcanoes and wild fires, human emissions of carbon into the atmosphere were poised to push the global temperature increase above the critical threshold of 2.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial level. What connects the two problems at the root—the source of the two problems—went unmentioned. In fact, the Pope made a statement that, if acted upon, stood to exacerbate the underlying problem: the exponential explosion of growth of the human population in the twentieth century.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus’ book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, was published. In demonstrating that it is possible for a species’ population to increase beyond the capacity of a species’ food supply, Malthus single-handedly dealt a blow to the “argument from design,” which maintains that the design in Nature implies a designer, and thus the existence of God as an intelligent being. An inherently flawed design found in nature would destroy this “proof” of God’s existence, for an omniscient, perfect being would not create a flawed design. As of the year of the Pope’s visit to Indonesia, the population of the human species, roughly 8.3 billion, had not (yet) outstripped the sprcies's food supply on a global level, but humanity's imprint was clearly already making more than a dent on the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. Malthus predicted not only the possibility of famine and disease from over-population, but also increased conflict, and the two world wars of the twentieth century could have been manifestations of growth pains. After all, Hitler wanted more land to the east for the Germans. 

With further increases in population in the twenty first century, not only even more conflict, but also famine and pandemics could occur. As of 2024, climate change was arguably the most dire consequence from the tremendous growth of humanity’s presence on the planet during the prior century. As biological organisms, we cannot help but consume energy. More people means more energy is needed, and other things equal, more pollution is one result. To be sure, pollution abatement technology has helped, but the sheer scale of population has eclipsed such incremental measures to reduce pollution.  In terms of “clean” energy, the increase in global energy consumption in 2023 was greater than the increased “clean” energy, so at the end of that year we were more, not less, dependent on fossil fuels. Clearly, technology’s salvific role would be in the long-term rather than right away. In the meantime, humanity could do worse than focus on the source of the environmental problem.

By worse, I have in mind the Pope’s praise of Indonesians “for having large families with up to five children. ‘Keep it up, you’re an example for everyone, for all the countries that maybe, and this might sound funny, (where) these families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child,’ he said.”[2] Perhaps if more families had one or two children and a dog, the population of our species would be more manageable and more in line with the natural constraints of our planet. Like technology’s role, managing the species’ population in a responsible way is a long-term project. Least of all should we hope for a massive pandemic or war that would decimate the population, as happened in the fourteenth century in Europe during the Black Death (and before then in China). Making sure there are enough workers to support the elderly is but one reason why quick, radical solutions are unwise. 

But it is also unwise to preach in favor of larger families. Indeed, such preachments stray from the domain of religion. Put another way, expertise in theology does not include expertise in human ecology. I submit that what makes religion distinct, or sui generis, is precisely its transcendent element, which goes beyond our earthly realm. Pseudo-Dionysius of the 6^th century describes religious transcendence as going beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion). Put another way, religious belief, faith, and experience includes a yearning for that which lies beyond. This core of religiosity should have been the Pope’s concern or focus, rather than family planning. He was on firmer ground during his trip in saying that people from different religions are “all brothers, all pilgrims, all on our way to God, beyond what differentiates us.”[3] The latter is what Augustine refers to as earthly matters, whereas being on our way to God intimates transcendence beyond our everyday world. The pope was right to emphasize the transcendence—the shared experience of unifies us all as creatures with an aptitude for transcendence in a distinctly religious sense. To put the matter crassly, if we all push out as many babies as we can, and with medical science exponentially increasing the human lifespan, chances will be greater that there won’t be a habitable planet for people to live in and thus be able to experience transcendence. To borrow a phrase from The Search for Excellence, a business book written in the 1980s, clerics would be wise to “stick to the knitting” rather than try to pontificate on other domains.

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1, Joel Guinto, “Pope and Top Indonesian Imam Make Joint Call for Peace,” BBC.com, September 5, 2024.
2, Ibid.
3, Ibid.

Religion in Film: Resisting the Formulaic

Historically, meaning in the history of cinema, perhaps too much effort or attention initially went into fidelity to doctrine, especially in Christianity. Heavily stylistic, unrealistic epics could be said to merely illustrate doctrines. Then as filmmakers began to think in an open-ended way concerning how to depict the transcendent both visually and ideationally (i.e., as an idea), the dominance of the earlier control-orientation slipped away to be replaced by innovative ways of understanding how the transcendent may relate to the realm of our daily mundane existence in the world. The extraordinary potential of filmmaking to tap into the human imagination without necessarily providing definitive answerers could be seen. I submit that this historical trajectory is a positive development. This does not mean that heterodox belief has or should win out; in fact, religious practitioners, including the clergy, can help filmmakers to depict the transcendent and its relationship to our existence in novel ways that do not seem so formulaic as to be easily brushed aside as less than credible. Old wine can indeed go into new jugs, and even new wine may be tasted without the world collapsing as a result.

The full essay is at "Religion in Film."

The Holy Grail: Artifact or Superstition?

Relics are nothing new to religion, whose legitimacy used to be synonymous with being ancient, which is one reason why the ancient Romans did not consider the nascent Jesus Movement to be a religion. The cup that Jesus uses in the Last Supper in Gospels is right up there with pieces of the wood cross of the Crucifixion as the most holy of relics in Christianity. “In Europe alone, there are said to be around 200 cups, each thought to be the Holy Grail—the cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.”[1] They can’t all be THE cup, but I bet if you visited each place, the partisans would insist that their cup is genuine. For example, the website of the cathedral at Valencia, in eastern Spain, proclaims regarding the cup there, “Tradition reveals that it is the same cup that the Lord used at the Last Supper for the Institution of the Eucharist.”[2] Never mind that medieval legend had it that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the Holy Grail near Glastonbury Tor in southern England shortly after Jesus’ death. That would be quite a distance to travel back them to deliver a cup. These two cannot both be right, yet Christians have prayed in both places as if the cup in each place were genuine. That people have gotten carried away with the super relic through history seems clear from “the fact that, over the centuries, legends have arisen of ‘grails’ producing miracles.”[3] That miracles have been said to arise from more than one of the cups ought to be a red flag that something is amiss, for only one cup could possibly be genuine and so miracles could not have come by means of proximity to the other cups. I submit that basic category mistakes regarding genres of meaning (and writing) are a big part of the problem as to why a presumed historical artifact has given rise to puerile superstition in the name of religious truth.

One scholar of religious studies, Joanne Pierce, is realistic in saying, “I honestly do not think that the actual cup from the Last Supper still exists.”[4] In fact, Pierce elaborates that because according to some Gospel accounts, the room was already prepared before Jesus and his disciples arrived, the cup used may not have even belonged to them. I submit that Pierce is conflating historical accounts and faith narratives—two very different, albeit related—genres of writing. That some of the Gospels have the room already prepared is itself an indication that we should not assume that the room actually was prepared beforehand.

Moreover, a faith narrative is not written as a historical account; the concerns of the writers would have been theological rather than to make empirical reports or accounts, especially as the Gospels were written many decades after the Crucifixion. Is it really likely that, for theological purposes, a detail such as how or whether the room was prepared would have been preserved in notes or orally? Pierce gets around this problem by stating that “the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic—in her words, ‘a cultural reality rather than a religious reality.’”[5] We are no longer concerned with the relationship of empirical history and faith narrative; the idea of the cup is what matters, and that isn’t even religious.

I think Pierce is wrong to jettison the religious meaning of the cup, even as an idea, because of the salvific significance at least in Roman Catholicism of the Eucharist in the gradual process of sanctification. Given the theological doctrine of transubstantiation—the real presence of Christ in bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ—in Catholicism, it is interesting that, “(f)or Pierce, a Catholic, the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic.”[6] Zwingli, the Swiss reformer for whom the Eucharist is only symbolic, would be more likely than the Pope to agree.

Essentially, my argument is that faith narratives are neither historical accounts nor just cultural ideas; rather, the distinctive meaning in a faith narrative such as one of the Gospels is religious. It is felt proximity to religious meaning that is important—not whether a given cup was actually used by Jesus in a historical or empirical sense. To conflate the religious and empirical is to engage in superstition, as evinced by the attribution of miracles from Jesus’ historical use of a cup. Put another way, the religious significance of the Last Supper, which is Jesus being willing to follow his Father’s will in sacrificing his life for humanity, does not come down to the trite contention of which cup Jesus actually used. “It was just a cup,” Jesus might say; “You’re missing the point.” In other words, too much attention to the means can obstruct the ends being served by the means. 

Regarding the famous cup, the distinction between artifact and superstition can be transcended, perhaps even in a Hegelian sense of solving dialectics through human history, by focusing instead on distinctly religious meaning. In other words, perhaps superstition results from mistaking historical artifact for religious truth. This is not to say that the latter cannot come through history; only that if or when the transcendent does manifest on the surface of history, a faith narrative still cannot be taken for a historical account. To focus on the historical as if it were the point would be to miss the distinctly religious point, for the validity of religious meaning does not depend on the criteria of any other domain.

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1 Julia Buckley, “They All Say They’ve Got the Holy Grail. So Who’s Right?” CNN.com, August 17, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.