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.