A contemporary scholar of Chinese
philosophy wrote, “myths often contain an element of historical truth, and what
passes for historical truth often has mythical elements.”[1]
By implication, not everything that seems to be historically valid in a
religious story is, for it is fair-game in that genre to assuage and even
invent “historical” events to make theological points. Lest it be thought that
histories are written objectively, it should not be forgotten that historical
accounts are written by human beings, and thus are subject to our limitations,
including bias. Nevertheless, religious stories, or myth, and historical
accounts are different genres of writing, and have very different purposes and criteria.
To conflate the two genres, or, moreover, any other domain with that of
religion, is to deny the uniqueness of religion (as well as that of other, even
related domains). Religion and ethics, for instance, are two, admittedly very
closely related, domains of human experience.
Ethics is the field concerned
with what a person should do, whereas religion goes beyond conduct to
include, and be based on, the experience of transcendence that goes beyond, or is
oriented to, beyondness. Religious mystics, such as Ramakrishna in the
1800s and Gertrude in a medieval monastery, would in all likelihood agree with
Pseudo-Dionysius’s claim that religion goes beyond the limits of human
cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). More precisely,
religion, while being in our world, transcends it and does so inherently.
Knowledge of the source, or infinite remainder, of religion inherently eludes
us finite, corporeal beings, whereas knowledge currently beyond our grasp in
domains such as politics, economics, the weather, and the other sciences can potentially
be known by us. This qualitative epistemological difference is just one way of
grasping why the domain of religion is unique, and thus warrants its own
criteria, rather than any overreaching from historians and scientists. To be
sure, the arrow goes both ways; distinctly religious criteria cannot legitimately
dominate in the fields of history and natural science. Such overreaching in
both directions has been the blight of religion especially in the last millennium
at least in Europe.
To be sure, certain other
domains are very closely related to that of religion. After all, five of the
Ten Commandments contain ethical content, albeit crucially of a divine command
rather than a human’s ethical theory. Recognizing that divine commands are not
bound in principle to our notions of conduct that is ethical (or unethical), as
Kierkegaard makes clear in Fear and Trembling in which Abraham’s
attempted religious sacrifice of Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of
attempted murder, it is legitimate to include religion in ethical analysis.
For example, whether knowledge
is of the transcendent sort or merely potential, it is important not to
overreach in what we think we know. This vice may be called epistemological
arrogance. In fact, to Confucius, “knowledge (zhi) is to know what one
knows and doesn’t know (2.17, 19.5). Such knowledge, in turn, enables one to
learn (xue) what one doesn’t know.”[2]
The arrogance in thinking one knows more than one does diminishes the knowledge
that a person can potentially acquire. Hence, Confucius states in Analects 9.8,
“The Master said, ‘Do I possess an all-knowing cognizance? I do not. If a
simple fellow asks me a question, my mind at first is a complete blank, and I
have to knock at both sides [of the question] until everything has been considered
[and some clarity begins to emerge].’”[3]
That is, Confucius (Kongzi) “did not think that he must be right; he was not
obdurate; he was not self-centered.”[4]
Intellectual humility is like a cup viewing itself as empty and thus as able to
be filled; additional knowledge must overflow from an already-full cup.
Such humility is especially
valuable when it is applied to knowledge in the religious domain, for to lapse
there into overreaching as if a person could be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing),
is to engage in self-idolatry. This is not so regarding knowledge in other
domains. Therefore, the method that Confucius urges for earthly knowledge in
those other domains pertains all the more when the human mind enters the domain
of religion. Incidentally, to project self-idolatry onto intellectual arrogance
in another domain is an example of religious criteria (and meaning) overreaching
at the expense of the native criteria (and meaning) of the other domains.
I contend that with respect to
religion, given the mind’s proclivity to overreach epistemologically (i.e.,
thinking one knows more than one does in a certain subject), it is prudent to
be ever vigilant in distinguishing religious
belief, which is compatible with faith, from knowledge of divine things, which excludes
faith and is ultimately self-contradictory because the essence of divinity is
inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. Analects
2.17 refers to a statement ostensibly made by Confucius himself: “The
Master said, ‘You [Zilu], do you know what I have been trying to teach you? To
say that you know something when you know it and to say that you do not know
something when you do not know it—this is true knowing[zhi].”[5]
To be able to say what one knows and admit what one does not (yet) know
is premised on knowing where the line between the two is. This in turn is
premised on valuing knowledge. In Analects 19.5, “Zixia said, ‘To be
aware each day of what you still don’t know and to remember after a month what
you were able to absorb—this is proof of your love for learning.’”[6]
A love of learning can be intuited by a person’s carefulness in making clear to
others the limits of one’s knowledge.
In the religious domain, all
that translates into resisting the temptation to presume to know not
only what God is in itself (i.e., the essence of divinity), but also what God
wants or wills and furthermore that God’s will must surely be behind some event
in the world. To know that God caused an earthquake, for instance, lies beyond
our ability to discern, and yet such overreaching has not been uncommon. To
know that it is God’s will that a close relative dies at a certain time is
similarly presumptuous, epistemologically, whereas to have faith, and
thus a belief, that the loved one is in a better place fits with the human
situs in the realm of religion. In stark contrast, to declare that the
person is in a better place is dogmatic, and may say more about the
psychology of the person making the statement than anything religious. Whereas a
person enunciating more about economics or politics than the person actually
knows is just pedantic, presuming to know that which lies beyond the limits of
human cognition, perspective, and emotions in principle is of a sort of
arrogance that is foisted by an utter self-contradiction: knowledge of that
which is inherently beyond the limits of human knowledge. In trying to be akin
to God, a human being flies too high and thus inevitably falls on one’s face. Humanity’s
grasp of what divinity actually is may be more misguided than we assume. How,
for example, is divine, theological love qualitatively different (i.e., unique)
from the garden-variety love evinced typically in our world? It is easy to draw
on psychology and metaphysics instead of looking below to a distinctly
theological sort of love. Augustine’s notion of caritas love in his Confessions
is soaked in emotion, and the Christian notion of divine agape love as
self-emptying love is typically thought of metaphysically rather than
distinctly theologically.
It is ironic that Confucius’s
epistemological ethic can be so useful in how a person can approach religion as
such. To be clear, in the Analects, Confucius is discussing knowledge
that a person can potentially have. Such knowledge is not of the transcendent;
in the religious domain, knowledge extends only so far and then belief must
take over. This does not mean that the method proposed by Confucius cannot be
used by people in discerning the limits of knowledge in matters of religion. The
human susceptibility to over-reach in such matters even though faith is tacitly
sacrificed in the process is so commonly exploited that more vigilance in
distinguishing what one knows from what one does not know is needed. Divine
revelation is by definition pristine, but it should not be forgotten that it
must go through our atmosphere—or as through a smoky, stained-glass window—to reach
us. Put another way, we are hardly pristine receptors, and yet we presume so to
be even as we implicitly import psychology and metaphysics in essentially
remaking divinity into something more familiar to the mind. David Hume’s The
Natural History of Religion gets at the anthropomorphism that the human
mind inevitably hangs on divine simplicity. For example, it is much more
difficult for us to grasp the Christian theological notion of the Logos than
its incarnation as a god-man because the latter is literally more familiar to
us than is God’s creative rationale in Creation. To transcend a familiar mask
of eternity—to use Joseph Campbell’s term—and be suspended in the mystery of
the transcendent that lies inherently beyond our reach (not to mention our human
form) is admittedly scary, but also so necessary to getting past religion in
human terms.[7]
2. Mary Sim, “Why Confucius’ Ethics is a Virtue Ethics,” The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed.s Michael A. Slote and Lorraine Besser-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2015), 63-76, p. 70.
3. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 133.
4. Analects 9.4, in Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 131.
5. Confucius, The Analects, trans. Annping Chin (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 20.
6. Ibid., p. 311.
7. This is essentially the thesis of my treatise, Godliness and Greed, which is published by Lexington Books. In my next book, God’s Gold, which unlike the first is written for a non-academic readership, I extend my thinking to how an anthropomorphic religion can be retained without the pitfalls of rendering the divine in so anthropomorphic terms.
