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.
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.
