Renunciation vs. Dutiful Action in Hinduism

Hegel looked at human history as developing through dialectics resolved at a more advanced point in a trajectory of expanding human freedom. It may be in the history of religion that less superstition evinces an evolution of a different sort. The monotheism of the Abrahamic religions came out of a polytheistic context, but it is a more difficult matter to claim that monotheism represents a development of human religion historically because polytheism has continued. Even though some contemporary interpreters of Hinduism’s main text, the Bhagavad-Gita, claim erroneously that the god Krishna being the supreme deity in that text means that it is monotheist even though in that text, Krishna himself acknowledges that people pray to other gods and goddesses that exist. Rather than maintain that monotheism is an advancement on polytheism, I submit that conceptual contradictions between contending religious claims in any religion can be surmounted, as transcended, though with the caveat that in polytheism, contradictions have a firmer grounding even though they too are to be transcended if religion itself is permitted to evolve.

In chapter 5 of the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that dispassionate action is superior to renunciation: “the Karma-Yoga is better than (mere) renunciation of action.”[1] In the next chapter, Krishna essentially redefines renunciation as the action of a person “who performs the action to be done, regardless of action’s fruit.” Such a person is “a renouncer and a yogin.” In contrast, a person who “is inactive” is not a renouncer.[2] In short, action (which is not motivated by its consequences) rather than inaction is renunciation. This flips the concept on its head. In the Gita, Lord Krishna wants Arjuna to fight rather than to renounce fighting relatives in the civil war, so the deity simply redefines renunciation to hinge on motive or intention rather than conduct (or lack thereof). In the Christian Gospels, Jesus says something similar regarding lusting itself rather than only actually having sex outside of marriage. Such an interiorization of religion may be a step in the evolution of that domain such that intention, not only what a person does, matters.

Lord Krishna’s conceptualization of renunciation conflicts with the conception of the word in Advaita philosophy, in which renunciation means abstaining from as much action as possible; meditation, rather than performing dutiful action even in battle is Shankara’s preference. To that famous Advaitan philosopher and theologian, Brahman, which is infinite being, is more ultimate than is any deity, including Krishna in the Gita. So, Shankara advocates meditating on Brahman rather than bhukti devotionalism to Krishna. Both regarding the different conceptions of renunciation and whether ultimacy is infinite being or a Supreme Person (e.g., Krishna in the Gita), compromise is elusive and perhaps impossible. That different strains of thought and even conflicting claims exist in a religion is difficult for us to accept even if the history of a given religion shows us how the differences arose. If Brahman is one, as both Shankara and Schopenhauer affirm in their respective writings, and if the existence of several deities in a polytheistic religion is possible rather than self-contradictory, then would it not be appropriate for religious leaders to gather to select one among conflicting claims?  In Christianity, this occurred in the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

On the other hand, the insistence on consistency may be premised on the exclusive existence of only one deity, which applies to the Abrahamic monotheist religions but not to a polytheistic religion such as Hinduism. Different perspectives, and even contradictory claims, may be consistent with the existence of several deities, even if one of them is supreme over all of the others. In the Gita, for instance, Krishna claims to be the supreme deity, which, by the way, is different than stating that among gods and goddesses that are worshipped, only Krishna exists. In the Gita, Krishna does not make this claim, even where he claims to deliver the goods when people petition other Hindu deities. In ancient Greco-Roman polytheistic religion, deities fought with each other, so even contradictory beliefs among the faithful would make sense. In polytheistic Hinduism, however, Advaitan adherents who follow Shankara’s theology, Brahman as the ultimate one over even Krishna in the Gita means that contradictions are illusionary rather than real. Even the deities are not real, according to Shankara.

Even in the Gita, Brahman itself, including the consciousness (i.e., general awareness) that being itself has (or is), transcends pairs of opposites. After Krishna asserts that a person “who does not hate or hanker after (anything) is to be known as a perpetual renouncer,” that deity states, “For, without (the influence of) the pairs-of-opposites, [such a person] is easily released from bondage.”[3] By implication, Brahman transcends pairs-of-opposites too. Indeed, yogins whose “defilements have dwindled, (whose) dualities are destroyed, (whose) selves are controlled, (and who) delight in the good of all beings” reach “extinction in the world-ground.”[4] Transcending dualities in the world ultimate results in one’s very self (atman) no longer being a distinct entity in Brahman. Therefore, contradictions even in scripture are surmountable. Moreover, as the example of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna illustrates, scripture itself can be transcended by genuine religious experience even in ritual, such as in devotion intensely directed to a deity. If so, not only cognitive contradictions, but much more could be transcended if religion on the human side develops further.

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1. Gita 5.2 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 149.
2. Gita 6.1. in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 157.
3. Gita 5.3 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 149. I have changed Feuerstein’s use of brackets to parentheses because in quoting Feuerstein’s text, I use brackets to add words to those which Feuerstein has written. This is consistent with Feuerstein having used brackets to add words to the text he was translating. I submit that this is a legitimate exception to the general rule that that which is quoted should be quoted as is, including the punctuation marks in the text.
4. Gita 5.25 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 155. Italics added to certain English words.

Undermining Progress: Power as Ignorance that Cannot Be Wrong

Bleeding to heal. The Earth is flat. Earth is at the center of the solar system. Zeus lives on Mount Olympus. The divine right of kings to act even as tyrants (e.g., Henry VIII of England). Hitler died in his bunker. Turning the heater on in a local bus kills coronavirus. These are things that were thought in their respective times to be uncontrovertibly true. In some of these cases, the power of the establishment was not subtle in enforcing them even when they should have been questioned. How presumptuous this finite, mortal species is! If ignorance on stilts is bliss, then why is it such in need of power? Subconsciously, the human mind must realize that its assumption of not being able to be wrong is flawed. We are subjective beings with instinctual urges—one of which manifests in the unquestioned assumption that what we know cannot be wrong, and furthermore that we are entitled to impose our “facts” on others. As the homo sapiens (i.e., wise) species, we are too sure, and too proud, concerning our knowledge and especially beliefs. We would like to have the certainty and objectivity that computers have, but we are subjective biological animals, not inert machines. 

The full essay is at "Undermining Progress."

Transcending Limited Notions of the Divine

When religion meets human nature, does the gravitational pull of me, me, me tend to encompass the journey downward in an all too comfortable direction? In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume proposes his theory that any religion begins with a focus on something akin to divine simplicity, but then becomes increasingly robed with anthropomorphic artifacts until the sheer weight of which brings down the tree whose inherently upward-looking striving succumbs to the increasing weight of the human.

In other words, is religion too weak to withstand the human, all too human ornaments that we conveniently adorn of our religions? The ornaments ultimate reflect ourselves, and thus are so convenient. So too is surrounding ourselves with others of like beliefs a matter of convenience. That is, religion can unwittingly become all about the self. Such religions or sects thereof can get sucked into a regular orbit of convenience without any of the congregants noticing the gradual and subtle slide.

As an antidote, transcendence, the unique and core aspect of religion and spirituality, can be utilized to get us outside of ourselves, including our concepts. The concept of God inhabiting a tree or stone relatively easy to transcend as a person looks past the image, both physical and cognitive, toward what is beyond, or through the favored image. Similarly even religious concepts that are themselves invisible, such as justice and mercy, can be transcended as a person moves on to even more basic divine concepts—even that of the One. Because the human mind is finite, even concepts revealed by a divine source are limited as they enter our cognitive atmosphere. Augustine likened this to light coming through a dark window. Accordingly, he warned that the relationship between the Father and Son should not be anthropomorphized into a human father-son relationship. St. Denis of the sixth century claimed that even Son itself as a limited human concept affixed to a divine person (of the Trinity) should be transcended in moving closer to the mystery that shrouds the divine in Christianity.

Simply stated, God lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, and thus beyond our concepts—even those associated with divine revelation. Denis refers to the transcendence of God as the brilliant light that is in the darkness of unknowing. Hence faith is not knowledge. The latter is human, all too human, and thus must be transcended in order to transcend beyond our limited domain. Only when even the lofty religious concepts are transcended—not denied or pushed aside, but, rather, gone through them—can God be yearned for distinctly—meaning distinctly from religion being about the self, and thus a faith that is too convenient. The unknowability or ineffability of the divine is not hostile to religion, but is rather its salvation as distinguished from egoism and even selfishness.

The yearning itself, combined with transcending the religious concepts—especially those that are so very comfortable—is the best way religiously to leave the self behind. From a focus beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, the spiritualized person returns to herself and our domain newly sensitized. When such a person looks at others, the sensitivity manifests automatically as compassion. This is more reliable, I submit, than relying on human intentionality, as in a decision to treat someone with compassion because of a religious teaching. Given the gravity of the human self, even in the religious sphere, compassion that springs automatically from the sensitivity to our world, including other people, is more reliable. Hence, paradoxically letting go cognitively of our cherished religious concepts of divine attributes can lead to transcendent religious experience—the sui generis essence of religion and spirituality—and more faithful feeling and action regarding religious ethical teachings.

From Being “Real” to Mythic: Do Religions have Lifespans?

Thousands of years ago, Greeks acted out narratives from what we now refer to as myths. The word myth connotes a religious narrative that has long-ago expired from being believed to be actual. Of course, no Christian in modern times would refer to the Passion as a myth; to refer to the crucifixion and resurrection as mythic would be insulting. Yet as a society increasingly secularizes, the events in the religious story gradually give up their all-embracing signature. As Good Friday or Easter becomes “just another day” for more and more people in the increasingly secular West in particular, the respective events lose their hegemony in defining for people in their daily lives what the Friday and Sunday are about. That is, the events "deflate" from being perceived as all-embracing in the sense of defining the significance of the days. If sufficiently relegated, the story itself can more easily be viewed as myth, rather than real. Notice religion’s appeal here to history or at least empiricism as a validator. Without such a basis intact, religious events are somehow less real in a religious sense of meaning.[1] In fact, a religion’s situs in a society can go from default-status to ultimately being replaced. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” in the late nineteenth-century prefigured the rise of secularization—the discrediting of the reigning concept of the deity by ascribing the vice of vengeance to it inexorably deflating the Abrahamic religions. Particularly astonishing is not the fact that religions have lifespans, but, rather, that any given religion in decline can endure an incredible amount of time at that stage. This phenomenon can prompt a person to wonder whether the religions are not human, all too human.

The process by which a religious narrative goes from losing its totality “in the real world” to being replaced, and thus deemed a myth, is not linear or steady, if Thomas Kuhn’s ideas on scientific revolutions applies. Yet nor is such a life-cycle short, ending in a sudden collapse similar to how the U.S.S.R. ended. In this regard, I depart from Kuhn's theory in so far it is applicable to religion.  

According to Kuhn, “intellectual progress is not steady and gradual. It’s marked by sudden paradigm shifts. There’s a period of normal science when everybody embraces a paradigm that seems to be working. Then there’s a period of model drift: As years go by, anomalies accumulate and the model begins to seem creaky and flawed. Then there’s a model crisis, when the whole thing collapses. Attempts to patch up the model fail. Everybody is in anguish, but nobody knows what to do.” Then there’s the revolution phase, during which “you get a proliferation of competing approaches, a willingness to try anything. People ask different questions, speak a different language, congregate around a new paradigm that is incommensurate with the last.”[2]

In terms of Christianity, the “period of normal science” is easy enough to picture. The Inquisition, for instance, points to that period existing historically in Europe, and to the enforcement powers that a “normal science” can enjoy. The loss of such powers goes a long way, I submit, in accounting for the incredible slippage that takes place once a religion is no longer the normal science. In the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a Christian church in Europe had much less leverage with which to “police” members deemed as heretics; a Christian unhappy with one’s church could simply pick a different sect or melt into the secular society. Such “model drift” is gradual, whereas a model crisis is not.

I’m not convinced that a religion collapses practically overnight in a crisis. Rather, I suspect that the drift gradually opens an increasingly wide area wherein other models can originate and take root. As a religion moves off the stage of normal science and is thus rendered increasingly transparent, questions naturally arise as the dogmatism of the normal science has been removed. Christians might begin to ask themselves: Did Jesus really exist? No evidence exists? Does religion really depend on history for validity anyway? Was God behind the Big Bang? Is religion overreaching when it tackles cosmology and the natural sciences more generally? Did we really share a common ancestor with the chimp?[3] Did a pope really write a letter as an archbishop stating it would be better to move a pedophile priest to another parish (to become its youth minister) in Germany than to risk harm to the universal church from a scandal? Does his ascendency anyway to the papacy implicate the religious organization (i.e., the Church) itself?

The scandal of pedophile priests in the Roman Catholic Church is an interesting case, for, by all rights, the cascading news should have triggered at some point a collapse of the religious organization; and yet, the status quo that includes that mammoth Christian sect (i.e., denomination) continued even as a scathing film, Spotlight, won the Oscar for best picture in 2016. A religion having enjoyed the status of “normal science” apparently has reserves of staying-power even in the face of abject hypocrisy occurring on a systemic basis (i.e., not just a few individuals).

The life cycle of an established religion is, I submit, quite long, and longer than expected or anticipated. Besides the power of the vested interests, human beings are too much like herd animals, especially in organizations, to get up and move to another pasture unless really prodded hard with a hot iron. Plus, cognitive dissidence—such as in “the Church can’t be that bad, or I would not be a member”—can reinforce denial. Lastly, to be an institution recognized by society is to get loads of legitimacy simply in existing. Such legitimacy has a way of silently drowning out even true charges of lewd or sordid behavior—not to mention hypocrisy. None of this even gets to the broader trajectory of a religion’s lifecycle. It can take a long, long time for a religion to run its course—and then it may stick around even longer in a hybrid capacity.

The longevity is in spite of the fact that the longer a religion endures, the further the stretch from the context of its origin to the present-day. A religion gets harder and harder to translate as the world changes from the world in which the religion first found expression. Texts of a religion coming out of an ancient agrarian world are not easily translated into a modern, urban world. Moreover, to the extent that religions tend to be rather fixed, even rigid, the “inability” (actually choice) not to adapt to changes in not only the world but also the development of mankind’s understanding of religion itself implies a limited lifespan. Yet very ancient religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, endure in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, any of these religions could survive in a limited and perhaps even barely recognized form in a newly developed hybrid form.

I’m not convinced that the notion of one paradigm cleanly replacing another applies to religion. Perhaps over a large enough span of time, very different paradigms can be identified. Hence we can distinguish the older polytheistic nature religions from the ancient Middle Eastern monotheist faiths. More narrowly, closer to a religion’s lifespan and what comes after, however, I suspect that hybrid paradigms emerge, pick up, and carry on some remnants of the religion. In Judaism and Christianity, the notion of a remnant (i.e., of a people, and outcasts, respectively) has a special place.

In the theory of organizational life-cycles, an organization toward the end of its decline can spawn a re-energized, or emergent, organization that retains some of the characteristics without all the bureaucratic baggage. A large corporation might spin off a division, for instance, that itself becomes a large company retaining some of the original company’s culture. Similarly, Christianity in the year 2200 might have left the Passion narrative and complicated theology behind. Yet Jesus’s teachings themselves, such as in the Sermon on the Mount, which are relatively compatible with secularity, might survive in altered forms or even new religions—or even in secular culture itself! Many Christians in 2016 would remonstrate that such a religion would not really be Christian at all, given the historical litmus test enjoyed by Christology (i.e., true belief being the Incarnation). Nevertheless, the retention of Jesus’s teaching would make the new paradigm quasi-Christian, or at least “Christ-like.” Indeed, to the extent that the new focus results in less hypocrisy, the hybrid might actually be more Christ-like. Beyond the lifespan of such a hybrid it is difficult from the standpoint of 2016 to speculate on what paradigms might come next. My point is simply that some of the bath-water will probably be used even after the focus on the baby has waned. Perhaps a religion is like a slug in that both move slowly and are not apt to change quickly, and yet both can exist for a very long time.

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[1] Here I’m relying on ch. 12 of my book, “God’s Gold.” In that chapter, I contend that religion overreaches in claiming history for itself. For a religion to use history as a sort of anchor is to make a category mistake.

[2] David Brooks, “The Post-Trump Era,” The New York Times, March 25, 2016. Brooks is drawing from Kuhn’s text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

[3] See ch. 12 of my book, “God’s Gold.”