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).

---

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.

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.

---

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.

Pruning and Weeding in the Garden of Eden: Religion and the Big Bang

Peeling layers off an onion is a proverbial metaphor for religious, philosophical, and psychological matters alike. This is not to say that these matters are synonymous or even reduce to the same basis. As concerns the religious or theological domain, the metaphor of levels to be peeled away to get at a distinctive essence may suggest that superficial uses of terms like religion and god may refer to phenomena that are actually within other domains and thus not at all of the dimension claimed. That is to say, people may be inadvertently sloppy as a matter of general habit with regard to what counts as religious or theological in nature. 

In short, too much extraneous content may have inadvertently gotten in (no doubt with the help of plenty over-reaching hands); interlarding flora and fauna from other lands presumed by now to be as native-born have eclipsed the theological dimension to the extent that it is barely recognizable.

If peeling off the outer layers of religion can prompt people to question their basic assumptions regarding the phenomenon of religion, I suspect that many of us may be surprised to discover just how much our ancestors have allowed “the burning bush” to grow over into foreign lands, and thus how much pruning is necessary to distinguish the theological dimension as unique to itself.

In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume suggests that the homo sapiens brain has great difficulty holding onto the notion of divine simplicity—such as in the divine as pure, undifferentiated spirit—and thus tends to render the divine more and more in human terms over time. Hence in Hinduism, the various deities have come to be depicted as stone icons bearing the likeness of humans (combined even with body parts of other animals, such as is the case with Ganash, the elephant-headed deity).

I submit that the human brain also has the tendency to take it for granted that the referent of an abstract word (i.e., linguistic symbol) is shared rather than distinctive to a particular mind. In asking other people, “Do you believe in God,” for example, we typically take it for granted that we have the same thing in mind with respect to that which “God” refers. Problematically, this erroneous assumption permits the gradual encroachment of matters extraneous to (i.e., outside of) the religious domain coming even into the default of what we typically assume as counting as religious in nature.

As just one example, people have confused or conflated the theological and metaphysical domains, even reducing the former to the latter. All too easily perhaps, we characterize God in terms of reality, a metaphysical concept. God as the source or condition of all that exists (i.e., Creation) as well as existence itself (i.e., reality) functions here as a metaphysical condition. If that which god refers is metaphysical, then theology is essentially a metaphysical theory; religion reduces to philosophy (metaphysics or at least existentialism).

To be sure, cosmological claims such as that God created the heavens and the Earth or the cosmos, permeate extant religions even functioning as a foundational article of faith. God created quarks and thus atoms, not to mention space and time. Immanuel Kant, a major philosophy of the eighteenth century, suggests in his Critique of Pure Reason that the human mind structures such basic contours of what we perceive of the world—such appearances known to us as space and time being distinct from things in themselves, or reality. Theologians (as well as many philosophers, such as Hegel) claim that their domain includes and in fact is based in the latter—the Real. Especially in a materialistic age, the reality claims in “God as the Creator” include the domain of physics (and chemistry) as virtually synonymous with that of metaphysics (i.e., existence and reality).

This model (from NASA) presumes a beginning, which dovetails with the storyline in the Biblical book of Genesis. Does it make sense to add time and even God into a physical process? 

Hence, God is popularly said to be the “first cause” of the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. Accordingly, reality or existence prior to the primordial blast would presumably invalidate theism—the belief that God (i.e., not only as the Creator) exists. The conception of God is conditional on what is known in physics. Should the universe as we know it have come through rather than out of the Big Bang when all matter and energy were presumably at one point in space (before time), the physics would by cyclical rather than linear (i.e., a beginning, middle and end). Creation or even Aristotle’s “first cause” cease to make any sense in terms of the universe.

In the early 1970s, Steven Hawkins theorized that quantum gravitational effects produce a repulsive force such that black holes eventually “evaporate” or explode outward rather than reach infinite density in a point. Physicists have concluded that the universe may not have begun with the Big Bang. Rather than starting from a point (i.e., singularity), the explosion could have followed a previous contracting phase going to a maximal compact state, which then triggered the explosion. In line with Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrences,” the universe may “bounce back” following each contracting phase, again and again.[1]

Lest it be concluded that science would once again be pitted against religion should the alternative theory get empirical support, the anticipated tension can be transcended. I submit that the either/or dichotomy is false, as it is premised on the assumption that religion includes physics (and metaphysics).[2] To create energy (and thus mass, as E=mc²) is not the same as to be the source or condition of reality; physics can thus be distinguished from metaphysics. Furthermore, the theological meaning of “God as Creator” can be distinguished theologically from scientific and metaphysical theory and knowledge; otherwise, the theological claim would not have its own distinct basis.

What is that basis? What is the content of religious faith in God as the Creator? How is creating in theological terms distinct from making (i.e, faire, machen)? I contend that the distinctly theological dimension has by now become nearly unrecognizable, or hidden, precisely because we and our forebears have unwittingly painted religion with so many colors borrowed from other paintings. Perhaps even more astoundingly, the human brain seems to “short-circuit” when it comes to presuming that it knows (and in fact cannot be wrong) what it knows concerning what counts as religious truth. This cognitive-neurological defense-mechanism keeps us from discovering how far off the map we have “sailed.” If my theory is accurate, the path back to “good gardening” lies in pruning back the otherwise fecund plant by disentangling it from the branches of others and asking what the plant is as distinctive and whole unto itself.

---

[1] Katia Moskvitch, “Black Hole ‘Information’ Paradox May Have Been Resolved,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2014.

[2] Peeling back yet another layer, the assumption itself premised at least in part on the historically-held assumption that religion must include everything or otherwise be invalid. This assumption is similar to the other historical assumption that morality must come out of religion to have any validity and force. These premises invite the theological dimension to “jump fences” as though with impunity.