Religion in Film: Resisting the Formulaic

Historically, meaning in the history of cinema, perhaps too much effort or attention initially went into fidelity to doctrine, especially in Christianity. Heavily stylistic, unrealistic epics could be said to merely illustrate doctrines. Then as filmmakers began to think in an open-ended way concerning how to depict the transcendent both visually and ideationally (i.e., as an idea), the dominance of the earlier control-orientation slipped away to be replaced by innovative ways of understanding how the transcendent may relate to the realm of our daily mundane existence in the world. The extraordinary potential of filmmaking to tap into the human imagination without necessarily providing definitive answerers could be seen. I submit that this historical trajectory is a positive development. This does not mean that heterodox belief has or should win out; in fact, religious practitioners, including the clergy, can help filmmakers to depict the transcendent and its relationship to our existence in novel ways that do not seem so formulaic as to be easily brushed aside as less than credible. Old wine can indeed go into new jugs, and even new wine may be tasted without the world collapsing as a result.

The full essay is at "Religion in Film."

The Holy Grail: Artifact or Superstition?

Relics are nothing new to religion, whose legitimacy used to be synonymous with being ancient, which is one reason why the ancient Romans did not consider the nascent Jesus Movement to be a religion. The cup that Jesus uses in the Last Supper in Gospels is right up there with pieces of the wood cross of the Crucifixion as the most holy of relics in Christianity. “In Europe alone, there are said to be around 200 cups, each thought to be the Holy Grail—the cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper.”[1] They can’t all be THE cup, but I bet if you visited each place, the partisans would insist that their cup is genuine. For example, the website of the cathedral at Valencia, in eastern Spain, proclaims regarding the cup there, “Tradition reveals that it is the same cup that the Lord used at the Last Supper for the Institution of the Eucharist.”[2] Never mind that medieval legend had it that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the Holy Grail near Glastonbury Tor in southern England shortly after Jesus’ death. That would be quite a distance to travel back them to deliver a cup. These two cannot both be right, yet Christians have prayed in both places as if the cup in each place were genuine. That people have gotten carried away with the super relic through history seems clear from “the fact that, over the centuries, legends have arisen of ‘grails’ producing miracles.”[3] That miracles have been said to arise from more than one of the cups ought to be a red flag that something is amiss, for only one cup could possibly be genuine and so miracles could not have come by means of proximity to the other cups. I submit that basic category mistakes regarding genres of meaning (and writing) are a big part of the problem as to why a presumed historical artifact has given rise to puerile superstition in the name of religious truth.

One scholar of religious studies, Joanne Pierce, is realistic in saying, “I honestly do not think that the actual cup from the Last Supper still exists.”[4] In fact, Pierce elaborates that because according to some Gospel accounts, the room was already prepared before Jesus and his disciples arrived, the cup used may not have even belonged to them. I submit that Pierce is conflating historical accounts and faith narratives—two very different, albeit related—genres of writing. That some of the Gospels have the room already prepared is itself an indication that we should not assume that the room actually was prepared beforehand.

Moreover, a faith narrative is not written as a historical account; the concerns of the writers would have been theological rather than to make empirical reports or accounts, especially as the Gospels were written many decades after the Crucifixion. Is it really likely that, for theological purposes, a detail such as how or whether the room was prepared would have been preserved in notes or orally? Pierce gets around this problem by stating that “the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic—in her words, ‘a cultural reality rather than a religious reality.’”[5] We are no longer concerned with the relationship of empirical history and faith narrative; the idea of the cup is what matters, and that isn’t even religious.

I think Pierce is wrong to jettison the religious meaning of the cup, even as an idea, because of the salvific significance at least in Roman Catholicism of the Eucharist in the gradual process of sanctification. Given the theological doctrine of transubstantiation—the real presence of Christ in bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ—in Catholicism, it is interesting that, “(f)or Pierce, a Catholic, the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic.”[6] Zwingli, the Swiss reformer for whom the Eucharist is only symbolic, would be more likely than the Pope to agree.

Essentially, my argument is that faith narratives are neither historical accounts nor just cultural ideas; rather, the distinctive meaning in a faith narrative such as one of the Gospels is religious. It is felt proximity to religious meaning that is important—not whether a given cup was actually used by Jesus in a historical or empirical sense. To conflate the religious and empirical is to engage in superstition, as evinced by the attribution of miracles from Jesus’ historical use of a cup. Put another way, the religious significance of the Last Supper, which is Jesus being willing to follow his Father’s will in sacrificing his life for humanity, does not come down to the trite contention of which cup Jesus actually used. “It was just a cup,” Jesus might say; “You’re missing the point.” In other words, too much attention to the means can obstruct the ends being served by the means. 

Regarding the famous cup, the distinction between artifact and superstition can be transcended, perhaps even in a Hegelian sense of solving dialectics through human history, by focusing instead on distinctly religious meaning. In other words, perhaps superstition results from mistaking historical artifact for religious truth. This is not to say that the latter cannot come through history; only that if or when the transcendent does manifest on the surface of history, a faith narrative still cannot be taken for a historical account. To focus on the historical as if it were the point would be to miss the distinctly religious point, for the validity of religious meaning does not depend on the criteria of any other domain.

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1 Julia Buckley, “They All Say They’ve Got the Holy Grail. So Who’s Right?” CNN.com, August 17, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Religion, Ethics, and Psychology: Three Distinct Domains

Compassion is so salient in so many religions that it is natural to assume that religious conduct is moral, which is to say that it issues in ethical conduct. Yet, as Kierkegaard emphasizes in Fear and Trembling, the divine decree that Abraham receives in the Book of Genesis translates into murder on the (universally accessible) level of ethics. In being almost going through with sacrificing his only son, Isaac, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder, which is unethical. Abraham’s faith in the validity of the divine decree can thus be distinguished from morality. Unlike ethics, religion is sourced beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotions, and is the domain is thus transcendent even as it is also immanent in the world. Even though ethical principles and faith can dovetail, as in five of the Ten Commandments, it is important that the two domains—morality and religion—are regarded as distinct, and thus with their own distinctive bases and criteria owing to the respective natures of each domain. In his book, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber attempts a mega-synthesis of many fields of knowledge. Such a broad project carries with it the pitfall of making conjectures that draw on or involve domains of knowledge outside of one’s own. I think the risk of such over-stepping is significant coming from both vantage-points in morality and religion (i.e., ethics and theology) when the two domains are mingled or intertwined without due recognition of how they are sui generis, of their own genus (type). Wilber even conflates a third domain, that of psychology, with those of ethics and religion. I begin by looking at morals and religion in general, holding off psychology until I address Wilber’s theory specifically.

In Christianity, it seems at first glance that it would be more difficult to differentiate the two domains, for God, which both Paul and Augustine wrote is love itself, lies in neighbor-love, which presumably includes compassion and thus results in ethical conduct. However, both in theory and practice, unethical conduct may (and has) stemmed from defending the faith, such as in the Crusades. It has been too easy for Christian leaders to relegate or dismiss outright the love-thy-enemy preachment in the Gospels to defend Christ (or His Church) from internal and external threats. Nevertheless, it is difficult to square of love of neighbor, which especially includes (or is epitomized by) love of enemies, with (verbally or physically) attacking and even killing detractors instead of helping them at a human level. Even if Christian faith is ever characterized explicitly and foremost in terms of compassion especially to people who insult or even go after us, faith and morality can still be distinguished as being in two distinct domains whose respective foundations and criteria differ qualitatively (i.e., fundamentally). Most crucially, distinctly religious faith has a transcendent reference point, or source, that is beyond the limits of our realm, whereas ethical theories do not; they pertain only within our earthly realm to personal and interpersonal conduct. Put another way, only God is wholly other, even as God is immanent in Creation; that which is in the created realm does not exhaust God. Otherwise, God could simply be a creation of human understanding, using stuff of this world such as ethical theories to furnish the content of that which is held to be divine.

I contend that religion, or faith, and ethics are two distinct domains even they obviously can influence each other. I am not contending that people of religious faith should treat other people unethically or engage in vices. The story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac can be read as the claim that faith in (or, more crudely, obedience to) a divine decree (or revelation, moreover) is not subject or confined to human morality. The divine decree that Abraham sacrifice his only son even though Yahweh has also promised the old man that his seed would populate the land is known only to him, whereas the ethical principle that killing someone is murder is universally accessible to anyone’s knowledge. The Ten Commandments have yet to arrive in the story, so there is no tension within faith between the immorality of murder—Thou shalt not kill—and Abraham’s sacrifice; the tension there is that Yahweh both demands that Abraham sacrifice his only son and promises that Abraham’s descendants will multiply throughout the land. Even in its internal tension, which Yahweh of course resolves in calling off the sacrifice at the last minute, faith is quite another thing than morality, and can even legitimately violate its strictures. The legitimacy if faith as a domain (and a human phenomenon) is not based on an ethical theory or principle; nor, for that matter, is the legitimacy of an ethical theory necessarily based on faith. Even if faith is a factor, something more—something native to ethics—is necessary. The assumption that it is wrong that the innocent suffer is ethical in nature. The qualitatively different assumption that Abraham holds that it is really Yahweh that is commanding the sacrifice is distinctly theological in nature. Only the latter assumption is based on a metaphysic that includes a transcendent (and immanent) deity. Even if the innocent should not be harmed because there exists a transcendent deity, the latter can legitimately nullify this ethical claim, as is the case with Abraham.

When the content of a divine decree is moral, as is the case for half of the Ten Commandments, and in the case of Jesus’ preaching on neighbor-love as compassion towards others (even and especially assholes), the two domains dovetail. This does not mean that the content of faith is exhausted or sourced in ethical conduct; rather, the latter can manifest from faith. Intense, repeated prayer or meditation that transcends the world, for example, may, upon return to daily existence in the world, cause a person to have an enhanced sensitivity in terms of empirical senses and thus to other people, which in turn may trigger compassion, and the resulting conduct may be termed ethical in nature, but the prayer or meditation oriented metaphysically is not itself in the ethical domain and is thus not justified by ethical principles or theory. 

Is it true that a person doesn’t have to be moral to believe in God, by which I mean that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? Whether or not a person unjustifiably harms another person is separate from whether a person has a cognitive belief that an intelligent being exists not only within, but also outside of Creation. Where the substance of that being is believed to be love, including in neighbor-love as expressed in compassionate acts towards other people, and here I have Christianity in mind, then it is contradictory to not believe in such acts while believing in God; failing to do such acts, or doing the opposite, can occur even if the person believes in neighbor-love; this does not involve two beliefs in contradiction. So a Christian cannot hold both that one’s enemies should not in principle be treated with compassion, but rather, with vengeance, and believe in the Christian conception of God. Such a belief, and the related faith in being saved, is for naught, Paul wrote, if there is not love. To be sure, it is possible to hold that enemies should not be loved and still believe that an intelligent being exists outside of Creation, as the first claim involves moral conduct (as well as love) whereas the second claim is metaphysical (or metaphysical-experiential). Looked at from this standpoint, the moral and theological domains can be seen to be very different, and thus distinct, indeed.  

To sum up the argument thus far, even in cases in which the content of a divine decree has ethical meaning or significance, the deity itself transcends the ethical domain because the latter, being that it concerns conduct, is only in our realm (i.e., no transcendent extension). Put another way, the divine reaching into the human domain does not limit the divine to be within the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion.[1] The Creator extends beyond its Creation.

To claim that spirituality (or religious development) is simply a more advanced or higher level of moral development is thus a flawed assertion that conflates two distinct domains. Faith, which can include a metaphysical belief (i.e., that God exists), is not a “super” moral principle, as if religion were the cherry atop an ethical sundae. To put both theology and ethics as intervals on a linear line as if one were a development from or of the other is to conflate two different types of things. This is precisely the error that Ken Wilber commits in his desire to come up with a theory of everything. To understand why, it is necessary to briefly discuss Kohlberg’s theory of moral development because Wilber bases his own theory of stages of consciousness in transpersonal psychology on that theory.

On a macro level of generalization, I contend that psychology, ethics, and religion or spirituality are  different and distinct domains, even though they often interrelate. Wilber, however, treats them almost as synonymous, or at least as de facto species of the same domain. He thus jumps between them in terms of stages of development, such that developing in one domain is necessary before a stage of development in another domain can be reached. His focus is on the incremental nature of growth. He writes, “We don’t go from an acorn to a forest in a quantum leap. There are stages in all growth, including human.”[2] That a given growth is of just one thing, such as moral development, while growth in something else is another growth, is missing from his theory as he conflates growths in different things together.

In his theory of moral development, Lawrence Kohlberg posts six stages, grouped into three levels: preconventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Individual rights and principles of conscience characterize the highest level of moral development. Wilber situates Abraham Maslow’s notion of self-actualization at this level even though self-actualization is in the domain of ethics. Wilber does not provide an explanation for how the ethical contents of individual rights and conscience necessarily correspond with self-actualized people. Doing so is necessary because ethical principles and psychology are two different academic disciplines and domains. Even if the sentiment of disapprobation is ethical judgment itself, as Hume contends, it is not the psychology itself, but what it points to in the ethical domain (e.g., a cognition that something wrong happened from seeing someone lying on the sidewalk stabbed in the back). Applying Hume’s notion of the naturalistic fallacy, an emotion itself merely is, and is thus not an ought. One must make moves to the ethical domain in terms of ethical justification before one can make an ought statement. Wilber merely states that self-actualization is at Kohlberg’s highest stage of moral development, as if the description of psychological self-actualization implied an ought.

Wilber also joins Kohlberg in positing a spiritual stage on top of the moral stages, defying the contention that spirituality (or religion) is distinct from psychology and morality. Kohlberg suggests that a higher level, called universal spiritual, is above his sixth moral stage. For both Kohlberg and Wilber, a person must develop morally through the successive moral stages before being able to reach a state of sustained spirituality rather than just occasionally having peak experiences. According to Wilber, the “genuinely spiritual or transpersonal stages of development (Kohlberg’s stage 7 and beyond) depend on their development upon all of the previous developments in stages 6, 5, 4, 3, and so on. Each of those stages contributes something absolutely essential for the manifestation of stage 7.”[3] But I submit that a spiritual experience, unlike psychological and moral ones, is capable of the sort of “intense interior illumination” that Wilber claims “can profoundly change a person’s life and open [a person] to new worlds, new dimensions, new modes of awareness.”[4] Such paradigmatic perceptual changes may be accompanied by psychological emotions but to reduce the former to the latter ignores the non-emotional aspects of being oriented to a reference point that transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. Also, having such an orientation in an experience is not in itself moral or immoral; rather, both are transcended as they pertain to our realm, which is within our limits.

Furthermore, there are several specific problems with the claim that a person must pass through stages of moral development before universal spirituality (as distinct from psychological peak experiences, which Wilber conflates with episodic spirituality) can take hold. Firstly, Maslow’s claim that lower physiological needs must be satisfied before a person can self-actualize has been nullified by empirical studies. Someone who is hungry or homeless can attend to the higher need for self-actualization. While this does not necessarily mean that a person can be both at a high and low stage of moral development, as morality is another domain, that the “all lower stages must first be reached” assumption has been invalidated in one domain suggests that it may be invalid in other domains, pending research in those domains. Even if spirituality sits on top of moral development, the stages of the latter may not have to be reached in order to be a spiritual person.

Wilber does not say that all moral stages must be reached before a person can have a temporary spiritual experience. In fact, he claims that a spiritual experience can cause a person to shift one’s moral basis from the approval of other people to law and order. He contends that “a person at moral stage 3 who has a profound spiritual experience might be motivated to move to the next stage—in this case, to stage 4. They do not, under any circumstances, go from stage 3 to stage 7,” which is the spiritual stage.[5] It does not follow, however, that yearning for a transcendent dimension in meditation or for union with God (i.e., having a transcendent experience) in prayer would necessarily make a person feel the need to obey local laws, for example, because doing so is ethical or results in ethical conduct. Also, why can’t a person whose moral campus is set to obeying laws be a spiritual person? Obeying laws is salient in Judaism, for example. Half of the Decalogue is divine laws that have moral content yet the point is to obey God to demonstrate fidelity rather than to behave morally.

Therefore, a spiritual person can have a law-obeying orientation to morality and still not reduce religion to morality. If faith and morality are two distinct (albeit interrelated) domains, then it does not follow that only people who are highly developed morally can have a religious faith or sustained experience. Tapping into universal spirituality in terms of access to another dimension—one that is transcendent—or having an expanded awareness (also with a transcendent aspect), which is how Wilber describes the spiritual stage, need not depend on a person’s recognition of individual rights and principles of conscience.

I am not suggesting that people of faith should behave unethically, or that they should get a pass for doing so. Rather, I am challenging the claim that spirituality is simply a higher-order level of development on top of moral stages. Were this the case, then the content of spirituality could simply be the purest expression of someone’s ethical ideal, which, although of great value, is still a human artifact, or construction. That which has a transcendent “beyondness” (i.e., going beyond our realm, and thus being inherently beyond our reaches) cannot by definition be limited to anything that is within our realm. In Christian terms, this notion has been argued by pointing out that God’s divine power, or omnipotence, being unlimited or full, cannot be constrained or limited by an ethical theory devised by us, for God goes beyond our earthly realm and thus cannot possibly be constrained or limited by it or anything within it. That a divine command can have ethical content, such as Thou shalt not kill, is not to say that God is limited by a human ethic, for the ethical content comes from God in revelation. When we add to such ethical conduct our own ethical principles and theories, it would be impious to assume that God is thereby constrained.

It follows that a person may be spiritual and behave ethically to avoid punishment or for approval from other people; Kohlberg’s highest moral level of development need not be reached. To be spiritual often issues out in ethical, compassionate treatment of other people (and even salient beings, as in Jainism), and this is of course a good thing. People who hurt other people for religious reasons are justifiably condemned, and this is possible because people with normally-functioning brains have access to the ethical dimension of human existence. Divine decrees, and faith, moreover, go beyond such existence to reach its source, or very condition. Being oriented to it is not of ethical content unless a divine decree is itself ethical (i.e., a command how to treat other people). Even then, yearning for union with God in an experience of transcendence cannot be exhausted in one’s conduct in this world because transcendent experience goes beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and feelings. Put another way, if union sought with the divine transcends the self, then how the self behaves in the world cannot possibility reach far enough to match the inner experience. This is not to say that faith and experience that is transcendent cannot naturally issue out in compassionate conduct, but such faith is not a “super” kind of conduct.

Therefore, Ken Wilber is incorrect in A Brief History of Everything in claiming that the “genuinely spiritual or transpersonal stages of development (Kohlberg’s stage 7 and beyond) depend for their development upon all of the previous developments,” or stages of moral development.[6] The term spiritual is not synonymous with transpersonal, as if spirituality were inconsistent with the human ideology of individual and consistent with collectivism. Confining the transcendently-sourced by a human ideology is to place a higher good below a lower one, which Aristotle calls misordered concupiscence. Subjecting spirituality, for faith that has a transcendent aspect, to an ethical theory or principle is better than placing an ideology in the driver’s seat, but the underlying problem is the same: placing a lower above a higher, or a smaller above a larger. The distinction between human ideology and an ethical principle is not as clear as we might suppose, and may even be in part illusionary, as ideological agendas can be adept at clothing themselves in ethical ideals. Wilber’s spiritual cherry atop of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development is anti-individualist, yet union with God need not exclude the individual soul as such. Selfishness and greed are indeed sordid, and they often exclude ethical conduct, but this does not mean that spirituality is therefore transpersonal in the sense that it is necessary first for a soul to transcend or even lose itself. In short, the temptation that comes with placing spirituality atop morality may be to furnish the content from one’s own ideology. So even though we should expect spiritual people to behave ethically, the religious and ethical domains are distinct, and thus have their own respective foundations and criteria. Furthermore, neither should be reduced to psychology, for that domain does not include the logical justification of ethical positions (and principles) and transcendence beyond the limits of not only human conception and perception, but also emotion. In Wilber’s terms, spirituality as awareness of another dimension or reality is not in itself a psychological state.  

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1. I am drawing here on the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.
2. Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), p. 151.
3. Ibid., p. 150.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Christianity and Hinduism: On Manifestations of Divinity

Hinduism is a polytheist religion whereas Christianity is monotheist. Many gods versus one seems like a clear distinction, and I submit that it basically holds. Yet nuances exist that make the distinction murky both in Hinduism and Christianity. The key to clearing up the ambiguity lies in deciding whether being a manifestation of something else is enough to count as existing as an entity. In simpler terms, is a manifestation real, or is it merely an appearance?

The foremost Hindu philosopher thus far is without doubt Shankara, who lived during the eighth century, C.E. in southern India and whose school, Advaita Vedanta, is essentially non-dualism—monism being the competing school of thought.  Shankara held that the deities in the Hindu pantheon are manifestations of brahman, which can be thought of as the substratum that pervades the universe. Only brahman really exists. The essence, content or substance of the individual soul, or atman, is brahman. To be a manifestation is to exist in the realm of appearance, rather than being something (i.e., an entity) that is real (or in the domain of the real). Shankara’s metaphysical framework also includes the realm of illusion, and it is important to keep in mind that the deities, such as Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, and Ram, are not illusionary. Rather, they are manifestations of something that is real, namely brahman.

One of my professors, Keith Yandel, argued that Hinduism is thus monotheistic because its deities do not exist as entities, but are merely manifestations of one thing (brahman). But brahman is not a deity, but can be thought of as ether that is everywhere.  This cannot be said to be monotheism, even though brahman is one rather than being composed of distinct entities. Yandel’s basis was in Western philosophy and Christianity, and I believe he interpreted Hinduism through those prisms to expand the domain of monotheism in religion.

The problem is that the word “manifestation” is also in Christian theology in reference to the divine—in particular, to the Trinity, which is composed of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Although the Latin word personae used to denote these three “persons” of the Trinity strongly implies that they exist metaphysically as entities, unlike Shankara’s Hindu deities, the corresponding word used in Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity translates as “manifestation.” That puts us in the soup. For if the three manifestations of the divine in the Trinity do not absolve Christianity of being monotheist, then neither do the Hindu deities as manifestations keep Hinduism from counting as monotheist.

Ironically, praying to Jesus, if He is taken to be a distinct entity that really exists as such metaphysically, corresponds to the dualist camp in Hinduism, which holds that the deities, such as Vishnu and Shiva as well as their respective successive incarnations, are metaphysically real as entities. In short, if Jesus really exists as a distinct deity even though it is of the same substance as the Father and the Helper, and the latter two are real entities too, then from the standpoint of Hindu theological philosophy, Christianity is not monotheistic. But Christianity descends from Judaism, whose basic plank is that God is one. Preliminarily, it seems like Orthodox theology has a better understanding of the nature of the Trinity than does Roman Christianity and its descendants (i.e., Protestantism). To be a monotheist, it would seem that a Christian oriented to Jesus Christ would pray to a manifestation of the divine rather than to a particular deity. Jesus appears to be a deity, and thus an entity, yet in terms of metaphysical reality is an appearance of something that really exists: God. But then Hinduism would also be monotheistic because its deities are manifestations too.

Even if Western Christians come to think that they are praying to a specific manifestation of God (i.e., Jesus), such an understanding of the Trinity would imply that Hinduism is monotheist. Furthermore, to claim that Jesus is divine seems, at least to my Western mind, to mean that the Son of God is itself an entity that is real (i.e., exists as an entity, rather than as a manifestation of something even though that something is of the same substance). This way of understanding Jesus is consistent with dualism in Hinduism, in which its deities are real entities and so Hinduism is polytheist.  But then wouldn’t Christianity be as well? Must Jesus be a manifestation of the divine for Christianity to be monotheist? But then does it even make sense to pray to a manifestation that is in the realm of appearance rather than the real? Is there any way to finally square this circle?

If divine reality goes (or is sourced) beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite suggested in the late 5^th or early 6^th century, C.E., then all we have access to is manifestation (and illusion). Faith is oriented beyond this, hence to what only can be belief that Jesus exists as a real entity, but the content of this belief can only be a manifestation to us. But then why can’t Shakara’s Hinduism be monotheist? Furthermore, if revelation holds that the persons of the Trinity exist metaphysically as entities even within the limits of our cognitive reach, then how can we stop the inference from the Hindu school of dualism that Christianity is actually polytheist—assuming that the Father and the Son really exist as distinct entities even though they are consubstantial (i.e., of the same substance). Put another way, can divine manifestation be applied in one religion with it being monotheist and yet be applied in another religion that is polytheist, or are both Christianity and Hinduism monotheist faiths? Can Christianity be thought of as being monotheist with three distinct really-existing entities of the Trinity while Hindu dualism is needed to keep Hinduism polytheist?

To say that the whole thing is a mystery is true, but this is also a cop-out (i.e., a way to side-step or escape the problem without solving it). In Hinduism, Krishna is associated with love, and in Christianity, Jesus is too. Can we say that a Hindu prays to the Lord Krishna while a Christian prays to the Lord Jesus? This makes both religions seem polytheist. But Augustine and Paul both wrote that God is love, and it can be said that Jesus is a particular manifestation of love both personified (manifesting as such, rather than really existing as an entity) and preached in the Gospels. But then would not Lord Krishna as such make Hinduism monotheist?

The solution might lie in distinguishing Christian theological love (i.e., God is love) from Hindu brahman (i.e., the ether that pervades existence). Christian agape (i.e., self-emptying, or selfless) love may manifest metaphysically as the Trinity in a way that maintains oneness to a degree that Krishna as a manifestation of brahman does not. The key may lie in the distinction between theological love and metaphysical ether. If so, do we even know how theological love is distinct from the varieties we encounter and experience in our world? Can we say that brahman as ether counts as divinity as distinct from metaphysical substance, or else how it is that manifestations that are divine (i.e., deities as appearances) can be of something that is not itself divine in its very nature? Lord Jesus and Lord Krishna may be pointing to two very different things, the difference of which affecting what it means to manifest something.

The Pope on AI: On the Ethical (Rather than Religious) Dimension

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

At its core, the human-machine distinction regarding decision-making comes down to AI making only “algorithmic choices,” that is, “technical choices ‘among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences,” whereas the human heart is capable of influencing the choices that we make and so only we can have wisdom.[1] The Pope’s definition of wisdom differs from that which describes wisdom as the combination of experience with knowledge. Even if experience comes into the equation as intuition, that is distinct from the proverbial heart. If statistical inferences don’t reach human intuition, then either conception of human wisdom suffices to distinguish human from (machine-learning) machine. In the philosophy of mind field, the difference between man and “thinking” machine can be put into the following question: Is understanding merely the manipulation of symbols according to rules? Do I, whose languages do not include Chinese, understand the answers I write to questions if I use a chart that indicates which Chinese characters to write if I’m presented with other Chinese characters? If understanding is more than merely the manipulation of symbols according to (linguistic) rules, then how much more different is human experience from statistical inference (and even learning itself), and how much even greater is the difference between human emotion, such as empathy or compassion, and AI. To the extent that ethical judgment is, as David Hume claimed, a sentiment of disapprobation (i.e., a visceral emotional reaction of disapproval), ethics can only be on the human side, where the heart resides.

The ethical dimension is salient in the advantages and (especially) the disadvantages of AI. On the one hand, the Pope said, AI has potential in regard to the “democratization of access to knowledge,” the “exponential advancement of scientific research,” and a reduction in “demanding and arduous work.”[2] Given the absolute value of reason (which assigns value to things), according to Kant, rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in ourselves. For all the advantages of specialization of labor as discussed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, at some point rote repetition of the same small action conflicts with Kant’s ethical imperative. In contrast, opening up knowledge and advancing it are fully in line both with rational nature and us being regarded as ends in ourselves and not merely means to other ends.

Even so, as the Pope pointed out, AI could also contribute towards a “greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes.”[3] Such a consequence would certainly violate Rawls’ ethical theory of justice in which societal systems, whether political, economic, or social, should be designed in such a way to disproportionately benefit the people at the bottom rather than disproportionately harm them.

Public policy enters the picture because we want to protect and perhaps even encourage the advantages and minimize or obviate the downsides by government policy. From Rawls theory, for instance, legislators might propose a law making college free for poor students in a society in which AI has a significant presence. Another law could mandate that the state provide computers to poor people free of charge. Rather than being technical policy prescriptions having the semblance of objectivity, these examples stem from the ethical dimension of AI.

Being that the Pope is the head of a religious institution, it is only natural that he would attempt to tack on the religious dimension. I submit that in doing so, he over-stepped. In discussing wisdom, for example, his addition of “listening to Sacred Scripture” in regard to the ancient Greek notion of phronesis (a type of intelligence concerned with practical action) doesn’t really fit, or is not pertinent.[4] It does not make phronesis religious in nature. Furthermore, he describes algorithms in terms of only being able to “examine realities formalized in numerical terms.”[5] The metaphysical term, realities, is out of place here. The Pope’s choice of the term was no accident. He sourced the mediating role of tools between us and our environment from us being “inclined to what lies outside of us,” which, and here is the stretch, in turn is in term so us being beings “radically open to the beyond.”[6] Such a beyond, as suggested by the use of the word radically, is transcendent, and thus in reference to God being wholly other rather than just immanent in Creation. In making this leap from humans needing to relate to the environment in which we live (e.g., for food) to humans having an aptitude for transcendence in a religious sense, the Pope jumped to another domain that is not relevant. For we do not use tools to grow or get food, for example, because we have an aptitude to transcend the limits of conception, perception, and emotion to posit or yearn for another world. AI pertains to what the Pope himself called the “techno-human condition.”[7] In contrast, the religious domain is sourced in, and thus relates to—as its reference point—that which transcends that condition. Even though AI represents “a true cognitive-industrial revolution” that will lead to “complex epochal transformations,” that revolution and the reverberating transformations emanating from it are firmly in this world. Even the ethical dimension of AI is likewise in the human condition; we need not be creatures radically open to beyondness to be able to address the ethical implications of AI.

I conclude, moreover, that only the religious domain includes the radically transcendent and in fact can be defined or characterized in terms of it. This is not to say that the domain cannot influence or be influenced by other domains; rather, that which makes domains distinct should not be skipped over lest category mistakes and faulty overreaches occur. Historically, the Church has overreached in superimposing the religious domain on that of natural science (e.g., astronomy). Likewise, the domain of history has been allowed to overreach in serving as a litmus test for religious truth or meaning, as if the latter were only valid pending credible historical evidence of an event or a person. Several neighborhood children at play who run onto the front yard of an elderly couple’s house and make noise—something I remember from my own childhood—is one thing; should they start moving the lawn furniture around and demand that the couple keep the chairs in their new positions—would be much worse. Imposing from one’s own domain implies a basic lack of recognition (or respect) of boundaries and thus of domains as distinct territories. The ethics house may be next door to the religious house, but the two are distinct. Similarly, AI might be next to human understanding, but the two are distinct. That algorithms are “neither objective nor neutral” does not men that they share in human subjectivity.[8] In fact, the Pope claimed that AI is not even really generative; it does not “develop new analyses or concepts.”[9] Instead, it “repeats those that it finds, giving them an appealing form.”[10] Whether this is so or not is beyond my fields of study, but my point is merely that a fundamental qualitative distinction between us and machines exists, and that the ethical dimension, as distinct from the religious, pertains to AI from our side.

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1, Joseph Tulloch, “Pope to G7: AI Is ‘Neither Objective nor Neutral,” Vatican News, June 14, 2024.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

On the Role of Free Will in Redemption

The film, The Professor and the Madman (2019), is based on the true story of James Murray, the editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19^th century, and William Minor, who contributed over 10,000 entries. Minor, who suffered from schizophrenia, was at the time a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for having killed Jack Merrett under the recurrent delusion of being chased. In the film, this narrative serves as the basis to explore whether even people who think they are unredeemable can nevertheless be redeemed, and thus freed, from their own guilt.

The full essay is "The Professor and the Madman."

Living Ritual

I contend that for a religious ritual to be “alive” is for it to be responsive to spiritual truths as they are played out by or among the people who have gathered even just as spectators rather than participants. In liturgy, the readings and the ritual itself can stimulate a spiritual state of mind (un état de l’esprit—this last word alone signifying the connection), which in turn can even unconsciously prompt conduct that can be observed to be religious (or spiritual) in nature. For a ritual to be alive is for it to incorporate such conduct in order to draw attention to the underlying religious truth manifesting in one or more persons. The antagonist in this drama is the strict literalist who goes inflexibly by the letter of the ritual’s laws rather than the spirit thereof, ignoring that only the spirit rises and thus is capable of lifting humans in general and in a liturgical context in particular.

The full essay is at "Living Ritual."