When religious tolerance appears in the literature on ecumenicism, religious pluralism, and other modes of peaceful coexistence, it is frequently juxtaposed with the words “beyond,” “more than,” and “is not enough.” To be sure, it is generally conceded in these contexts, tolerance is an improvement on intolerance, and, relatively speaking, then, a fine thing, as far it goes. For many, however, it does not go very far. “Religious tolerance,” we are told, “however virtuous, does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another.”Footnote ² It is thought to lack strenuousness, and hence, to be unsuited for modern moral conflicts, which tend increasingly toward the polarity characteristic of war: “Tolerance, especially of the knee-jerk variety. . . works as long as people can slink off by themselves, avoiding contact, and never facing up to what they truly believe.”Footnote ³ No one says, “I am fighting for [fill in the blank] with all the toleration I can muster.”

Consistent with the implicit scolding of cowardice in complaints about tolerance is the sense that it does too little—that it “can be a very passive kind of thing.”Footnote ⁴ Being excessively passive seems to go along with being insufficiently positive. Thus, for some, tolerance “is only a negative (political) principle, lacking the positive, affective mutual engagement called for by a stable society.”Footnote ⁵ Putting up with the existence of what are taken to be the offensive beliefs and practices of others does not quiet the desire to wound those others in some way, or heal the memories of the imagined or all-too-real offenses from which that desire continually draws fresh fuel.

If, for the sake of argument, we were to take tolerance to be defective in the respects just mentioned, how should it be supplemented? The means and aims of the movement beyond tolerance to something better often point towards a religiously-inflected version of Kantian cosmopolitanism, understood as “an attitude of recognition, respect, openness, interest, beneficence, and concern toward other human individuals, cultures, and peoples as members of one global community.”Footnote ⁶ This common understanding of cosmopolitanism, as variously seen in the contexts of Christian ecumenicism, “wider ecumenicism,” and religious pluralism, varies from Kant's own version of cosmopolitanism, which he noted was concerned “not with philanthropy, but with right.”Footnote ⁷ More specifically, Kant stipulated that “cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality,” and that this mode of hospitality “means the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his arrival in another's country.”Footnote ⁸ The right is negative, not positive. Ethically attractive extrapolations from Kant's norm of “universal hospitality” aside, his aim, as stipulated in Perpetual Peace, is not to bring peoples and individuals alike together in friendship but rather to secure peace through respect for individuals in their capacity as bearers of universal human rights. The norm of respect for human beings as self-legislators of universal moral law is distinctively Kantian, whereas already in antiquity norms of openness were associated with modes of cosmopolitanism.

What is the “attitude of recognition” that is said to figure in Kantian cosmopolitanism? His brand of respect does not demand “recognition” in the now-familiar sense of mutual interest in and deference to, as well as good will and friendliness towards other individuals. Peoples, taken collectively, are not required to be friendly to one another, true though it is that the cosmopolite is supposed to be interested in them as objects of curiosity. Indeed, in his discussion of what he takes to be the natural predispositions of people of different nationalities, Kant singles out “the Spaniard” on the grounds that he “does not learn from foreigners [or]. . . travel in order to get to know other peoples.”Footnote ⁹ To his mind, other peoples do a bit better in this vein. Of Spaniards, Kant complains:

In the Kantian scheme, then, respect for universal human dignity ought properly to be supplemented by curiosity, exercised, for example, through travel. But curiosity about the world and about “peoples” need not be supplemented by feelings of “concern.” For Kant, affects and inclinations, including those pertaining to love and concern, are not a source of binding moral law: “Love as inclination cannot be commanded; but beneficence from duty when no inclination impels us. . . is practical. . . . Such love resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy.”Footnote ¹¹ The cosmopolite need not “care” about people as individuals, much less as members of particular religious traditions.

Kantian cosmopolitanism is consistent with, although more expansive than, the quasi-Lockean religious toleration that features in the laws of liberal nations, which stress respect for other people's rights. Kantian cosmopolitanism supplements toleration, understood in its minimal sense as the practical respect of civil rights, with 1) the norm of equal innate human dignity, 2) the norm of universal hospitality, 3) the norm of principled respect grounded in universal moral law, and 4) the norm of disinterested curiosity in “peoples” in the world around oneself.

It would seem that we cannot get from respect to “recognition” in the robust sense in which it functions in the context of contemporary religious pluralist and ecumenical thought by turning to Kant, whose notions of cosmopolitanism (particularly those pertaining to equal human dignity and universal moral law) are arguably foundational for the universalist dimensions of such thought. Nor, looking slightly further ahead in history, can we get it from Hegel, the ostensible father of modern recognition.Footnote ¹² Must we, then, have recourse to theological resources in order to think about recognition as it pertains specifically to religion? How was “recognition” understood prior to Hegel, in the context of Western religious traditions? Might earlier modes of “religious recognition” (4) be recovered, so that the West might use them in attempting to move beyond norms of religious toleration? Why invoke recognition at all in this context?

In his new book, Risto Saarinen, Professor of Ecumenics at the University of Helsinki and a Lutheran theologian, argues that recognition, far from being exclusively a secular notion of Hegelian parentage, and the late descendent of less developed—and less demanding—notions of “mere” toleration, should be understood as a theological concept that was already robust in the ancient (Latinate Christian) world. He seeks to defend the claim that “recognition is a theological topic that is relatively independent of post-Hegelian philosophical developments” (4). In order to support this argument, the book provides “the first intellectual history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to the present day. It connects the history of religion and theology with philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition” (4).

Saarinen has chosen a topic that relates closely to his longstanding interest in religious dialogue between Christian denominations and relational practices such as gift-giving, as well as intellectual history. Saarinen's new book is written for academic specialists in historical and systematic Christian theology; it may prompt interest in recognition among scholars of other religions, and of religious pluralism, as well.

Because Saarinen believes that “a relatively stable terminology designating the phenomenon of religious recognition can already be found in early Christianity” (26), he does not attempt to separate various conceptions of recognition from a concept of it that is understood as “a cluster concept with several dimensions” (29). This “cluster concept” is historically situated, deriving from the use of the Latin verbs cognosco, agnosco, and recognosco, as well as the substantives cognitio, agnitio, and recognitio, and looking back to the Greek gi[g]nosko, epignosko, gnosis, and epignosis. His account of religious recognition in this context is purposefully a bit elastic. Religious recognition, then, features a cognitive element, in that “somebody or something is perceived and known in the sense that the recognizer can say who or what is concerned” (27). To this is added a dimension of attachment: “the recognizer not only perceives the recognizee but also attaches a certain positive value or commitment to him/her/it” (27). To attachment, which entails “involvement and creating a social bond,” Saarinen adds as a third feature of recognition, “availability,” by which he means that “at least two participants are able to relate to one another as ‘the recognizer’ and ‘the recognizee’” (28).

Unlike toleration, recognition in Saarinen's account does not proceed from less to more demanding formulations; rather he claims that in Christianity, recognition is demanding from the outset. In this historical context, love and gratitude appear as “upward and downward instances of recognition” (31).

From this point forward, things become more difficult, as Saarinen presents a complicated rubric of the different modes of recognition—so complicated that readers may find themselves repeatedly having to turn back to the pages detailing that rubric (I did this so many times that I finally had to write them down on a piece of paper). In brief, a mode of recognition called R1 (in which A recognizes B) is distinguished from R1U (“upward” recognition from lower to higher, as from a servant to a master), R1D (“downward” recognition from higher to lower), and R1E (recognition between equals), as well as from R0 (an act of seeking recognition), R0F (in which “B has a favourable attitude toward potential As”), R1D/E, RD/E, and Rdef (the last of which contains elements of F, D, U, and E) (35–40). Relational recognition may occur within the self as well as between selves; in that context, Saarinen also works with “A” and “B” (235).

The presumed academic audience for this book is implicit not only in this rubric but also in the habits of patient, detailed argumentation employed here. Saarinen is measured in making even fairly modest claims and, in response to his own posited questions tends, to settle diplomatically for “yes and no” with qualifications.Footnote ¹³ That said, the book's central claim—that a theological mode of recognition exists independently of Hegel and that post-Hegelian philosophy is indebted to that tradition—is a bold, very well-defended, and, I think, eminently defensible one, albeit, as I shall suggest, for different reasons from the ones cited primarily by Saarinen. This book should open up new avenues of research regarding religious recognition within the study of Christianity and other religious traditions as well.

Overall, the book aims to provide a historical and theologically systematic account of recognition as it figures mostly in Christian theology prior to and beyond Hegel. More pointedly, the book aims to “deconstruct the process of recognition,” in order to fulfill its intellectual and theologically normative aims. The latter include the recovery of a hitherto unrecognized tradition of religious recognition that may be employed as a supplement to toleration. Consistent with the aims of ecumenical and pluralist thought, Saarinen seeks to make “religious recognition” available as a normative resource. In order to go beyond toleration to something more than secular Kantian cosmopolitanism and its variants, he needs to go back before Hegel, locate ancient “religious recognition,” and usher it, intact, into the proverbial contemporary “multicultural and multireligious world” (1). Such a world, Saarinen remarks, “requires new personal attitudes and societal strategies to enable peaceful coexistence among different convictions. In Western democracies, toleration has been the prevailing attitude and societal framework promoting such coexistence” (1).

As Saarinen correctly observes, “While most democratic thinkers agree that toleration continues to be vitally important in our times, many argue that it needs to be complimented by other attitudes and strategies” (1). Thus, we face the predicament sketched by Bernard Williams and others that is mentioned at the beginning of this essay: toleration does not ask us to lose our hatred of or prejudice against certain practices, beliefs, and ways of life. It just asks us to permit their existence without engaging in interference or inflicting injury. No individuals have to change their feelings; they just have to restrain them to the point that the laws protecting the tolerated are not transgressed. The low standard of toleration, necessary though it may be, is just one step towards the development of the mutual regard and affirmation associated with recognition.

From the perspective of intellectual history, Saarinen aims to show that

This view suggests what is, for Saarinen, the distinctive aim of “religious recognition” as such, which entails “producing a self-definition and self-preservation of the recognizer” (251). His objective is to show that this distinctive aim was in place from early Christianity onwards. Importantly, at no point does religious recognition emphasize equality. Rather, from its putative “ancient beginnings, and increasingly during the medieval and Reformation periods, religious recognition is considered to be a relational act that involves and redefines its participants” (246). In this context, “the personal identity of the individual who performs the act of recognition is not an unchanging substance but is expressed in terms of her attachment and social bond. She is qualified as a ‘servant,’ a ‘bride,’ a ‘lover,’ or a ‘believer’” (246).

According to the Recognitions, recognition has interpersonal, human-divine, and truth-regarding dimensions to it. For Saarinen, interpersonal recognition in this context evokes the Aristotelian notion of anagnorisis, which entails the passage from ignorance to knowledge, while recognition in its truth-regarding capacity reflects the Pauline account of knowing the truth. In this text, Saarinen detects a pre-Hegelian association of recognition with struggle: “The one who has new awareness separates himself from earlier lords; the separation nevertheless originates with the lords who are responsible for the struggle [for truth]. . . . Separation leads to truth and liberation; it is truthful heteronomy with the absolute” (51). This interpretation assumes quite readily the usefulness of Hegelian and Kantian vocabulary in this context, even while noting that comparison with Hegel's account of the struggle for recognition would be anachronistic.

The Recognitions is but one early destination in a trajectory stretching from Aristotle and the New Testament to modernity. This trajectory runs through some little-known as well as some much better known sources, including, among others, Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs, Martin Luther's Lectures on Romans, Marsilio Ficino's fifteenth-century Neoplatonist treatise, De Amore, John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, a text dubbed Religion, eine Anglegenheit des Menschen by eighteenth-century German Protestant theologian Johann Joachim Spalding (the discussion of which is excellent), and several texts by modern ecumenical thinkers, both Protestant and Catholic.

The two chapters following the introduction are structured chronologically, moving from “The Latin Traditions” to “The Modern Era.” Chapter Four then offers a “systematic outline” of religious recognition. This last chapter concludes with reflections on the connections between the theological accounts of recognition detailed here and current philosophical discussions of recognition that characteristically ignore its religious dimensions. Here, for example, we learn that “religious recognition is a strong attitude in our sources that changes and transforms the person who recognizes. Normally, the object of recognition, the recognizee, also undergoes. . . change. Especially in older texts, recognition is a much stronger attitude than toleration. . . which does not question the position of one who tolerates” (242).

The discussions of particular theologians, though brief, are generally of high quality. Saarinen is very good at showing patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the treatment of religious recognition. His carefully structured prose, which is notably unadorned with stylistic flourishes,Footnote ¹⁴ clearly shows significant variations among accounts of religious recognition. One example of his approach, which features discrete discussions followed by summary accounts that reveal relationships, will have to suffice in this context:

Carefulness about differentiating between modern and pre-modern understandings of recognition is a hallmark of this book. Mercifully, there is no attempt to pretend that concepts such as “otherness” in the post-Hegelian Levinas-ian sense figured in the ancient world. Beyond that, Saarinen makes a very interesting point about the treatment of the theme of recognition in the history of modern Christian theology, namely that it is unevenly treated and that it does not show up where and when one might have good cause to expect it:

Strikingly, Saarinen remarks, there is “one genre of theological literature in which recognition is discussed throughout the twentieth century. The ecumenical movement has employed this term consistently since the 1920s, reflecting the concept of recognition extensively, especially in the 1970s” (173). The apparent mystery deepens, given that “paradoxically, discussions on ecumenical recognition faded in the 1980s, some time before the philosophers started to employ the concept” (173).

Had Saarinen more explicitly included a discussion not merely of Christian ecumenicism but also religious pluralism in his account, I would speculate that the uneven and at points paradoxical fortunes of religious recognition in modern theology might be better accounted for. The mode of equal, affirmative, potentially loving recognition featured in religious pluralism represents a response and supplement to toleration. Toleration itself, of the post-Lockean, law-bound variety, was the dominant response to intra-Christian religious dissention, and toleration could accommodate varying degrees of recognition understood as a voluntary, subjective phenomenon.

Recognition becomes prominent in the context of ecumenicism during the very period when Christian denominations start to be imagined by other Christian denominations as equal religious “others” along the lines by which non-Christian religions are recognized in the context of religious pluralism. Once the idea of recognition was joined to the idea of equal cosmopolitan right, the notion of a universal right to equal recognition became a foregone conclusion. The idea of other religions as equals, while functioning in some sense as a development of the norms underpinning the wider ecumenicism, ultimately runs counter to the notion of all people as “anonymous Christians” that features in that context.Footnote ¹⁵ Since the problem addressed by pluralism is one of a world joined by technology but not joined by social attitudes (love, affirmation, etc.) that make closeness tolerable, then recognition comes into play. Ironically but unsurprisingly, estranged factions within Christianity needed to be made into rights-bearing strangers in order for a new mode of closeness to be secured through recourse to the notion of love for the stranger. As the stranger becomes the neighbor, and love for the stranger-neighbor becomes paradigmatic in ethical and theological terms, relative familiars need to become more strange in order to be better loved.

In the 1980s, as religious pluralism ascended to greater prominence, recognition needed to be rehabilitated and, more specifically, rendered both more abstract (since it applies to “the other” as such) and more intimate, such that love for the other-as-neighbor-and-stranger is demanded. The norm of equality had to be accommodated. The mode of recognition we see in contemporary religious pluralism is the result of this accommodation. Here, we might rethink what Saarinen calls the “new personal attitudes and societal strategies” called for by the “multicultural and multireligious world” (1).

To my mind, the concepts of religious recognition that become relevant in the context of pluralism (as the complex of principles and practices designed for such a world) are those found particularly in the ancient Near East and in at least one book of the Hebrew Bible, because of the extent to which both, their significant differences aside, use fictions of familial bonds that can be formalized to forge modes of commonality between strangers. Religious pluralism requires such notions of constructed kinship, albeit along very different lines, because of 1) its emphasis on the stranger in an expansive sense that includes foreigners, 2) its utilization of both obligatory and voluntary notions of love, and 3) its political dimensions, including attention to power.

Briefly, and again, speculatively, the concept of recognition between vassal and suzerain, for example, lends itself to dramatic reinvention (indeed, transvaluation) in the 1980s-vintage religious pluralism, which commonly aimed at the articulation of purportedly shared (or at least potentially shareable) stipulations, rules, and norms.Footnote ¹⁶ One thinks, for example, of the guidelines for dialogue issued by the World Council of Churches, as well as the work of individual theologians, such as Paul Knitter and Leonard Swidler, the latter of whom went so far as to compose a “Decalogue for Dialogue” in 1983.Footnote ¹⁷ In the “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” drafted by Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng and endorsed at the 1993 World Parliament of Religions, we find an attempt to formalize a post-legal common ethic that governs the hearts of religious humankind while creating stipulations for conduct.Footnote ¹⁸ No one religion is suzerain or vassal with respect to another. The suzerain is excised from the code altogether. Within the code, all are brothers and sisters, but oddly, brothers and sisters in need of stipulations concerning the means and aims of their bonds of love. While non-systematic norms of uncoded “recognition” were ebbing in 1980s ecumenical theology, a sort of retro-covenantalism (with stipulations, declarations, and the like) was cropping up in religious pluralism. This covenantalism was arguably as much inspired by John Rawls’ massively influential reimagination of social contract philosophy in his 1971 A Theory of Justice as it was by theological declarations, such as those made during the course of Vatican II. Thus, it tends heavily toward articulating ostensibly basic or minimal commitments or agreements with respect to proceduralism that are to be consented to before dialogue can begin.

In the wake of the turn toward recognition that followed upon the publication of Axel Honneth's The Struggle for Recognition in 1992, pluralist thought absorbed the philosophical recovery of recognition and swerved away from codes toward relationships. Here is where the concept of recognition from the book of Ruth comes in, which is often employed in both homiletic and ideologically-inflected theology. Writing in 2005, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that

Recognition here is not codified. It requires no stipulations and goes against expectations to the point that it prompts incredulity. It consists of the “kindness of strangers.”Footnote ²⁰

With respect to Saarinen's book, given that it aims to define and recover a neglected tradition of “religious” rather than solely “Christian” recognition, it would have been valuable to have a more wide-ranging perspective, especially with respect to the recognition of rulers that is such a central theological concept in the ancient Near Eastern treaty literature and the Hebrew Bible. There is, of course, nothing whatsoever wrong with a book primarily on “Christian recognition,” but that is arguably not quite “religious recognition.”

Finally, the assumption in this book that toleration is less “strong” and demanding than recognition deserves more critical attention. Because toleration has been legally recognized in the West, it may seem that deferring to its constraints is no more demanding than obeying any other settled law. Should one try to practice toleration of Judaism or Christianity in Saudi Arabia, however, one may find such deference very strong and demanding indeed, even to the point that it may demand the sacrifice of one's life. In liberal democracies, toleration may succeed to the extent that it does only because it is enshrined and defended by the law. If it were undemanding, why would the law have been dragged into the matter in the first place? Exhortation could have taken care of the problem.

Unlike toleration, recognition, in the sense of feelings of esteem and respect, cannot (at least yet) be legally regulated. When one norm is backed up by the law and another is not, their relative strength cannot be readily compared. If I feel or do not feel esteem toward someone of another faith, or indeed for religion more generally, no one need necessarily know of that. The ebbs and flows of recognition go undetected by the law.

When ecumenical or religious pluralist thought calls for movement beyond tolerance, it is often suggested that we need increased “mutual understanding” of religious others and, more maximally, that we ought to esteem, affirm, or even love religious others as such. But, arguably, we cannot do any or all of these if we still view them through lenses colored by hatred, prejudice, and implacable memories. Thus, ecumenism and pluralism, unlike toleration, seem to demand not only that we “lose” our negative affects (and the memories that sustain them) by some undefined means, but also that we replace them with some sort of positive affect, such as that entailed in recognition.

What are the reasons that a given person in a particular situation might come to believe that he or she should not only respect religious others (as manifested in non-interference with their rights of expression, association, and free exercise) but, beyond that, also recognize them? Is there some other prompt to voluntary recognition of others that can evade entirely the question of the inequality of esteem and love, and resultant painful disappointments? What happens when recognition-fueled engagement with religious others leads not to esteem or affection but to estrangement and grief, as is potentially the case with any mode of engagement?

In normative terms, it is hard to make the case that one “must” feel esteem for (much less rejoice over) someone else's religious conviction—or indeed, religious conviction in general in a way that is respectful of the conscience of others, and of their freedom and autonomy. Morally respectable people may well think that all religions are opium for the masses, Platonism for the people, breeding grounds for intellectual dishonesty, collections of colorful but childish folk superstitions, etc. One may respect the persons in question while finding their views to be sadly reductive and perhaps as self-congratulatory as they are uninformed. It is, after all, possible not only respectfully to disagree with someone but to feel frustration, indignation, and even grief that someone else may take something that one believes to be a source of truth and joy as a pathetic, quaint, or offensive delusion. Such feelings are, I think, inevitably part of the everyday experience of closely interacting with others who hold very different understandings of what it means to be a good thinker, a good citizen, a good friend, a good Kantian, a good Hindu or Christian or humanist (or whatever), and a good human being.

Current ecumenical and pluralist thought alike, then, is faced with the challenge of self-definition and reflection with respect to the ethos of recognition, which varies across cultures and historical moments. Such reflection could conceivably benefit from a consideration of the extent to which modes of recognition may entail frailty, fickleness, or desperation. For example, esteem may be granted lavishly where it is not warranted and then withdrawn. Looking up to someone everyone else enjoys despising is very difficult. Love itself can fail to see and choose not to know. We may think we recognize the truth, and believe that we do love it, while living and engaging with others in such a way that gives the lie to our pretensions.

How are we to recognize defects in our habits of recognition? Self-knowledge as to our limitations in this capacity would seem to be available only through actively undertaking the effort to recognize, and being open to acknowledgment and correction of our errors when we fail. But just what would such an effort entail? What is the worth of recognition that must be willed? With recognition of any sort (including that of truth) comes judgment as to the nature of the thing recognized. To take recognition seriously is to ask not only why we cannot recognize what we tolerate but also how we would have to live differently if, in fact, we were to find that we do.