Kiefer, Anselm (1945–) © Copyright. Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven (Jeder Mensch steht unter seiner Himmelskugel)Footnote 1
The field cannot be well seen from within the field.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”
Near the center of Anselm Kiefer's watercolor, Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven, stands an inverted half-globe in the middle of a field. We know that it is winter, for patches of snow partially obscure the bare ground, which is itself marked by receding, interrupted lines of exposed roots and clumps of dirt where crops once grew and could, one imagines, grow again. Within the clear blue dome a small human figure in a dark green military uniform raises his right arm. His apparent salute is directed at no one in particular, since he is utterly isolated.
One might be reminded of the subject of Robert Frost's poem, “The Most of It,” who “thought he kept the universe alone/For all the voice in answer he could wake;/Was but the mocking echo of his own.”Footnote 2 Yet Frost's solitary thinker is ultimately provided with a corrective (albeit not the one for which he longed) to his illusion of being separate and apart. Here, there is no remedy in sight. The fact that the human figure wears a uniform, however, suggests that he is or was a member of a group or at least that he inhabits a world that contains uniforms and, by extension, the soldiers and officers of the law who wear them. This is not, then, an image of an isolated subject in a state of nature. The field he stands on was flattened and plowed and planted; whatever grew there was grown in straight lines and was apparently harvested at some point. But we can only infer the existence of other people here from the evidence of their past actions. In the “present” of the painting, there is no longer any sign of their presence nor any suggestion of how such people (should they be allowed to register in consciousness) might put things in common with one another though conversation, commerce, or other collective enterprises, including what Kenneth Burke once called “the ultimate disease of cooperation: war.”Footnote 3 The human figure is spared from conflict (for which he is, nonetheless, outfitted should it arise) in being cut off from mutual human love and deprived of community.
Kiefer's painting has commonly been read with reference to his exploration of the frighteningly vital afterlife of Nazism and fascism in European culture.Footnote 4 The artist himself, however, has indicated that the painting does not concern totalitarianism and noted that the gesture depicted was, in fact, “supposed to be like a lightning rod.”Footnote 5 He offers an alternative perspective from which to consider the painting, observing that “Each man has his own dome, his own perceptions, his own theories. There is no one god for all. Each man has his own, and sometimes [one person's worldview] overlaps with or intersects another's.”Footnote 6 This, then, is a universe of nonhierarchical multiplicity, in which everyone worships his or her own deity. There is no God of all creation nor any other discernible power to keep people commonly in awe. One might imagine that such a world would appear as an exceedingly messy and violent Hobbesian war of all against all. Instead the scene we encounter is characterized by a sense of stillness and by a detachment so intense that other human beings have vanished from the landscape. The painting, then, can be taken either as a portrait of extreme relativism—according to which there is no “truth” but only points of view that may or may not overlap—or as a portrait of extreme exclusivism, according to which there is only one truth and one way of approaching it, all other ways (and all “others” as such) having been reduced to non-existence, registered in this case as non-appearance in the field.
The title of this highly ambiguous painting suggests that we are all standing under our own domes of heaven.Footnote 7 Does this mean that we encounter everything within our immediate field of vision through what we take to lie beyond it, with the effect that our view of the earth is colored by our understanding of heaven? Or merely that we all see things through the lens of a particular worldview, as colored by our situation, presuppositions, and experience of acculturation? The title of the painting refers to “everyone,” but the artist seems to inhabit, if not an overarching canopy extending over other, lower sub-horizons, then at least some place from which their status as partial worldviews may be accurately perceived. The field viewed from within the monochromatic dome would necessarily appear to be blue as well, but we know that there is a view beyond it from the mere fact that the painting itself contains other colors. In this, the artist's-eye view puts into question the claim posited by the title.
If, for the sake of a thought experiment, one were to imagine some way in which the tiny figure under the dome might transcend his predicament, of what would it consist? Here I shall consider this question in the context of religious pluralist thought, with special attention to the issue of transcendence. The central claim of this paper is that religious pluralism attempts to arrive at a new mode of transcendence which incorporates two conflicting modes of transcendence. At the same time, religious pluralism must resist positing itself as a comprehensive, definitive mode of transcendence. This resistance is the condition of religious pluralism's commitment to a merely partial transcendence, and with it, an openness to multiple understandings of transcendence. Yet that commitment is endangered when religious pluralism singles out impartialist norms of justice as the primary means by which to judge all other modes of transcendence, including those informed by notions of love.
The paper proceeds as follows: first, I review some current and past scholarship on transcendence as it pertains to religious pluralism. With reference to Kiefer's painting, I pose a series of questions about the problem of accommodating the multiple understandings of transcendence which the existence of different “domes of heaven” suggests. I pursue these questions through a discussion of several important figures in religious pluralist thought, while developing the argument that religious pluralism attempts to combine vertical (philosophical and intellectual) and horizontal (social and affective) modes of transcendence.Footnote 8 I then discuss various understandings of human and divine relationship as they figure with regard to the preference for impartialist norms of justice and love in religious pluralist thought. Finally, I suggest some ways in which religious pluralism might serve as a context in which to pose questions about affective and intellectual obstacles to transcendence as well as about the means of moving beyond them.
Transcendence, Radical Otherness, and Ambiguous Others
In surveying the literature on transcendence in philosophy of religion and related fields from the past fifty years or so, one frequently finds “transcendence” described with reference to its putative loss, denial, disappearance, or even death.Footnote 9 One does not come away from such a survey with the impression that, as Karl Heim observed in 1935, “the problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time.”Footnote 10 Yet it seems too much to observe, as does Jeffrey Kosky in an essay published in 2004, that “to write on transcendence … runs counter to every dominant movement and voice of twentieth-century culture.”Footnote 11 As I shall suggest here, while transcendence has not been transcended, it has arguably been transformed. I begin by considering a modern attempt to counter the dominant Western account of transcendence by positing a version of it to which multiple religious and philosophical traditions could be regarded as responses.
In his seminal work of 1949, The Origin and Goal of History, Karl Jaspers pointedly rejects the Hegelian notion that “the Son of God is the axis of world history.”Footnote 12 For Hegel, “Christ—man as man—in whom the unity of God and man has appeared, has in his death, and his history generally, himself presented the eternal history of Spirit—a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as Spirit, or to become a child of God, a citizen of his kingdom.”Footnote 13 Participation in the history of Spirit (as presented in Christ) is the condition of membership in the kingdom of God. Jaspers observes that “the Christian faith is only one faith, not the faith of mankind”; hence, the view that Christ is the point towards which and from which history unfolds “suffers from the defect that it can only be valid for believing Christians.”Footnote 14
In its stead, as is commonly known, Jaspers posits an alternative axis of world history, which he locates in an “axial age” occurring around 500 B.C.E., or, more broadly, in a “spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C.”Footnote 15 During this period, an extraordinary flowering of human potential occurred in multiple locations:
Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being…. India produced the Upanishads and Buddha, and like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities…. in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato [and] the tragedians.Footnote 16
Jaspers argues that, taken together, these developments represent a new way of being human. Human beings assume their humanity, he suggests, in becoming “conscious of Being as a whole…. [The human being] experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence.”Footnote 17 The medium through which this change occurs is reflection; hence, thought, not spirit, is the engine of history. Transcendence—which is first perceived through reflection and later through symbols—“may be the space of nothingness in which everything is, this nothingness which may then suddenly become plenitude and authentic Being.”Footnote 18 In facing this void/plentitude we become aware of our own limits with regard to it and strive to transcend them. Transcendence, then, entails a going within (to “the depths of selfhood”) and a going without (to the “Being” that is beyond us, to which we exist in relation).
Here, we note only a few features of Jaspers' notion of the transcendent. First, it does not posit either society or the human “other” as the locus of transcendence.Footnote 19 Secondly, philosophy appears as a response to and means of transcendence no less than does religion.Footnote 20 Thirdly, this notion of transcendence is a common point of reference and shared horizon—not a lowest common denominator.Footnote 21 Jaspers hoped that what he regarded as his theoretical transcendence of and reorientation away from the vantage point of Christ as the definitive axis of history and existential experience would further tolerance, understood as the condition for global community.Footnote 22 The demand for tolerance reflects a particular understanding of truth. Since no one possesses the truth in full, one must converse with others; “boundless communication” is “the path along which the truth is disclosed.”Footnote 23 His notion of an axial age is meant to serve as a resource for creating a global community of meaning: “to visualize the fact of the Axial Period and make [it] the basis of our universal conception of history is to gain possession of something common to all mankind, beyond all differences of creed.”Footnote 24 Jaspers' vision of a future does not, however, entail a vision of a unity of faith: “the truth of faith lies in the multiplicity of its historical manifestations, in the self-encountering of this multiplicity through ever deeper communication.”Footnote 25 The demand for such communication testifies to our potential to attain mutual understanding through “the movement of living together,” but that movement never comes to rest in complete agreement, much less transcendent Being.Footnote 26 The “One of transcendence” is “an infinitely remote point of reference,” which means that “it cannot become the exclusive possession of an historical faith that could be enforced upon all as truth per se.”Footnote 27
By the time that Jaspers attempted to posit transcendence as a locus of common ground, the notion of it had already started to acquire an “unsavory reputation” as a source of incoherence, point of contention, and “ground of oppression.”Footnote 28 In the context of scholarship and philosophical reflection, transcendence increasingly came to appear as a potential source of intellectual embarrassment needing to be purged of its associations with the supernatural and renovated for modern use or discarded altogether.Footnote 29 Towards this end, some thinkers in the mid- to late twentieth century developed ideas of “transcendence without mythology,” “transcendence without ultimacy,” and even transcendence without transcendence.Footnote 30
The attempt to move beyond vertical notions of transcendence (whether philosophical notions of ascent to a higher truth or theological notions of a god and world above and beyond this one) is frequently associated with secularization. By 2007, when philosopher Charles Taylor set out to define what he means by the notion of a secular age, he did so with reference to the options it poses with regard to transcendence. “A secular age,” he observes, “is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable.”Footnote 31 While Taylor pointedly resists the notion that “modernity is coterminous with exclusive humanism,” he does suggest that modernity allows for the emergence, on a large scale, of a modern figure he refers to as the bounded or “buffered” self, which he distinguishes from what he calls a “porous” self.Footnote 32 The “porous” self (a figure that Taylor associates with openness to transcendence) is radically exposed to what is other than him or herself. This means that he or she may be wounded and mended by otherworldly powers and beings. He or she is “vulnerable … to benevolence and malevolence which is more than human, which resides in the cosmos or even beyond it.”Footnote 33 In contrast, “For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of … disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them.”Footnote 34 The bounded, buffered self, in other words, can practice mastery by controlling his or her exposure to otherness (human, cosmic, and divine) in a way that the porous self cannot. The porous self is open to an encounter with others and otherness that extends beyond the boundaries of the mind and the world. The possibility exists, for the porous self, that what is unseen by us and radically other than us may be real.
Against this notion of openness to the transcendent as it exists outside of mundane experience is the notion that an attempt to locate the transcendent in a timeless, otherworldly place detracts from our attention to time-bound, this-worldly experience here on earth. The idea here, which we find featured in Nietzsche and others, is that a life lived with reference to an alternative sphere of “true” existence (be it a Platonic “intelligible place” or a Jewish, Islamic, or Christian notion of heaven) represents, among other things, a diminishment of the possibilities and pleasures of worldly existence.Footnote 35 Along these latter lines, Nietzsche makes the following observation: “The ‘true world’—an idea which is no longer good for anything, no longer even obligating … consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits).”Footnote 36
While expressing her qualified sympathy with Nietzsche's critique of notions of a transcendent otherworldly sphere, philosopher Martha Nussbaum suggests that while, “directing our aspirations towards a ‘true’ world” may lead “to a denigration of our actions and relationships in this one” there is, in fact, “a great deal of room for transcendence of our ordinary humanity—transcendence, we might say, of an internal and human sort.”Footnote 37 By internal, human transcendence she means the process of “delving more deeply into oneself and one's humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result.”Footnote 38 Nussbaum posits a zero-sum relationship between internal transcendence and modes of transcendence oriented to something external to oneself and one's humanity. Attention to the former task, she suggests, if diligently pursued, would take up so much time that we would not have the leisure to attend to any other. Such a loss would implicitly amount to moral gain in her account. The impulse to go beyond ourselves is to be encouraged as long as one stays within the boundaries of oneself and one's humanity; it is when the impulse to go beyond ourselves is directed towards something so far beyond us that it is wholly other than us that, it seems, difficulties arise.
For modern moral and political philosophers, scholars of religion, and theologians, then, transcendence is a contested concept on a number of different levels. Without going too far into the wide range of debates about transcendence, here I shall suggest only a few observations concerning transcendence as it relates to religious pluralism. From a normative perspective, the most prominent versions of religious pluralism rely heavily on the notion that there is something beyond our material existence—whether a reality, deity, or truth—that transcends our limited capacity to meet and to make statements about it. According to the influential historian of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose thought is of considerable importance for understanding contemporary religious pluralism, “[d]octrinal formulations, theological systems, creeds, and the like” are “ultimately and indirectly … statements about transcendence.”Footnote 39 But “[p]rimarily and immediately they are about persons, whose faith means that they are involved in such a transcendence. The transcendence, and even the involvement, are something to which their statements may be an attempt to give intellectual expression but which those statements cannot capture but can only indicate.”Footnote 40 Throughout his oeuvre, Smith develops the idea that transcendence (whether understood as truth, reality, or God) eludes us to the point that we cannot attain unique possession of it or be uniquely possessed by it. In light of his view that transcendence transcends what we know of it or have to say about it, Smith proposes the idea of a “truth/reality that explicitly transcends conception but in so far as conceivable is that to which man's religious history has at its best been a response, human and in some senses inadequate.”Footnote 41 While privileged, intimate knowledge of transcendence is uniquely available to none, a “general human awareness” of transcendence is, he suggests, a constant “throughout history and throughout the world.”Footnote 42
Religious pluralist thought generally maintains the focus on cognitive processes that we find in Jaspers' account of the human response to the perception of transcendent Being, but it emphasizes the limits as much as the powers of human reflection in this context—or better, it emphasizes the human power to recognize the limits of our own powers in this respect and, crucially, to seek out assistance from others. Since none of us has perfect knowledge of this matter (no matter how much we reflect upon it by ourselves or with other members of our own tradition), we need to seek out others and learn from them, if we would hope to do justice to transcendence. As I shall discuss, pluralism's emphasis on the centrality of relationships and common inquiry reflects its understanding of the limitations and possibilities of human knowledge. In religious pluralist thought, the locus of transcendence shifts to include a focus on the “other” and the social, without losing its focus on individual consciousness, knowledge, and reflection.
Beyond that, while pluralism recognizes a plurality of responses to transcendent “truth/reality/God,”Footnote 43 it does not posit that all different understandings and modes of transcendence are equal. Rather, as I shall suggest, it ranks modes of transcendence that are consonant with impartialist norms over those favoring versions of justice that are more accommodating of particularity and, with it, preferential love. But since pluralism resists suggesting that it is the guardian of transcendence (and hence, in a position to rank and adjudicate claims concerning it) in the sense that the Supreme Court, for example, is the ostensible guardian of the Constitution, what are we to make of its attempts to pass judgment in this context? More broadly, how do we distinguish between better and worse or true and false claims to transcendence? Kiefer's painting, to which we now turn, offers one way of thinking through such questions.
Multiple Modes of Transcendence
In turning to Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven, we note that the painting may be taken as an image of a limited worldview which stands in need of transcendence as well as an image of an attempt at transcending the condition of mere humanity, understood as a state of material existence with no heaven beyond it or ultimate meaning within it. Existing interpretations of the painting reflect this ambiguity. Philosopher James Watson views the dome as the image of a particularistic perspective pretending to universality, an “imposed field of transcendence which always seems universal from within.”Footnote 44 For curator Nan Rosenthal, the painting contains a critique of false modes of transcendence and the systems of belief that support them: “Kiefer's title and image refer to his view that there is no single teleological system of belief such as Christianity or Marxism, appropriate for all human beings.”Footnote 45 To art historian Mark Rosenthal, “The saluting figure with the limited viewpoint imposed by the dome … is pretentious, even silly, compared to the enormity of the earth.”Footnote 46 He adds that “Kiefer's comparison of spaces shows that true transcendence can only occur by passing beyond, or in the terms of Indian philosophy, by ‘shattering’ this roof.”Footnote 47
In this account, the problem lies in the subject's confinement within an “arrogant, destructive, isolated, and limited” worldview.Footnote 48 Correspondingly, the solution lies in the shattering of the shell around him and a subsequent ascent to an uncrowded expanse beyond the ruins of the shattered enclosure. In the context of the metaphor for transcendence to which Mark Rosenthal, in quoting from Mircea Eliade, refers, “the image of shattering the roof signifies that one has abolished all situation, has rejected settling in the world and chosen absolute freedom, which, for Indian thought, implies annihilation of any conditioned world.”Footnote 49 The aim is not simply to transcend the boundaries of a given situation, but situatedness as such. In this context, one might think also of the notion of philosophical transcendence as entailing an open-ended search for wisdom, rather than the fulfillment of that search in the putative possession of truth.Footnote 50 Perhaps if the subject could somehow be prompted to wonder at the fact that religious others exist and to embark upon a program of inquiry into their existence, he or she might have reason to leave his or her dome behind. The assumption would be that the best way to change people's capacity to live in peace with religious others is to encourage the study of others' lived experiences, traditions, and sacred texts.Footnote 51
Programs of study, however, may point towards solitary contemplation or towards friendship with others. Inquiry might remedy the various intellectual and moral errors associated with a “limited viewpoint,” or it might serve only to intensify the isolation of the tiny subject. Alternatively, one might envision the project of transcending that viewpoint with reference to a direct confrontation with the immediate presence of a human other or neighbor—but who would the neighbor be in this context? Given the subject's isolation, it seems simplest to imagine the fictive neighbor as whoever happens to be at hand—the person “who is within reach in any given situation.”Footnote 52 This is the figure who Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggests should be understood as “the transcendent,” with the effect that the “question of transcendence” becomes “the question about love for one's neighbor.”Footnote 53 Authentic transcendence, which in this account is defined as “being there for others,” is available only through an encounter with the neighbor which entails “participation in the being of Jesus.”Footnote 54 Thus, the suggestion that the one might alleviate loneliness through encounter with a neighbor may be understood not merely as a question of transcendence but also as a question of membership in a corporate body and relationship with a personal deity. Far from being the simplest solution, then, the notion of encounter with the neighbor prompts the question of what sort of neighbor is being envisioned, and how one stands in relation to the neighbor with reference to the larger body of which one is or is not a part. Need the neighbor, for instance, necessarily be human, or would any sentient being suffice? Is this love the expression of some natural fellow feeling or pity for others or the fulfillment of a direct commandment by a personal god? If the latter, how does that god disclose himself?
In this context, a number of narratives of particular revelation come to mind. With regard to the idea of divine self-disclosure through love, one thinks, for instance, of the account of revelation found in Franz Rosenweig's philosophical masterwork of 1921, The Star of Redemption. Here, divine love seizes and commands an enclosed, circumscribed human soul with a force no less imperious than that of death. The isolated soul is, Rosenzweig suggests, unprepared for this disclosure. Hence, revelation must shock if it is to break through: “… love would not be the moving, the gripping, the searing experience that it is if the moved, gripped, seared soul were not conscious of the fact that up to this moment it had not been moved or gripped. Thus a shock was necessary before the self could become beloved soul.”Footnote 55 Here, the experience of being commanded by God points beyond the intimate experience of being sheltered by divine love towards the exposed and entangled world of everyday experience. In that world, the soul's response to the experience of being loved by God is revealed as love of neighbor. For Rosenzweig, this love is a matter of obedience to a commandment and response to divine initiative: before “man can turn himself over to divine will, God must first turn to man.”Footnote 56
The experience of divine love may lead toward the condition of being bound by a body of comprehensive law (with obedience to that law being understood as a means of transcendence) or, alternatively, toward the transcendence of law in favor of the spirit thought to inform it.Footnote 57 The notion of revelation—and of the love of God and neighbor that is bound up with it—carries with it tradition-specific understandings of what is being revealed, and to whom, and towards what end. The neighbor, in other words, comes to light not as a generic figure, but as part and parcel of more comprehensive notions of God, love, obligation, and community.
Not all attempts to commune with one's neighbors, of course, are governed by norms of obedient love. For example, the painting's subject could be prompted to move beyond the limits of his dome and to enter into collective action with others through the lure of organized violence or perhaps through the temporary illusion of liberation from the boundaries of one's own person found in becoming part of a crowd. The mere move from self-centeredness to other-centeredness or group-centeredness would not necessarily remedy the problem of destructive affects (such as hatred and resentment) and the defective understanding of transcendence thought to be coincident with them. In the absence of peaceful, just, or loving communities into which he might enter, it is not clear on what grounds the passage of the human figure from his dome could properly be understood as one of transcendence. If one suggests that the subject may transcend the dome by being brought to recognize the presence of other human subjects and to enter into community with them, the problem arising from the wide range of understandings of transcendence and responses to difference is reframed and expanded rather than resolved.
Historically, communities have attempted to settle or move beyond the problems arising from the existence of different domes of heaven through such means as war, political revolution, and lawmaking (of both secular and religious varieties), as well as by the promulgation of doctrines of enlightenment, tolerance, affective unity, and rational self-interest. Such attempts aim at the unification of different domes under a larger canopy, in the name of the God of all creation, the love of wisdom, the good of the planet, a spirit of compassion for living beings, or a more just and loving world. Few among us would reject outright the notion that one should hope for transcendence in this last respect. Such hope is founded on the perception that the status quo does not represent the optimal state of affairs—an observation that seems difficult to refute.
The problem is that because multiple accounts of transcendence—some of which focus on social transcendence, others on various modes of internal transcendence, and still others on a transcendent God or state of being—involve different understandings of such goods and because such understandings are frequently mutually exclusive, attempts to translate ideas of transcendence into practice have tended to prompt conflicts within communities as well as between them. These conflicts may arise from the refusal of particular groups or individuals to go along with a project of collective transcendence that some have decided needs to take place for the good of all.
The need to transcend the violence and harm that follows from disordered responses to the phenomena of particularity and difference is no less pressing than that of countering defective attempts to transcend them altogether. How then may a given community counteract the threat of outbursts of active enmity (as well as that of constant, low-grade hostility) that follows from the co-existence in proximity of multiple “domes of heaven” without positing strong demands for the transcendence of difference through affective unity, mass conversion, or philosophical enlightenment? Absent the protection of domes, on the one hand, or something close to total transcendence of them, on the other, how are individual and collective subjects with different understandings of transcendence to live together in the same field under a common sky? One answer that comes immediately to mind is religious pluralism.
Religious Pluralism as a Mode of Transcendence
Generally speaking, religious pluralist thought emphasizes the importance of “new cooperative relationships that transcend old boundaries”Footnote 58—with those “old boundaries” being understood with reference both to the affective boundaries of fear and hatred as well as to the intellectual boundaries of ignorance, untruth, and misunderstanding. The “new cooperative relationships” between religious others at which pluralism aims are thought to offer enhanced access to truth and mutual understanding through the affective medium of friendship and neighborly love. In transcending obstacles of fear and instinctive repugnance to arrive at a new mode of affective relationship with religious others (through the practice of inter-religious dialogue or in the course of informal encounters and shared activities) one transcends ignorance and prejudice to arrive at a more abstract knowledge of otherness as well. In this sense, religious pluralism seems to promise intellectual and social transcendence at the same time: at least notionally, to practice interreligious dialogue is to purge oneself of negative affects toward religious others in the very act of acquiring new knowledge about another equally valid way of existing in relationship with the divine—and perhaps insight into the divine itself. This promise is also a demand: as Michael Kogan puts it, “pluralist principles require self-transcendence and oppose egocentricity, whether it be an egocentricity of the individual or the group.”Footnote 59 Self-transcendence amounts to “an opening of mind and heart,” which is “the very essence of applied religion” as such, as well as of pluralist principles.Footnote 60
The practice of encountering religious others in the context of interreligious dialogue (as well as everyday experience) in turn prompts the search for and discovery of theoretical insights into the grounds and significance of these new modes of relationship. Yet to the extent that religious pluralism attempts to arrive at and provide for vertical transcendence through the assumption of an impartial stance—a view of the field above and beyond the field—as accomplished fact and self-sufficing end, it limits the possibilities for the horizontal transcendence at which it aims and upon which it depends. The tension between the two modes of transcendence at which pluralism aims arises, I suggest, as a result of conflict between rival norms of love and justice pertaining to relations between religious others, between the human and divine (or cosmic) other, and even between the seeker of knowledge and the unknown.Footnote 61 One mode of transcendence entails rising above partial, particularistic claims to truth—and with them, the fierce passions attached to such claims—and attaining objectivity; the other entails transcendence of one set of affects (suspicion, anger, hatred of what differs from us or fear of what is unknown to us) with another set of affects, namely, those suggestive of love and friendship, which are not any less particularistic than their negative counterparts. The latter, horizontal mode of transcendence does not require the particular mode of justice that is impartiality: rather, one might suggest, it aims to give in gracious excess of what is strictly due and to give the most where the need is greatest. This option demands the unequal and partial treatment of equal moral subjects.
On a normative and practical level, religious pluralism aims to transcend violence while protecting difference which means preserving particularity. It seeks to allow for separateness while encouraging dialogue, thereby establishing the conditions for friendship, mutual understanding, and, in some accounts, neighborly love. In this, it seeks to improve upon what is generally regarded as the primary early modern solution to the challenge of grappling with religious particularity and difference: the secular doctrine of toleration.Footnote 62 As Abdulaziz Sachedina suggests, “religious pluralism appeals for an active engagement with the religious other not merely to tolerate, but to understand. Toleration does not require an active engagement with the other. It makes no inroads on mutual ignorance.”Footnote 63 In contrast, religious pluralism requires not only engagement but engagement suggestive of cosmopolitan public spiritedness and affective sincerity: “A morally and spiritually earnest search for common undertakings … can lead the way for society as a whole. Religious pluralism can function as a working paradigm for a democratic, social pluralism in which people of diverse religious backgrounds are willing to form a community of global citizens.”Footnote 64
Early modern doctrines of toleration, with their emphasis on reason and self-interest (as well as Christian charity) as motives for refraining from discord, did not encourage the transcendence of boundaries through an earnest, open-hearted willingness to seek out religious others and engage them in dialogue about their convictions in the hopes of forming a new sort of community. Emerging secular doctrines of democratic individualism, in fact, pointed towards a world in which people could keep everything, including their religious beliefs and practices, largely within the circle of their own concerns. By the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville was able to observe correctly that “[i]ndividualism is a reflective and tranquil sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men and withdraw into the circle of his family and friends, so that, having created a little society for his own use, he gladly leaves the larger society to take care of itself.”Footnote 65 Among other things, modern religious pluralism, with its insistence upon engagement and dialogue between “little societies,” aims to counter the ethos of parochial self-involvement associated with individualism.
Yet while pluralism represents one moral, political, theological, and philosophical option among others, plurality (as well as the various attempts to formulate theoretical and practical responses to it) represents an inescapable feature of modern experience. Not everyone, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith observed more than twenty years ago, has responded in the same way to the phenomenon of religious plurality:
The efforts of some groups to hang on to what in the past served to introduce them … to transcendence by neglecting, disparaging, or making war on those outside their own groups, is proving disastrous; [sic] denying or rejecting pluralism. Much greater truth, as well as much greater goodness, is attained by recognizing more transcendence rather than less: by recognizing that both the truth, and the goodness, that one has known transcends the form in which one has traditionally known it…. One also, in this process, discovers—and this is decidedly healthy—that the particular form through which one's own group was being introduced to transcendence was in fact a particular, human, finite form: flawed, like everything human; mediating transcendence yet in perilously earthen vessels.Footnote 66
In terms borrowed from the painting we have been discussing, this discovery amounts to the recognition that one has been seeing the field from within a dome and that there is another, better way of seeing to be had beyond it. Smith's argument for “more transcendence” is grounded in his account of truth, our partial, flawed grasp of which “enables us to transcend, if only in part, our isolationisms and subjectivity, to break out of the imprisonment of our self-centered loneliness.”Footnote 67 The task, then, is to “wrestle and strive” and “apply creative intelligence” in order “to expand one's circle of friends, so that … the divergence be superseded, in a new comprehensive understanding and mutuality…. We are not, never have human beings been stuck with the status quo. We can move to transcend it—a little; sometimes, a lot.”Footnote 68
Access to truth, in this account, begins with the recognition of the partial, incomplete nature of the means by which we were first introduced to it. We find that the boundary we took to divide heaven and earth was actually the barrier between an expansive, multi-colored field, and the narrow, monochromatic half-circle of a dome. In transcending this dome, we are led to expand our circle of friends, and to enhance our access to the truth by hearing our neighbors' accounts of it and sharing our accounts of it with them: “Every position … that human beings concoct is finite, limited, contingent, relative. Yet if each, including our own, is seen as an approximation to something higher, something ultimate and not relative, then we can proceed bravely [and] cheerfully…. We strive to bring our own approximation ever closer to the Truth and are happy to collaborate with others next door.”Footnote 69 This vision of pluralism seems to accommodate both vertical, philosophical transcendence, and horizontal, social transcendence. It suggests a means of partaking of justice and friendship on the basis and in the service of a shared commitment to truth—a commitment that demands friendship in the context of the formal study of religion as much as in encounters with religious others in the course of everyday life.Footnote 70 Here, then, is perhaps what a view of the field from within the field would entail. The view of the field is within the field rather than beyond it because it acknowledges that it, too, like the dome that it transcended, is particular, human, and finite. But at the same time, it offers “more transcendence” than the comparatively impoverished vision of transcendence to be had from within the dome.
Recent pluralist thought offers multiple accounts of transcendence, not all of which, to be sure, depend upon the acceptance of a notion of universal truth. In fact, quite a few arguments for pluralism are founded on the notion that determinate truth claims as such must themselves be transcended, as well as skepticism about transcendence (which, as I have already indicated, is sometimes figured in terms of the denial or irretrievable loss of it). Yet the critique of defective modes of transcendence requires some standard by which to assess the defects, as well as some means of adjudicating between multiple standards. For some pluralist thinkers, the task of discovering ways in which individual and collective subjects might be encouraged to think “outside the dome,” as it were, and to interact amicably (or at least, non-violently) with others, requires first an understanding that religious traditions are not best understood as domes (or any other sort of closed circle) to begin with.
Contemporary accounts of pluralism tend to envision the different religious traditions as rivers or paths (in a manner suggestive in some limited respects of earlier formulations of these notions by Sri Ramakrishna and Gandhi), rather than domes, cities, houses, or worlds—a conceptual and rhetorical choice with significant normative and theoretical implications. In this, current work in religious pluralism evokes Smith's notion that the very concept of “religion” (understood as a fixed, reified entity rather than a dynamic series of interactions between cumulative traditions and personal faith) is obsolete. What he envisioned as the imminent retirement of this concept was intended to have both affective and intellectual consequences: if the concept of “religion” were to disappear, Smith suggests, “such a disappearance could mean for the devout a truer faith in God and a truer love of their neighbor; and for scholars a clearer understanding of the of the religious phenomena that they are studying.”Footnote 71
For Diana Eck, one of the leading scholars and proponents of religious pluralism, who has acknowledged the extent to which her work has been inspired by Smith, “[r]eligions are far more like rivers than like boundaried circles or even complex structures.”Footnote 72 Hence, the understanding and visual representation of different religious traditions as self-contained circles denoting particular “religions” is deficient on intellectual grounds. She suggests that it is, in fact, “highly misleading, for every religious tradition has grown through the ages in dialogue and historical interaction with others,” adding that religious traditions are more internally complex and dynamic than the image of a circle suggests.Footnote 73
Broadly speaking, religious pluralism “affirm[s] the value of living and teaching in the presence of other truths and systems. Other approaches teach … the limitations of [one's] own views—preventing an imperialist extension of [one's] truth/faith beyond its legitimate sphere into realms where it becomes a lie or is wrongly applied.”Footnote 74 Worries about religious imperialism with regard to the proper spheres within which “truth/faith” claims must confine themselves suggest a common standard of legitimacy, based on some relatively determinate knowledge of where the boundaries between such spheres lie and a judgment that they ought be respected. It is not clear, however, apart from any such common standard, on what basis complaints about religious imperialism are to be made. Here, this common standard does not appear to be truth, since it is implied that truth claims must be strictly localized and policed in order not to offend. Perhaps a standard by which to judge the legitimate boundaries of spheres outside of which truth becomes a lie could be found in consensus of opinion. But norms of consensus, with their preference for unity at the occasional expense of minority understandings of the truth, exist in notorious tension with those of pluralism.
According to John Hick, a philosopher of religion who has played a major role in the development of pluralist thought, the legitimacy of the various modes of transcendence associated with particular religious traditions should be assessed with reference to the moral and spiritual fruit that they bear, especially as manifested in love, compassion, and goodwill towards others. Hick's far-reaching account, as is well known, postulates the existence of a noumenal, transcendent “Real” that lies beyond and that is experienced through “the great post-axial traditions.”Footnote 75 Hick views the distinction between pre-axial and post-axial religions in terms of the different sorts of access to transcendence and understandings of salvation afforded by each.Footnote 76 He suggests that “the generic concept of salvation/liberation, which takes a different form in each of the great traditions, is that of the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness”Footnote 77 and that the common measure of authentically religious transformation is “the transcendence of the ego point of view and its replacement by the devotion to or centred concentration on some manifestation of the Real, response to which produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.Footnote 78 The composite “compassion/love” exists in order to cover the very different modes of affect entailed in theistic and non-theistic religions; as such, it pointedly abstracts from the tension between them. The dramatic differences between the doctrine of love for one's fellow human beings vs. compassion for all life (and the tension between them, since the former presupposes what, from the perspective of impartial regard for all beings, might well be regarded as an unjustifiable preference for one's own species) do not really matter in this context.Footnote 79 The sharp differences within the understanding of what love for human beings entails within a given tradition (as, for example, within Christianity, where the question of the ways in which such love ought to be consonant with impartiality is contested) are similarly irrelevant here.Footnote 80 Since all tradition-specific accounts of the Real—and, it would seem, all statements about the Real, given that “our language can have no purchase on a postulated noumenal reality which is not even partly formed by human concepts”Footnote 81—are equally incapable of designating the transcendent Reality, the different ways in which statements fail in this respect are not germane to the hypothesis of its existence.
At the same time, the “major world religions” are hypothesized to be “at least to some extent in alignment with that Reality”Footnote 82 to the extent that some essence common to all of them (transformation issuing in compassion/love) is to be regarded as the criterion by which they might be ranked and judged. The criterion is drawn from particular, tradition-specific concepts (such as, for example, compassion for all sentient beings) as mediated through language and applied to tradition-specific concepts as mediated through language. The apparent ground of legitimacy is the putative universal recognition and respect granted to the very different attributes summed up as “compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.”Footnote 83 Such recognition and respect, however, as pertain in this instance, are far from being universal. The critique of the Western tradition of anthropocentric love for the members of one's own species (on the irrational grounds that the species into which one happened to be born is loveable because it is one's own) is relevant with regard to both theory and practice in this context, especially as it informs the critique of what has been termed “the parochialism of the Western concept of human rights.”Footnote 84
While the differences between theological doctrines of love and compassion can be smoothed over by the purposive construction of composites, the differences between epistemic and philosophical stances cannot be similarly resolved. For Hick, it is only pluralism that offers both a superior (because plausible, realistic, and impartial) mode of thinking about religion and a superior mode of relating to others who belong to religious traditions other than one's own. Pluralism seems to offer epistemic, moral, and social transcendence, whereas exclusivism, in his account, falls short on at least the first front. There are instances in which exclusivism is epistemically acceptable, but they are so limited as to be irrelevant to the task of thinking about religion. Hick's acknowledgement of the minimal validity of exclusivism does not move beyond tolerance of exclusivism to affirming its worth as a different but nonetheless equal mode of thinking about “religion on a global scale”:
[I]t is epistemically OK to be an exclusivist, although I think it is important to add that this principle applies not only to Christians but equally to members of other world religions, and also to ‘Moonies,’ members of the Lord's Army, animists … and anyone else…. I acknowledge that, so long as he sticks rigidly to his position, the exclusivist is encased in an impenetrable armour, from within which he knows a priori that all faiths except his own are false. But this purely defensive stance does not help us when we try to think realistically about religion on a global scale.Footnote 85
Using the vocabulary of the painting that we have been discussing, it would seem that exclusivism is “OK” as a philosophy of the dome from within the closed horizon of the dome (tantamount to the “impenetrable armor” of an exclusivist position), but that it is quite useless as a philosophy of the more expansive field that is the world.
With regard to that larger context, Hick suggests that “it is a philosopher of religion's obligation to address the issue” of religious plurality.Footnote 86 To his mind, however,“philosophical pluralism” is “not really distinct from … ‘practical or pragmatic pluralism,’ ”Footnote 87 meaning, among other things, that non-philosophers as well must address the issue of religious plurality (although not along the same lines as their philosophical peers). Pluralism is simply the best approach across the board—philosophically, socially, politically, and, it would seem, theologically, as well.Footnote 88 Yet it must find some means of dealing with the others next door who believe that the means by which they were introduced to truth are something more than stepping-stones to higher awareness or tinted domes with which they shield themselves from the challenges of a perspective that is at once more positive and (as Smith would have it) more true.
What, if anything, do pluralists who have already gained access to transcendence in some sense have to learn from their exclusivist neighbors? To the extent that these neighbors are approached primarily as benighted obstacles to transcendence, nothing. In fact, Hick urges that each religious tradition that views itself as existing in a uniquely intimate relationship with the transcendent Real and other traditions as “earlier stages in an evolution of which it is the culmination, or as less full and authentic visions of itself” should drop that stance, for such a notion simply “cannot be sustained on impartial grounds.”Footnote 89 His pluralistic hypothesis, properly understood, “will thus inevitably call, at least by implication, for further development within each of the traditions.”Footnote 90 More recently, Paul Knitter has taken the notion that religious traditions with exclusivist truth claims must practice self-transcendence to another level in arguing that “all religions” simply need to “lay aside their claims to be the only or best or final way to God or Truth.”Footnote 91 This sweeping change is the centerpiece of his proposed program for a new axial shift in religious history, comparable in significance to that described by Jaspers. He suggests that the primary means by which this axial shift will occur is not through “theological or liturgical clarifications” but through Christians “reaching beyond the confines of their own religious neighborhoods and making friends with people in other neighborhoods.”Footnote 92
Here, affect (in this instance, neighborly love) is to serve as the engine of a comprehensive epistemic overhaul, suggesting again the extent to which pluralism seeks to combine vertical and horizontal modes of transcendence, thereby keeping each mode of transcendence from becoming extreme and arriving at what might be termed a doctrine of moderate or partial transcendence.Footnote 93 Pluralism aims for amicable engagement but not the complete harmony characteristic of an eschatological “total community.”Footnote 94 It proposes neighborly love as a mode of transcendence but generally refrains from identifying the neighbors (Any living thing? All human beings? Friends but not enemies?) in a way that is independent of any specific tradition.
Pluralist thought would seem to be an ideal context in which to further explore the question of the possibilities and limitations of neighborly love and to consider the calculus by which to determine our varying degrees of obligations toward others in this respect. Yet what practical religious pluralism demands—an acknowledgement of the incomplete nature of one's own understanding of the transcendent and a willingness to seek out others and, in the spirit of friendship, to accept correction and instruction from them—theoretical and philosophical pluralism seem, at least with regard to religious exclusivism, to forbid. What theoretical and philosophical pluralism permit and, to some extent, demand—the attempt to persuade others of the superior merits of one's own position regarding a common subject and, in effect, to convert them to that position without offense intended or taken—practical religious pluralism resists. Because of the assumed gap between and incommensurability of religious and philosophical-theoretical perspectives, attempts at conversion may look like imperialism in the former context but beneficial correction in the latter. But religious pluralism is perhaps itself best understood as a response to a perceived experience of transcendence. Both arguments for and descriptions of religious pluralism tend to call attention to lived experience of relationships that transcend religious difference.
Thomas Banchoff suggests that “the new religious pluralism is, in part, an outgrowth of a more fluid demographic and cultural landscape. Migration flows generate greater demographic diversity, while modernization tends to loosen social attachments and generate more fluid and multiple possibilities for religious identification and belonging.”Footnote 95 On a less abstract level, Wilfred Cantwell Smith called attention more than forty years ago to the fact that, in modernity, we—or at least some of us—engage with religious others in the course of everyday life: “No longer are people of other persuasions peripheral or distant…. The more alert we are, and the more involved in life, the more we are finding that they are our neighbors…. Confucians and Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims, are with us not only in the United Nations, but down the street. Increasingly, not only is our civilization's destiny affected by their actions; but we drink coffee with them … as well.”Footnote 96 Theories of religious pluralism would seem to be, at least in part, a way of accounting for experiences and relationships that transcend the boundaries imposed by norms, patterns of social attachment, and prejudices that would, if strictly maintained, keep people of different faiths from pursuing “fluid and multiple possibilities for religious identification and belonging” or even from having coffee with one another.Footnote 97
With regard to practice, the task for pluralism is to forge “new cooperative relationships that transcend old boundaries”Footnote 98 without simply creating new boundaries dividing those who subscribe to non-pluralistic modes of transcendence from those who do not. A promising approach along these lines seems to lie in de-emphasizing the notion of common impartial grounds to which all must defer if they wish to be justified before the tribunal of philosophers or scholars of religion. This need not, however, necessarily rule out the notion of common ground altogether. Paul Heck, for instance, acknowledges that “The common ground will always be contested,” but suggests that while “[u]nique claims will be affirmed … there is also space to include others under the umbrella of a single truth.”Footnote 99 For others, the emphasis on common ground is itself problematic. As Diana Eck puts it, “We do not enter into dialogue to produce an agreement, but to produce real relationship, even friendship, which is premised on mutual understanding, not agreement.”Footnote 100 This understanding of dialogue reflects her broader claim that “[t]he challenge of pluralism is not to obliterate difference, nor to smooth our differences under a universalizing canopy, but rather to discover ways of living, connecting, relating, arguing, and disagreeing in a society of differences.”Footnote 101
This challenge pertains to both specialized (academic) and everyday modes of interaction. Eck makes the important point that dialogue is not only an object and subject of study but a method as well.Footnote 102 Among other things, this means that “the study of religion is itself a form of dialogue involving not only encounter with our subjects of study, but continued reflection on the personal, religious, or intellectual presuppositions that shape the intention and direction of our own study.”Footnote 103 This understanding conflicts with the notion that the study of religion (like the natural sciences) ought properly to refuse to allow particularistic commitments, affective dispositions, and virtues to play a role in the creation of knowledge.Footnote 104 Eck's work suggests important questions about the relational norms by which new ways of “connecting, relating, arguing, and disagreeing” are to be governed not only with regard to the study of religion, but also with regard to interreligious experience in everyday life.
Roughly speaking, human relationships are governed by two overlapping but ultimately distinct sets of relational norms, one centered on justice and the other on love (understood to include friendship). Justice usually pertains to relationships with strangers or with others whom we may not necessarily love. “What distinguishes justice from love,” notes Josef Pieper, is that “in the relationship of justice, men confront each other as separate ‘others,’ almost as strangers…. To be just means to recognize the other as other; it means to give just acknowledgment even where one cannot love,” and, I would add, especially where one cannot love. The just person “sanctions another … in his very separateness and helps him to receive his due.”Footnote 105 In thinking about how new modes of interreligious relationship might be fostered without positing relational norms that would override rather than compliment the norms internal to the traditions which pluralism aims to bring together in conversation, one solution would be to rely exclusively on norms of justice, especially those norms of intellectual and procedural justice that aim to correct partiality of judgment.Footnote 106 But at least notionally, none of the aims of religious pluralism depend upon the possibility of obtaining a wholly uncolored, impartial view of all the domes of heaven in a given field from within (or above) the expanse of that field nor upon the prospect of those domes being shattered in the service of its own vision of transcendence.
At the same time, as I have suggested, pluralism does indeed hold out a vision of transcendence, albeit a partial one. Since pluralism seeks, as is commonly stated, to engage actively with religious difference rather than merely putting up with it, it must both include and exceed norms of justice and respect for persons as such. One may respect others as equal moral subjects and tolerate them without caring about them very much one way or the other; but engagement requires affects as springs of action, as well some means of directing them through education. On the level of politics, the emotion that causes us to move beyond our “little society” of private concerns and take action is frequently anger at injustice or fear at what will happen in the absence of particular sorts of political authority. In the context of religious experience, we are much more likely to imagine ourselves as being drawn out of our various encirclements (whether familiar and comfortable or oppressive and life-sapping) by love.
On one level, religious pluralism posits itself as a practical solution to the pressing problem of violence informed by fear and hatred. It seeks to counter the ignorance that is thought to foster such destructive affects by tapping into a counter-affect: the desire to inquire into and become further acquainted with the unknown and unfamiliar (informed by something like the love of truth or wisdom) and also some sense of transpolitical and cross-religious fellowship. Pluralism thus suggests a particular stance towards “otherness” as well as “others.” Whether this sense of transpolitical and cross-religious fellowship is to be understood as being grounded in a doctrine of natural pity for the suffering of others, an ethos derived from a putative awareness of our mutual fragility and vulnerability in the face of death, benign curiosity about the way that others live, or some sense of “global community,” is an open question.
The aims of pluralism are served through the provision of a mutually accessible space in which we might transcend our existing modes of relationship—but also by the theoretical and theological articulation of the norms and affective dispositions suggestive of transcendence in this respect. In this context, pluralism is occasionally (but not always) presented as a way of imitating the ostensibly impartial nature of divine or cosmic love.
David Ray Griffin correctly notes that one of the bases for “the shift to pluralism is a theological judgment about the primacy of divine love.”Footnote 107 Such a statement immediately prompts a further question about what sort of divine love is being considered. Here, Griffin is speaking mainly of Christian understandings of divine love, but there are, of course many different accounts of divine love even within a given tradition. One might, for instance, stress the understanding of divine love that posits an exclusive nuptial relationship between a personal god and his people or the understanding of divine love as impartial agape towards human beings or the force that “pervades the universe in every aspect and enables the creative processes of the world to continue.”Footnote 108 Pluralism grants primacy not to divine love in all of its varying manifestations but to one particular understanding of divine love, namely, that characterized by impartiality.
In the words of Huston Smith, “There is one God. It is inconceivable that s/he not disclose her saving nature to her children, for s/he is benevolent: hence revelation. From her benevolence, it follows, too, that her revelations must be impartial, which is to say equal. The deity cannot play favorites.”Footnote 109 Revelation, in this account, must be given equally to all if it is to be consonant with the divine nature. But insight into the nature of revelation—and of the deity who grants it—is apparently not equal, meaning that some receive it first and must convince others, especially those who believe in limited, particular revelation, in turn. The fact that the deity does not necessitate equal disclosure of his or her impartiality (which would seem to be a part of his or her saving nature) means that the question of the selectivity of divine self-disclosure is relocated from the level of religious traditions to that of individual scholars of religion, only some of whom have gained insight into the nature of divine benevolence.
Smith's vision of impartial benevolence is pointedly designed to counter notions of chosenness and the idea of exclusive divine love from which it follows: “the idea that a universal God decided that the divine nature should be uniquely and incomparably disclosed to a single people,” he observes, “is among the most difficult notions to take seriously in the study of religion.”Footnote 110 He suggests that “it is awkward … for seeming to violate principles of impartiality and fair play,” adding that “[w]hen Moses tells the Jews, ‘The Lord God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth’ … is there any reason to think that we are in the presence of anything more than routine religious chauvinism?” To Smith's mind, this offensively undemocratic notion is redeemed—but only partly—by the idea that the Jews were chosen for an instrumental reason: “to serve and to suffer the trials that service would often exact.” But the doctrine still “rankles,” for “the fact that they were singled out for a special role in the redemption of the world still looks like favoritism.”Footnote 111 Worse, to his mind, is the fact that “the Bible makes no attempt to avert this suspicion: ‘It was not because you were more in number than other people … but because the Lord loves you [that he] has chosen you to be a people for his own.’ ”Footnote 112
What is striking here is the movement between the notion that chosenness constitutes an intellectual problem for scholars of religion (because it appears to be so ridiculous as to make it impossible to take seriously) to the suggestion that it is morally “awkward” because of its putative violation of “principles of impartiality and fair play” to the notion that it suggests a problematic affective disposition (chauvinism). How do we distinguish between an idea that is difficult to understand and one that is difficult to take seriously? How are we to identify ideas that merit our attention even though they fail to reinforce our convictions? The relinquishment of all claims to being uniquely beloved of God would put such questions to rest and remedy what is thought to be the intellectually, morally, and theologically offensive notion of chosenness in one fell swoop, but at the cost of an openness to exploring even those truth-claims which prompt confusion and evoke anger or feelings of moral distaste.
By the standard of strict impartiality, any form of love that falls short of universality—which is to say every form of love, since even the notion of compassion for all sentient beings is partial to sentience—is defective. It is not clear how love which is perfectly consonant with the demands of justice is to be distinguished from justice. In particular, love constitutes an affront to the rationalist-proceduralist concept of impartiality associated with modern Western norms of democratic political deliberation and juridical procedure. Transposed to the context of divine judgment, this concept of impartiality makes chosenness a violation of the idea that God does not take particulars into account when making choices or rendering judgments. The notion that divine love chooses who it will seems to become the idea that love must not choose nor reveal what cannot be disclosed equally to all. From the perspective of justice as impartiality, the question of why human beings are singled out for revelation in some (but not all) religious traditions is itself problematic.
Returning to the predicament represented in Every Man Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven, we note that in order to satisfy the demands of justice understood as strict impartiality and the demands of love as envisioned in the passage from Rosenzweig, we would have to imagine that everyone under his or her own dome of heaven would have his or her enclosure shattered simultaneously and feel the shock of becoming a beloved soul at the same moment. Short of such a moment of transcendence, we would be left in the pre-eschatological world of partial loves as well as of particular individual and collective identities. Whether such distinctions will still exist in the eschaton—in which harmony among parties previously estranged from one another will be achieved but distinctions still maintained, or particularity transcended through the dissolution of every partial thing into a comprehensive All—is a question not only about justice but about love as well.
On this matter, of course, religious traditions are characterized by internal as well as external disagreement. The theory and practice of religious pluralism may provide a figurative space in which questions about the various understandings of love and justice underpinning such disagreements can be fruitfully explored. Such a space, however, is best understood not as a neutral clearing house or procedural mechanism for the sorting out of different claims to transcendence but rather as itself suggestive of a claim to social and intellectual transcendence which currently favors some understandings of love at the expense of others. The preference for forms of love and compassion that are in accord with impartialist norms of justice makes it difficult to understand and accommodate a notion of divine love as exclusive passion or a notion of covenantal love between some human beings—but not all—and a universal deity. It is, of course, not uncommon to find oneself bound by multiple commitments to markedly different forms of love and justice. But such an experience is as likely to result in a sense of tension or even paralysis as in a capacity for perceptible movement beyond our various enclosures and, with it, transcendence.
