A liberal conception of religious reasons
The Sunset
When he saw the sun rising in splendour, [Abraham] said: ‘This is my Lord; this is the greatest (of all).’ But when the sun set, he said: ‘O my people! I am indeed free from your (guilt) of giving partners to Allah. For me, I have set my face, firmly and truly, towards Him who created the heavens and the earth, and never shall I give partners to Allah.’
(The Holy Quran (2000) 6.78–79, p. 104)Among the most interesting manifestations of religious meaning are discursive appeals that one might wish to characterize as religious reasons. They seem inherently religious because they relate actively to a supposed sacredness or divinity; at the same time they present themselves as reasons insofar as they link claims inferentially in a regular way, catering to anyone's good judgement.Footnote 1 They adduce the power and fascination of reasoning itself along with the power and fascination of a religious ideal. One would miss an important part of what they offer if one saw in them only traditional lore, moral pressure, imaginative stimulation, or hopeful wagering on ‘overbeliefs’ (though any of these other elements may play an essential role in religious life and thus in a religious reason acquiring full religious force). For instance, the appeal I have labelled the Sunset categorically clarifies relations between sense-experience and reflective judgement and between finite beings and infinite being even as it devoutly testifies to a god.
If it is not improper to call appeals like the Sunset religious reasons, we need a workable positive conception of religious reason to interpret them properly; and it seems to me that our conception will not be strong enough until we have grasped how religious appeals can work religiously in a reasonable way and reasonably in a religious way. But philosophy of religion as we know it contains major obstacles to forming such a conception, so I would like to approach the topic freshly from the point of view of an eagerly appreciative comparative student of religious reasons. This pragmatic specification is crucial, for the notions of religion, reason, and religious reason can be taken up in quite different ways for different justifiable purposes – including the purpose of showing what reasoning alone cannot accomplish religiously.Footnote 2 My aim here is to maximize the interest and importance of religious reasons in the humanistic study of religion for the sake of the greatest potential mental enrichment of enquirers. I want, therefore, to give religious reasons a liberal interpretation – ‘liberal’ in the double sense of belonging to ‘liberal learning’ and being philosophically permissive – as capable of giving reason to anyone anywhere, though not without special difficulties inherent in their religious character. I affirm the freely curious discussion of religious ideas that thrives in non-sectarian classrooms and coffee shops, and not least among religious persons when they speak to each other or to a larger public outside dogmatic constraint, as one worthwhile practice of reasoning among others.Footnote 3 In support of this practice, I want to mark out an alternative to academically popular approaches that unnecessarily limit the import of religious reasons.
One common shortfall in appreciating religious reasons occurs in construing their religious and rational dimensions either as (1) simply incompatible, or (2) unproblematically compatible, posing no directive challenge to enquirers. (This is not the place to examine the history of these approaches, but I take it that the first is associated with the Enlightenment's promotion of secularized reason while the latter is associated with post-critical and post-secularist counters to the Enlightenment. The first retains a strong prescriptive animus – we are all required to follow one true rule of reason – while the second throws off that burden by treating reasoning non-judgementally as context-relative.)
(1) Some would contend that anything that might be called a religious reason is either really a reason and to that extent necessarily not religious, or really religious and to that extent necessarily not a reason. If we take the reason part of it seriously, the appeal must conform to universally practicable standards of inference and motivation; but if we take the religious part seriously, the appeal must be grounded in a marvellous, exceptional experience or in a personally wilful position-taking, and so, as inherently inordinate or peremptory, can never truly embody reason. Consider, for instance, ‘Obey your father, because God commanded us to honour our parents.’ If the ‘because’ that links obeying one's parents to God's command does give a reason, the part played by the citation of God's command could equally well be played by anything else that is credible and motivating, even ‘if you don't, I'll slap you.’ The appeal leverages a religious belief without there being anything religious in the appeal's own way of working. But if the overriding sense of the appeal really is devout, its point being to evoke obedience to God, then the ‘because’ might as well drop out: no reason-giving or reason-taking is envisioned, only majestic commanding and zealous hearkening.Footnote 4
(2) An alternative approach is to dissolve the problem by likening religious communication to other kinds of communication in the role it lets reasons play. Such a view can be maintained with either a unifying or pluralizing conception of reason. (a) On a gently unifying view – for instance, one in which reasoning is defined as a practice of composing stable relationships amongst claims of all sorts (descriptive, appreciative, prudential, etc.) – rationality can be realized on its own universal level, whichever genre claims are made in. A Jew citing a Talmudic text as a reason for a dietary policy is doing the same thing, and doing it well or badly in generally the same way, as an astrophysicist citing the red shift in support of Big Bang cosmology. (b) A pluralistic view of reason can lead to much the same result. If reasonings in different contexts have no more in common than a diffuse family resemblance, then no one context of reasoning can dictate rules to the others, and religious practices of justifying inference, so long as they do their expected work in their own context, may be called rational or reasonable as aptly as any others. On either of these views, religious reasons can be recognized as such by anyone making a fair survey of all language games.
The first approach misses how certain reasons do make a rational appeal in a distinctively religious way; the second fails to recognize that they do this in a universally relevant way, crossing the boundaries of concrete contexts of reasoning to pose issues of sense-making and justification for any hearer who might happen along. For example, the home context of the Sunset is the Quranic discourse that inaugurates and regulates Islam, the enterprise of a particular community that calls itself the ummah; yet Qur'an 6.78–79 is boldly, unrestrictedly argumentative in such a way that it demands to be evaluated by non-Muslims and Muslims alike. (Of course it is possible, though I think not obvious, that I am mistaken in taking 6.78–79 to be a religious reason. Considered from a free humanistic standpoint it is also possible, though not obvious, that 6.78–79 was misconceived by its author as a religious reason.)
To see how the liberal consideration of religious reasons is uniquely capable of making the fullest sense of the religious and rational aspects of meaning formation together, I find that it helps to distinguish it explicitly from several better recognized perspectives on religious reason.
(1) Anthropological. Any student of religious reasons should attend to how they function in a concrete cultural context interdependent with other cultural elements, since reasons cannot hold interest or importance without making sense, and sense can be made only in a practicable ‘form of life’ (in Wittgenstein's sense) and is liable to be distorted when represented in a different context.Footnote 5 Therein lies the constant relevance of a descriptive anthropological approach to our subject. But even the most peculiar reasons, when they are encountered as reasons – like the most peculiar foods, when they are encountered as food – are offered and may be taken in some fashion, by whoever has the chance to take them, so it must be possible for them to transcend their concrete cultural contexts. Good interpretive anthropology will get us to ponder the possible rational force of the reasonings with which we are becoming acquainted; following up on those reasonings as engaged reasoners will take us outside the frame of anthropology. The evaluation of reasons can never be settled by description (except when description functions as argument), for the pre-eminent point of reasoning is to work out what shall be believed and done by all who share in the reasoning, not simply to take note of what some reasoners do.
(2) Critical and apologetic. Rational critics of religion obviously need to maintain a universal standard of reason by which to test religious claims. In one famous example, J. L. Mackie (Reference Mackie1955) was able to cause real trouble for monotheist thought by holding its beliefs in God's omnipotence, God's perfect goodness, and the existence of evil to a standard of rational consistency; and apologists likewise depend on an impartial standard of reason to vindicate religious claims, as in Richard Swinburne's (Reference Swinburne and Brown1977) response to Mackie on the ‘problem of evil’. While apologetic thinking can involve a searching examination of the nature of rationality, it must settle on some generally acceptable basis for determining whether a religious affirmation is reasonably allowable – as it might be when framed as a sufficiently probable belief in the Lockean tradition represented by Swinburne (Reference Swinburne2004) – or whether a religious affirmation necessarily follows from unavoidable premises, as in the cosmological argument for God's existence used by Aquinas.Footnote 6 The governing question of liberal consideration of religious reasons, however, is whether they might, on one interpretation or another, be congenial or compelling (or merely suggestive, or irremediably problematic). For the sake of keeping that question alive, rather than for the sake of assuring any one sort of answer, liberal enquiry must be aware of the moves available to rational critics and apologists. But liberal enquiry is not wedded to one formulation of the standard of reason any more than it is wedded to one kind of conclusion or one plan for implementation. To the rational critic or apologist, the idea of a distinctively religious reason is at best irrelevant, at worst deeply threatening; to the liberal enquirer, it is stimulating. (I hope that rational critics and apologists will read on, nevertheless, to consider further how to relate to their inner liberal enquirer.)
(3) Theoretical. Some of the strongest construals of religious reason are attached to substantive theories of religious meaningfulness, as in Kant's theory that practical reason necessarily produces belief in God, immortality, and eternal retribution to protect a conscientious agent from being discouraged by the dodgy prospects of action, or Weber's related idea that theodicy is a driving force of religious rationalization.Footnote 7 There might indeed be a Kantian or Weberian element in any given religious reasoning. Kantian or Weberian logic might govern someone's religious thinking in a given set of circumstances. Yet liberal consideration of religious reasons can connect religiosity with reason without depending on any one such theory. Wherever giving a religious reason is tied to a conception of religious meaningfulness, liberal study will gladly consider the appeal of any such conception.
(4) Kerygmatic. Those who proclaim religious appeals may use the form of reasoning to articulate the consistency of the religious life as they understand it. They may fashion religious reasons as reflections of divine qualities or as models of the religiously construed fundamental situation. For example, Luke's account of Jesus on the cross reasoning ‘Forgive [my tormentors], for they know not what they do’ (23.34) models the Christian ideal of divine love, and propositions in Nagarjuna's Middle Stanzas such as ‘Since he is by nature empty, the thought that the Buddha exists or does not exist after nirvana is not appropriate’ attack intellectual assumptions about existence in conformity with the Buddhist ‘right view’ of impermanence.Footnote 8 All such kerygmatic moves might be of reasonable interest in a liberal enquiry. Presuming that possibility of reasonableness is liberal enquiry's own appeal, which serves its agenda of acquiring all possible mental resources. While a devout scripturalist committed to extracting the greatest number of usable prescriptions from a sacred text may construe every expression in it as a religious reason for adherents of that tradition, the liberal student of religious reasons will follow the scripturalist's claims with the distinct (and, I submit, complementary) motive of wanting to see how each of these claims might turn out to be interesting, enlivening, and justifying for anyone in principle.
One more notable distinction of the liberal approach to religious reasons is illocutionary. Liberal enquirers bring their own slant to the giving and taking of reasons: whenever possible, they presume a more generous sort of giving and experiment with a more opportunistic sort of taking. In general practice, the variable of illocutionary force in giving reasons shows up most starkly in the difference between imposing a reason as a requirement and offering a reason as an invitation. A corresponding variable on the side of receiving reasons lies in one's cooperative willingness to make little or much of a reason's implications. A very willing receiver of reasons may take the optimistic general position that we always have a chance of discovering and following profoundly good reasoning that will repair the defects of our actual reasoning so far.Footnote 9 Like the great role models Abraham or Gautama or Kongzi, the most willing receiver of reasons has mind, will travel.
Reasoning within a regime of required loyalty, whether in religion or in the military, is assumed to be authoritarian, but even here reasons can be taken either actively or passively. The more adventurous active way is of greater interest in liberal enquiry. Suppose a theist offers encouragement using a ‘because’ formulation: ‘Never give up on yourself, because your almighty creator wills the salvation of all.’ Taking this reason actively, one's mind opens up to an intriguing prospect of intentional collaboration with a supreme power. For a mind of settled religious belief that already takes a scheme of divine providence for granted, however, this reason is a prudential reminder no different, qua reason, than ‘Don't forget to take your umbrella, because it's supposed to rain today.’ The judgement-guiding power of passively taken reasons depends more on who happens to hold which belief and less on the life-affecting potentialities of the reasons; it is sectarian rather than liberal.
The religious qualification of reason
I propose that a paradigmatic religious reason, for purposes of liberal enquiry, is an intriguingly outlandish yet possibly regularly justifying inference that offers intellectual help in relating its receiver positively to something that might count, at least partly in its sacred status or divine quality, as ultimate good.Footnote 10 A religious reason fits with religious beliefs and attitudes by opening up and enlarging their implications, not merely by citing them. As religious, a religious reason can be taken as tremendous and fascinating; it summons the charisma of a sacred community or divine being from which the cognizant hearer will be unwilling to be separated, and it conjures a mind-expanding prospective ultimate good. To take an expression this way actively is to open up the two essential reason-questions of evidence and normative consistency, that is, the question of the true character of the touchstones of consideration and the question of the rightly ordered life of those for whom the offered inference will be regularly justifying. Ways of using religious reasons that take evidence or normativity entirely for granted, whether sectarian or universal, do not accord with the distinctive sense of a paradigmatic religious reason. It is a problematic sort of reason. Nevertheless it does motivate and explain, offering any hearer a position in which to exercise self-satisfying and collegial good judgement, and that, from the point of view of liberal enquiry, is what reasons are always for.
Even on the most open conception, reasoning must be a distinctively rigorous mode of sense-making. Validity and normativity are primary standards of rigour in the formation of any rational position. If there is such a thing as rational art criticism, for example, there must be a regular way of accrediting valid evidence for a claim about the character of an artwork (in the way that brushwork and composition attributes can be valid grounds for the claim ‘this is a Rembrandt’) and there must be a regular way of following normative implications of judgements (as consistency demands that a painting determined to be a Rembrandt must be taken into account henceforth by anyone forming judgements about Rembrandt the artist). Validity could be called the infinitely interesting issue of rational thinking, our fascinating courtship with evidence, while the practical implementation of normativity, our striving for comprehensive justification, is what makes reasoning so imposingly important. As rational, then, a religious reason must offer somehow to regulate evidence-establishing and connection-making amongst claims and reasoners.
Religious reasons do this, but they typically add to ordinary claiming and norming a special mode of transcending appeal that we may call, as religious people often call it, ‘invoking’’, on the model of calling upon a person on whom one depends. Religious reasons invoke transvalid evidence (as in ‘revelation’ or ‘enlightenment’) and transnormative response (like ‘a covenant of the heart’ or compassionate solidarity with all sentient beings). In transvalid evidence, a divine being is thought to make an appearance from beyond our ordinary cognitive horizon, beyond ordinary definition and verification – but still a substantial reality-establishing appearance. In transnormative response, an ultimately rectified community is posited beyond our present practical reckoning, beyond ordinary regulation – but still as maintaining ideal standards of thought and communication. In religious perspective, the validity and normativity appeals of reason have been raised to a higher power. These ideals propose a reward of greater meaningfulness than valid evidence and normed consistency of response, as such, could ever offer: contact with ultimate reality and perfectly sharable thought.
One could argue that transvalid and transnormative appeals are a wholesome extension of our validity and normativity standards, perhaps their ‘eminent’ fulfilment by the grace of the divine – or, in the other direction, that our ordinary validity and normativity standards are emotionally cooled-off utilitarian reductions of our primal responses to epiphanies and the pulls of group solidarity – either way emphasizing a continuity between religious and non-religious reasoning.Footnote 11 But even if some such idea of continuity seems plausible, the tension between our supposed relations with transcendent ultimates, on the one hand, and the everyday requirements of rational communication in the world, on the other, cannot be eliminated. Appreciably religious claims and norms will not be rationalized easily by a conscientious thinker, not even by a devout one. The general difficulty I want to recognize here is not just procedural; it is not just the problem that authoritarian or personal reasons are refractory to full public discussion. It is inherent in the available meaning of religious reasons, and must be sounded out in their liberal construal. It shows up on several fronts:
(1) To assess claims and norms in reasonable discussion, there must be a shared understanding of the purpose of the system that they form. But the organizing purpose of religious discourse is understood in a wide variety of ways, reflecting a remarkable freedom in religious intentionality. A theorist of religious meaning can give good evidence that the essential action of religious expression is, for example, to guide conduct, or to secure (or dissolve) the identities of things, or to imbue certain things with supreme value in a value hierarchy, or to celebrate the splendour of the world as a whole, or to assuage profound anxieties about the mortal predicament. It seems we must admit that a religious appeal could centre on any of these functions and that nearly any religious appeal could align with more than one of them. This variable landscape of meaning is not favourable for straightforward rational evaluation, to put it mildly. Any stipulation as to how one should construe religious validity and normativity – and with that, how one would determine how to respond satisfactorily to religious claims – could be dismissed from the point of view of a rival stipulation (moralistic vs. aestheticist, essentialist vs. existentialist, etc.).
(2) A reason proposes a regular inference, but even religious insiders admit that inference from the divine is unforeseeably and uncontrollably variable in meaning; after all, divine possibilities transcend the human, which is why invoking is necessary. Religious appeals are characteristically ‘wild’ in relation to the standards of reason in one or more of these ways:
(a) Invoking an ultimate good can exceed the normative both in the direction of permitting or stimulating individual freedom of response and in the direction of asserting an extraordinary, not directly imitable basic pattern of action in which norms must be rooted, like the Vedic cosmic sacrifice (Rig Veda 10.90) that grounds the human norm of performing all action as sacrifice (Bhagavad-Gita 3).
(b) There may be immitigable pragmatic uncertainty about how supposed religious reasons are given. Even if the supposed divine illocutions that are served or conveyed by communicated religious appeals are bound to be expressed and understood in terms of human illocution – as inviting, commanding, instructing, etc., each with its own graspable field of possible practical regularities – religious discourse characteristically indicates that divine illocution transcends the human, perhaps sometimes nudged by the thought that the divine reality is not merely one speaker among others that could give directions or follow up on them in the ordinary way. In Hebrew prophecy, for example, just as God's steadfast love is not equal to human love, God's invitation to holy relationship is not the same as a human ruler's or lover's invitation; it is mysteriously thornier and sweeter at the same time. ‘You alone have I known among nations, therefore I will punish you’ (Amos 3.2) shows how a strangeness of religious normativity flows from a peculiar inescapability of the divine. ‘Love your enemies … so that you may be children of your Father in heaven … Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:44–45, 48) seems not so much to mandate a new rule as to dramatize a holy transcendence of regular community maintenance.Footnote 12 Some of the most abusive commentary by Zen masters on their colleagues’ pronouncements seems analogously to depart from the normal framework of teaching and learning.Footnote 13 Thus it is deceptive to place a ‘Christian love commandment’ or ‘Zen instruction’ in the scene of reasoning, because an illocution other than ordinary commanding or instructing is taking place, one that aims at a response somehow more exalted than compliance with ordinary illocutionary conventions. For this reason, the Christian ‘norm’ of perfect love and the Zen ‘norm’ of reality-mindedness are not exactly programmatic, though they do continually inspire plans for conduct.
(c) On the side of the receiving of reasons, we cannot straightforwardly check to ascertain how a divine ‘claim’ applies to us. Individually, assuming a certain status of the individual in reality? Collectively, assuming or imputing or promising our solidarity with a certain community? Historically, assuming or imputing or promising our participation in a certain large-scale shared action? (What is the present relevance of the humiliated Servant figure in Second Isaiah?) Physically, or metaphysically? (Where is the Buddhist Pure Land?) Ideally, like an orienting pole star, or to be fully implemented in practice? (Are extravagantly altruistic saints to be emulated?) Do we respond to the ‘claim’ with our actual personal resources, or are we required to open ourselves to infusions of extraordinary power? (Might the invocation begin such an infusion?) Religious appeal to an ultimate good can exceed the normative both in the direction of imposing new identities, relationships, and practical scenarios on norm-followers and in the direction of transformative provocation or release.
(d) A divine claim is on the unique divine level of that which ‘redeems’, ‘illuminates’, or otherwise finally determines the meaning of everything, but any explanation of its force must place it misleadingly on the level of ordinary thoughts and things that always still await their final determination. Given this premise, how could we ever have an adequate interpretation of divine information? To cite just two examples of obvious difficulty, it seems impossible to know how we should take the fantastic descriptions of the end times in the Christian book of Revelation or of the Pure Land in the Pure Land Sutras, though adherents of those traditions will not doubt that the texts are divinely informative in some way or other.
(3) And then there is the issue of bias. True reasoning is poised to address all potentially relevant considerations, but a truly devout religious reasoning characteristically embraces certain touchstones and principles to the exclusion of others, and that selectivity threatens both procedural reasonableness and the rationality of the reasoner.Footnote 14 If a religious reason needs to do the work of reason in an open community of reasoners and yet is inherently dogmatic and sectarian, we land in a version of the familiar dilemma: either the religious reason must be supportable by a non-sectarian ‘public’ reason (as John Rawls required), which is to reckon that the religious reason is not effectively a reason at all insofar as it is really religious; or the ideally open conversation must be interpreted as a forum in which diverse sectarian appeals are to try their rhetorical luck in eliciting agreement from members of the larger public (as Jeffrey Stout has proposed), which makes the religious meaning of their appeals more uncertain.Footnote 15 Suppose, for instance, that a ‘pro-life’ Christian believes that the impermissibility of abortion is a normative implication of the divine cherishing of human life in all its stages, a view believed to be prophetically declared in Jeremiah 1.5, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.’Footnote 16 To state the biblical directive as a reason, bridging its religious power to a generally appreciable validity and normativity, the pro-life Christian must develop a public-minded claim along such lines as these: ‘Abortion is impermissible in the ideal inclusive ethico-political community because one of our best available touchstones concerning the status of unborn human life is divine cherishing of all human life as presented in a superlatively impressive religious source.’ That move towards wider sharing of an idea is of course always welcomed by the liberal enthusiast for religious reasons, but from the religious reasoner's own point of view the prospect of wider sharing makes the reasoning uncomfortably open. What will the upshot be when various other valuations of human life, also from highly impressive sources, are collated with the biblical source – including the Buddhist Jataka literature, for instance, with its vastly different view of the shape of life?
These uncertainties come with the territory and should not be overlooked by anyone who ventures to speak constructively about religious reason. I hope I have not understated any of the difficulties in my quick review. Nevertheless, I suspect that many who have studied religious discourse will be ready, as I am, to single out some religious appeals for appreciation in the genre of reasons, having found in them appropriately challenging prospects of shareable regularity along with, as we say, very interesting points. To show how this can go, I will now offer two interpretations of religious reasons geared to the preceding analysis: first, with an example of what is commonly called a ‘prophetic’ religious argument, for which historical events are crucial; and then with an example of a ‘mystical’ argument for which modification of individual awareness is crucial. The two examples could readily be taken for kerygmatic reasonings under the restriction I gave that category above, but I will write them on the liberal blackboard under the titles the Lion and the Salt.
The Lion
The Lion is a riddling argument made in Amos, a book of classical Hebrew prophecy, which plays memorably on the figure of the fearsome predator: ‘The lion has roared, who is not frightened?’ (3.8). The idea is that an ultimately definitive judgement of human conduct must be manifest in disasters that befall and threaten human communities, and whoever understands this aright will respond with renewed adherence to a supreme righteousness. Here is the larger sequence of thought in 3.1–8:
Hear this word that Yahweh has spoken about you, O Israelites, about the whole family that I brought up from the land of Egypt: ‘Only you have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities..’
Do two go together, unless they have arranged to meet?
Does a lion roar in the forest, if it has no prey?
Does a young lion thunder from its lair, unless it has seized [a victim]?
Does a bird alight upon a ground trap, if there is no lure for it?
Does a trap spring up from the ground, except to make a capture?
If a trumpet is sounded in a city, will not the people be disturbed?
If a disaster befalls a city, is it not Yahweh's doing?
For my Lord Yahweh does nothing, unless he has disclosed his plan to his servants, the prophets.
The lion has roared; who is not frightened?
My Lord Yahweh has spoken; who could not prophesy? (Amos (1989), 373, 389)
This passage adds several stimulating suggestions to the generally reasonable notions that events have causes and that conjunctions of events may not be merely coincidental: first, that we have interests at stake in certain cause-and-effect connections just as vital as a prey animal's interest in not being caught by a predator; second, that it is never wise to overlook the pre-eminent Cause of all causes in a serious interpretation of events (‘If a disaster befalls a city, is it not Yahweh's doing?’); and third, that listeners need guidance in interpreting events and drawing appropriate inferences in their planning, since a lion's roar is not in itself fully articulate. The situation of the lion's roar hits a maximum of being interesting (Where is the lion? What is it likely to do? What are our options?) and important (How can we survive at this juncture?).
Cities do fall, horribly, yet it is not obvious what to make of the empirical evidence of large-scale human disasters in relation to the a priori inference that the Cause of all causes has acted, and via the prophet ‘has spoken’, in these events. Does God reveal that humans are wicked by sending disasters proportioned to their wickedness? Is the temporary happiness of the wicked like the temporary life of the lion's prey? Do politically caused disasters have different implications than natural disasters? To what extent is the fallen city the revelation of a really or ideally unsustainable way of life? (Did the city-destroying Hurricane Katrina disclose a pre-existing corruption of US society, as both religious and secularist interpreters claimed?)Footnote 17 Obviously there is much room for obtuse and unhelpful interpretation in this situation – and yet refusing to learn a lesson of principle from a major disaster is a dreadful lost opportunity. The Lion draws us into this field of underdetermined yet life-shaping interpretation with our eyes and hearts shocked open.
The evidence of divine disapproval in a city's fall is not incontestable like the physical evidence of death and destruction. But the Lion suggests that a serious observer should see in the physical evidence something that must always make a vulnerable mortal tremble, the roar of a destroyer capable of striking again, a destroyer whose natural work is to consume something that unfortunately might be part of the substance of one's own present life. The construal of the evidence as divine disapproval could not be validated if it were simply fantastical, avoiding facts; it may, however, on the contrary, confront us with otherwise unfaceable facts of our shortcomings as well as an additional horizon of more-than-human, more-than-occasional judgement.
As for normative implication, beyond the initial hearkening response it is not yet clear what design for communal life would answer adequately to the message of disaster. We can say that Amos is pointing towards a path of life that is closer to lion-safe when he speaks elsewhere of political and economic sins as the occasion of God's roar. But his climactic proposition ‘let justice roll on like the ocean, and equity like a perennial stream’ (5.24) is not ‘normative’ in the sense of placing a defined rule on conduct. It incites us to implement better norms than we have been following, but its practical logic is still somewhat in suspense or (to put this more positively) embryonic.
Considered as an actively religious reason, the Lion is invested in transvalid evidence and transnormative directive force, either of which could be taken by a detached observer or unwilling addressee as non-rational. The lion's roar can be seen strictly as a poetic metaphor for a complex of experienced violence and ethical concern. The whole utterance can be seen as a symptom of fear and hope. The part of it that invokes the god of Israel resonates just within that tradition. Only for an active maximizer of reason do the evidence and drawing of implications come into the realm of regularity to constitute a possibly or bindingly rational claim. For such a receiver, however, the rational aspect of Amos's claim is a major component of its power.
The Salt
The Salt belongs to one of the most famous sections in the Upanishads, a sequence in the Chandogya that brings home to a young enquirer, Shvetaketu, his essential identity with fundamental reality.
‘Put this chunk of salt in a container of water and come back tomorrow.’ The son did as he was told, and the father said to him: ‘The chunk of salt you put in the water last evening – bring it here.’ He groped for it but could not find it, as it had dissolved completely.
‘Now, take a sip from this corner,’ said the father. ‘How does it taste?’
‘Salty.’
‘Take a sip from the centre. – How does it taste?’
‘Salty.’
‘Take a sip from that corner. – How does it taste?’
‘Salty.’
‘Throw it out and come back later.’ He did as he was told and found that the salt was always there. The father told him: ‘You, of course, did not see it there, son; yet it was always right there.
‘The finest essence here – that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (atman). And that's how you are, Shvetaketu.’ (Upanishads (1996), 154–155 (Chandogya 6.13))
The Salt directs us to notice the formal possibility of identifying a more fundamental being that is not directly apparent in the worldly objects we ordinarily focus on, a being that stands to beings generally as ‘self’ stands to a concrete bodily life, and which thus must be one's own self too – one's own controlling principle and centre of significance – in the most profound way. But there is also the enlivening suggestion that this cosmic Self is not merely an abstract ontological function but can actually be sensed as a taste pervading all things, tasteable more deeply than the many flavours of world-illusion. Further, there is the highly encouraging implication that the real core of one's own life is indestructible.Footnote 18
The evidence of this supreme Self is on free display with the dissemination of the Upanishadic teaching, yet we have a prospect of seeing that evidence only if we become intrigued with the kind of point Shvetaketu's father, Aruni Uddalaka, is trying to make, and only if we imitate the formerly arrogant, now chastened Shvetaketu in applying ourselves to learning it. The evidence of the Salt is offered as valid, but in an extraordinary way; many lack the necessary attunement to it. It is intensively interesting to the greatest possible degree, calling for an infinitely refined perception and judgement of what is, momentously qualifying perception and judgement of everything particular. (I find the Salt far more interesting than the nearby reasoning that ‘by just one lump of clay one would perceive everything made of clay’ (6.1.4), since the clay analogy points towards a mere lowest-common-denominator aspect of things, a stripping down of quality. I do not speak of the Clay.)
The implications-enacting normative community posited by Upanishadic reasoning is, in one clear sense, the whole cosmos united by its one Self, but for immediate practical purposes, the prescribed pairing of guru and pupil modelled by Uddalaka and Shvetaketu is of the greatest significance: ‘In this world when a man has a teacher, he knows: “There is a delay for me here only until I am freed”’ (6.14.2, emphasis added; cf. 3.11.5). The Salt does not tell us how exactly to conduct ourselves in the delay before deliverance any more than the Lion tells us how exactly to respond to disasters. But the taste of salt, like the threatening roar of a lion, is inescapable in the life of whoever successfully receives the religious reason, and must affect everything in that life. It is personally determining as a purely intellectual construction cannot be.Footnote 19 Discovering that taste, and learning to comport oneself appropriately as one who tastes reality and thus can be freed from illusory bondage to worldly beings, requires the guidance of an already attuned guru just as a genuinely helpful interpretation of disasters requires the articulation of a prophet attuned to God's will. Thus a dedicated aspirant invokes the guru, who is essential to deliverance. A liberal student of the Salt can acknowledge this requirement while being receptive to the text itself as a quasi-guru. Like Shvekatetu, who is becoming impressed by his now more credible-seeming father in the storyline of the Chandogya, new takers of the Salt can taste something of rational and religious power in its promise of a Taste.
Conclusion: the return of the Sunset
A religious reason sceptic may object that the liberal view of religious reasons comes with too many caveats, allows too much personal variation, and leaves the upshot of religious reasoning much too open to qualify as reasoning. The stubborn root of the problem, it may be asserted, is that the extraordinary reference points of religious claims are not clearly and consistently available enough to all parties in principle to support their fully rational handling.
A reply from the Qur'an is at hand: everywhere on earth the sunset returns constantly, proving that the brightest light in our world is not a perfect constant and so prompting a universally available recognition that everything that seems meaningful in a certain way at a certain moment will fail to register in that way at another moment. Something of the greatest importance always remains, one realizes, supportive of reasoning, but this something does not necessarily shine like the sun, and a straightforward relationship with it might not be available. Now it is easy to see the sense of this thesis in the special context of transvalid divine data and transnormative religious practice as an affirmation that the divine must be, at least in crucial part, beyond our powers of specification. Probably most religious reason-givers would agree that in their devout association with what they take to be fundamentally real and good, their achievements of validity and normativity in religious discourse must be regarded as imperfectible works in progress. But the point of the Sunset can also be applied to the reasoning process universally inasmuch as every act of reasoning depends on forces of evidence and implication that cannot be perfectly mastered. For the elements of any given reason are not only instruments of the reasoner's intention (supposing a stable and univocal intention), they are doorways to indefinitely many interpretations. Despite our artificial confidence that we can infer (Q) from (P implies Q) and (P), the meanings of P and Q and implication are always subject to divergent understandings in actual reasoning. Within the practice of reason, recognition of this openness continually incites further reasoning. Recognizing the openness of the whole life of reasoning points up its fundamental imperfection in relation to an ideal of determinate formal rationality and, more positively, its aeration by the continuing free interventions of reason-givers and the free responses of receivers. In leading us to so interesting and important a perspective, the Sunset is confirmed as a worthy reason useful in challenging anyone who thinks the point of reasoning is just to settle things conclusively. This interpretation vindicates the Sunset's appropriate clarity and consistency of relevance.
Another sort of critic might accept the rational aspect of the Sunset more or less as I have portrayed it but object that I have come around to accepting the assumption I rejected earlier that religious reasons can be rational only insofar as they involve reasoning that could be stated non-religiously. Do my interpretations of religious reasons really show reason doing anything other than what it does without religious commitments, and does ‘religious reason’ qualify as reason in any way other than by hitching a ride on non-religious reason? I cannot prevent a fellow reasoner from drawing this conclusion about the material in one case or another, but my general answer is that, though religious reasons do indeed draw support from non-religious reasoning, the whole story of their rationality goes further. Religious reasons can be really religiously rational insofar as they work religiously in working rationally. The Sunset, for example, amplifies an inference about contingency into a religious-grade inference of the unique, tremendous reality of Allah from a stunning perception of the frailty of all worldly things, powering this inference at least partly by an amplification of ordinary rational conscientiousness into Abrahamic earnestness and submission. In a devout Muslim perspective, the non-religious reasoning I drew out of the Sunset is but an echo of the Sunset's primary claim.
Meanwhile, from a non-Muslim standpoint it is not necessary to follow the Sunset to Allah specifically, though its implied non-religious argument for a non-perceptible fundamental reality is closely related to (and a Muslim can say ‘inspired by’) its religious argument for Allah. The liberal student of religious reason clarifies the possibility of pious Abrahamic reasoning partly by exploring its rational potentialities but also by recognizing the elements in its claims that depend on personal experience and choice and the contingencies of invoking. As regards the latter elements, the liberal student, in that character, remains uncommitted. As regards the former, the liberal student is bound to join all other reasoners, religious or not, in following reasoning down all the paths it can take, including paths leading into religious perspectives. In thinking about, and with, the great religious reasons – if you will, the Greatest Hits of religious reasoning – we can best appreciate in detail how this works.
