Reading "God" into Hinduism

Even the Jesuit missionary Robert de Nobili, whom Francis X. Clooney ("Hindu God, Christian God. How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions", Oxford 2001), somewhat distastefully in my opinion, presents as a sort of model for "interreligious theological conversation", asked: "Who could ever doubt that there is a Sovereign Lord of all things who is at the same time their ultimate cause?" Many, of course, have doubted this, or thought that the "Sovereign Lord" is not also the "ultimate cause", or that there is no one cause. My point, however, is that even those people who agree that there is "a Sovereign Lord" do not, by this agreement, assent to a belief in the same entity. Easily they could doubt that there is the Sovereign Lord whose name is God and whom de Nobili professed.

It is true enough that they can on the basis of their agreement have a debate about the Sovereign Lord. "The Sovereign Lord is great," one of the agreers may say, and the other may reply, "No, the Sovereign Lord is without size." But do they differ because they have variant opinions about the same entity, or because they consider different entities as the Sovereign Lord? If their cosmologies differ sufficiently, it will even become pointless to ask this question, because, except from a privileged position (i.e. the worldview of the one making the judgement), there is no way to judge which the actual entities they are talking about are. So, significantly, they are talking about some entity qua "Sovereign Lord", with the entity's identity neither central nor easy to establish.

Take it, for example, that both are talking about the god Śiva. In that case, it seems clear that, if the entity exists, one of them is more correct in his account of it. But the first agreer might counter, "What is without size is not Śiva." In that case, from the first agreer's point of view, they are talking about different entities, one Śiva and the other without size; from the second's, they are talking about the same entity, but one of them has a defective understanding of it. There are not just the levels of real entities, on the one hand, and descriptions, on the other, but also an intermediate one, where the mapping of descriptions to entities is negotiated; and the picture is further complicated because the real entities are not immediately accessible, but must be assumed and described, so that descriptions are effectively mapped onto other descriptions.

Or take it that they are talking about two different gods, and shift their conversation to this topic. "Śiva is the Sovereign Lord," says the first, and the second, "No, Viṣṇu is the Sovereign Lord." A third agreer will object to their disagreement and tell them that they are referring to the same god, Harihara, by different name; the next will differ slightly, saying that the difference between Śiva and Viṣṇu is real enough, yet they are both aspects of Harihara. Now the first agreer may say, "I disagree. Śiva is the Sovereign Lord, and Viṣṇu is inferior to him." The second agreer will say the opposite. Another Hindu who has listened to the whole conversation might think, for one reason or another, that arguing about which god is greater is pointless; so might a Buddhist, who thinks that any Bodhisattva is greater than the gods anyway; while a Christian might sum up the whole discussion as "They disagree about the name of God."

None of these viewpoints is wholly satisfactory when it is transferred into academic discourse, but it is the last (perhaps merely because it is so exceptionally widespread and under-critiqued) that I find particularly objectionable. It simply does not do to erase the very real differences between different conceptions of deity, and the way that these conceptions depend on the wider cosmological assumptions one makes, by talking about God, capital G, as if everyone already understood what this meant, irrespective of their worldview. We cannot, in other words, take for granted "God" while people are still disagreeing about gods.

Well, let us imagine the Christian agreer a little more charitably. He will say, "They disagree about the nature of God," and if we ask why he inserts this Western term, no definite article, capital G and all, into a discussion about Hindu theology, he will say that it is a shorthand. He means nothing more than "Sovereign Lord", and his sentence, more fully, was intended to mean "They disagree about the nature of the deity whom they consider to be the Sovereign Lord," leaving open the possibility of all the responses we saw above.

That does not change the fact that the usage is problematic. It is ambiguous at best, and it leads to such non sequiturs as the following: Clooney defines theology rather broadly as "people scrutiniz[ing] their own faith traditions with an eye toward understanding (and then living) that faith more adequately", but then wants to "initiat[e] an extended conversation between the Hindu and Christian theological traditions on four topis: God's existence, the true God, divine embodiment, and the measuring of religions by revelation." It surely does not due to lead into the topic by making the acceptance of a capital G God, meaning "Supreme Lord"-cum-"ultimate cause", the basis for theological dialogue.

Firstly, it erases several questions that would occur to modern Hindus but rarely to modern Christians: Are there any gods (devas)? Is there any one god ruling all things? Is there an ultimate cause of all things? Is it a god? Is this god the same as the god ruling all things? Is this god qualitatively different from other gods? Is this deity, the Īśvara (Lord) what Christians mean by God? Are the devas perhaps not gods, but rather angels? Is the Īśvara God, but not at all a god, one (even if supreme) among many, in the polytheistic sense? Are there perhaps no devas?

The way that Clooney frames the discussion, the first three questions are conflated into "Does God exist?", or perhaps, just a hint more neutrally, "Is there a God?" It is taken for granted that God is not a member of the same class as the other devas, that their existence is not an important issue, that their nature not an interesting question, and that the question of a supreme god is only relevant if it is simultaneously about the ultimate cause. Hardly a basis for interfaith work that leads one to expect much in the way of results, or much of an opening to new perspectives differing from Western presumptions.

In my opinion, it is the Christian conflation of (1) the concept of deity or "god" with (2) the specific properties of the single god of Monotheism¹ and (3) "God" as a personal name that makes Clooney go from the question considered in chapter 2 of his book, "Is there a God[?]", to the topic of chapter 3, "conclusions about who God is" rather than, e.g., "conclusions about who is God"; the latter I would more fully construe as "... who is the person that has the properties qualifying them as God" (=Supreme Lord and ultimate cause of all things), the former as "what is the name and what are the properties of the entity God²".

Indeed, he summarizes the sorts of heliefs treated in chapter 2 as "there is a God" and "there is one God" (although, of course, starting with questions about a capital-G God, the unity and uniqueness of this God is already taken for granted), and those of chapter 3 as: "this is God's name." The most honest summary comes just a few lines later: "questions about whether there is a God and what God is like". Thus the meaning of "god" is limited to a single and ultimate being by being restricted to "God", and the polytheistic (or, to already pander to those who would exclude an Īśvara from the number of devas, the polydevistic) context in which such a concept is embedded in India is disregarded from the start. If the discussion is framed as one about God and his properties, the many disagreements people could have about the "Sovereign Lord" (as we saw above) will be hard to account for, and seem somehow extraneous to the discussion. Yet Clooney does not intimate that he is knowingly leaving polytheistic positions out: "Hindu God, Christian God focusses rather narrowly on how Christian and Hindu theologians reason theologically, discern, assert, and defend the truth, and aim to persuade both insiders and outsiders of that truth." The actual topic is rather narrower, as Clooney does not fathom polytheism as methodology³, as would behoove any comparative theologian.

Now, it must be granted that Clooney can sometimes be more nuanced, as when he describes the Hindu school of philosophy, Mimamsa:

"The Mīmāṃsā theologians worked with a simple, realistic world view and were willing to acknowledge the gods as legitimate recipients of worship and invocation. But since it suffices for ritual purposes to assert that the gods can be invoked, they also felt that there was no need to speculate further about the nature of these gods. While Mīmāṃsā is not antitheistic, it has no need for the postulate of a Supreme Being, Lord, or Creator. On the whole, ordinary reasoning about any religious topic must defer to the logic of ritual obligation and the world it implies."

The use of antitheistic in place of the simpler atheistic seems somewhat obscurantist to me, but otherwise, this is a fair account of what are in fact often described as atheists (on Wikipedia, prominently) because they are do not suscribe to Theism in the peculiar sense that word has in Western descriptions of Hindu philosophy, namely "the belief that Sovereign Lord and ultimate cause are one and should be worshipped"; notably, the usage does not fit well with the usual usage of theism, or categories like monotheism, atheism, polytheism (vague and of little analytical use as they are), but ties in well with the sort of use of "God" that I just criticized Clooney for.

It is therefore a systemic problem of intellectual erasure that I am arguing against, and thus even the better passages in the book do not save him from the criticism that he has led into his book (I have been quoting from chapter 1 only so far) with far more Christian bias than he accounts for in his long reflections on writing a theological work about Hindu theology as a Christian.

This trend continues throughout the book; thus he says that "[i]n the beginning, at least, Vaiśeṣika thinkers had no need for God as an intellectual principle." This leaves open the rather important question of whether they accepted or presumed the existence of non-capitalized gods.

After the Vaiśeṣika, Clooney treats the Nyayas, in particular their oldest text, the Nyāya Sūtras, citing the one passage dealing with "God":

"IV.1.19 The Lord is the cause, since we see that human action lacks results.

IV.1.20 This is not so since, as a matter of fact, no result is accomplished without human action.

IV.1.21 Since that is efficacious, the reason lacks force."

He comments that the passage "is most probably also a rejection of the need for a God intended to guarantee the efficacy of human activity. Since human action can be explained without positing God, it is wise to avoid this superfluous postulate." In that sense, it "reads as a criticism of the postulation of theism⁴". This is of course the theism of Western Indology; it does not mean belief in gods. In fact the author of the Sūtras may very well have taken the existence of gods for granted, even if it is likely that they reject an Īśvara, or Lord.

It is strange that Clooney does not here, where he first cites an actual piece of Indian theology, or at any previous point discuss what Indian words and concepts he sees fit to translate as God. We can see that Īśvara is one of them.

Of the first later Nyāya writer he discusses, Annambhaṭṭa, it suffices to say that presenting his arguments for the existence of a creator god without giving an account of his wider theology, his opinions about devas, is unhelpful; where are they to be situated in his system? Are they īśvara or finite self? Clooney labels the latter as human and translates the former as "the lord", leaving no room for beings like devas, asuras, and the like. Did Annambhaṭṭa consider these to be finite selfs, did he not believe in them at all, or does he in fact mean īśvara in a generic sense (Sanskrit has no definite article, after all)?

When he paraphrases Jayanta⁴ (also a Nyāya) with "We name this maker 'God.'" it would be incumbent on him to give us the word he is translating here. From a stray reference later, it is presumably Īśvara. By this, he meant Śiva, and he also worshipped Śiva's wife Pārvatī and their child Gaṇeśa, and mentions other "gods [devas] and demons [asuras]" and "Brahmā | The Creator God" (a rather confusing gloss when Īśvara, God, and creator god are elsewhere taken as synonymous). What status do these other gods have for him? Is Śiva a god like them?

Among those opposed to the arguments for "God", Clooney introduces the Buddhists as "religiously nontheistic: not God but the Buddha is the sole and sufficient source of religious wisdom." This is surely misleading on several counts—Buddhists believe in and (may) worship gods (devas), and they also worship that "source of religious wisdom", the Buddha, making him eligible as a god or God if this is really to be used as an analytical term. Unless one discounts all devotional rituals in Buddhism as non-religious because they are subordinated to the quest for Nirvana (of course, they can also be part of that quest!), which seems absurd, this description is incorrect. Why not describe the Buddhist position explicitly, which would require more words, than using categories like "religiously nontheistic", which seem precise and analytical, but are in fact vague and ill-fitting?

The real difference of Indian theological debate from Western ones is completely hidden through all these terminological choices. The debate between Nyāya logicians, Buddhists and Mīmāṃsins is not about deity but about the specific question of a creator god⁶, which is only one aspect of the "question of God" in the West. There, the question of uniqueness has been tied inextricably to the exclusive fitness as an object worship. And it is largely this that the capital G enshrines: because there is only one god, God, it is a name, not just a description. And that name inherently includes an aspect not central to the interschool debates in India at all: the exclusive fitness as an object of worship. So the sentence "Is there is a God?", because of the many conflations that obtain in a Christian/Western context, would need to be broken up into the two questions, "Are there devas?" and "Is there an Īśvara?" The assertion "There is one God" has strong implicitations for religious practice, while "There is one Īśvara" does not necessarily have them. From the fact that Jayanta argues for the unity of the Īśvara, it also seems that a multiplicity of them is not implausible per se, while in the West, the question "Is there a God?" already precludes the possibility of more than one entity that is a God, because a capital-G God is by definition unique.

If nothing else, we have gained some understanding of the sort of presumptions and terminological sleights-of-hand that lead to people calling polytheists either atheists or monotheists, and inventing definitions of polytheism that describe the belief system of absolutely no one.

I will continue the discussion of Clooney's book in two other posts, on Brahman understood as "God" and on the concept of Īśvara.

Notes

1: I use "Monotheism" as a historical category referring specifically to those traditions that stand in some historical continuity to the Hebrew Bible, as, in keeping with my opinion that the meaning of a concept—like the idea of a single, unique god—is dependent for its meaning on its context, and so it is not useful to apply the label to superficially similar beliefs, which will tend to lack certain features that are typical of Monotheism, e.g. the idea that belief in or worship of multiple deities is ethically objectionable.

2: As noted before, this takes the entity God for granted, rather than, so to speak, the position of God, whose nature depends on the cosmology one adopts, and which is filled by an entity whose identity is up for debate. At the danger of oversimplifying, there is some sense in saying that the Christian God is a conflation of person and function, whereas in some other traditions (e.g. the Greek), the who of the person and the what of the function are distinct. Of course the distinction breaks down in many areas (as, e.g., Atlas' identity is fundamentally associated with his function), but most discussion of, e.g., the demiurge, or, in post-Stoic philosophy, "the god" (more usually translated "God", of course), meaning effectively "Sovereign Lord" and highest principle (which can, but need not, mean "ultimate cause"), with the stress on the latter, discusses them qua demiurge, or qua "the god". Galen, for example, believed that there was a demiurge or creator (function), but was uncertain about whether he was Zeus (person).

3: For a defense of methodological polytheism, see Edward Butler, "Polytheism as Methodology in the Study of Religions". My objection to that article would be that it throws out the methodologically agnostic baby (which goes unmentioned) with the methodologically atheist bathwater.

4: No better or worse is the previous description that "(Nyaya)'s primary text, the (Nyaya Sutras) of Gautama, can be read as a neutral analysis neither favoring nor opposing the idea of God."

5: At least in this case, we are told that Jayanta argues against the possibility of multiple creator gods. But yet again, whether a rejection of "multiple 'Gods'" (the scare quotes seem to signify a feeling of complete incoherence of the phrase) is also a rejection of multiple gods is not explained, and would probably be assumed by most readers if no discussion of his Śaivism and mention of other gods followed.

6: The "Sovereign Lord" part of the concept of Īśvara is thus incidental; in fact, Buddhists may see Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as "Sovereign Lords of all things", and also accepts a hierarchy of gods and thus a "Sovereign Lord" of gods.