Ultimates

Philosophical Theology, Volume One

Robert Cummings Neville

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438448855
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Finalist for the 2015 John N. Findlay Award in Metaphysics presented by the Metaphysical Society of America Robert Cummings Neville offers a new theology of the ultimate and a new theory of religion to back it up. The first volume in a trilogy, this book and companion volumes treating existence and religion advance a systematic philosophical theology to address first-order questions found in the array of Axial Age religions. Questions generally arising in the major religious traditions are interrogated with a dialectic of philosophical approaches. This volume begins the project with a consideration of ultimacy defined philosophically and illustrated in a wide range of traditions. To the question of how or why there is something rather than nothing, Neville answers with an elaborate hypothesis about the ontological act of creation that creates all determinate things as related to but different from one another. The result is the claim that there are five ultimates: the ontological act, the form of determinate things, the components of determinate things, the existential location of determinate things relative to one another, and the value-identity of ultimate things, giving rise to five universal religious problematics of ultimacy respectively: the question of existence, the ground of obligation, the quest for wholeness, engaging others, and finding meaning. Neville analyzes what can and cannot be known about each of these ultimates. Readers will find Neville's theory of religion and philosophy a bold one, running counter to dominant trends while richly informed by a long and fruitful engagement with theology, philosophy, and religion, East and West.

PART I

Ultimates Defined

PART I

Preliminary Remarks

How does one begin a discussion of ultimate reality? The first quandary is that we are already in the middle of very many discussions of ultimate reality. Some of these discussions are the historical traditions of religions with their manifold genres of scripture, commentary, and evolving cultures of rituals, practices, and historical institutionalizations. Others are more philosophical discussions of ultimacy that in some ways are critical of religious traditions, especially in the West since the Enlightenment. Yet others are discussions of the methodology and content of anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, and history, as well as philosophical, literary, and artistic endeavors, all having to do with how human beings approach ultimacy. These discussions are diverse and complex. To be involved to a professional degree in any one tempts an attitude of alienation from the others. Yet all have some bearing on ultimacy.

The second quandary with beginning to discuss ultimate reality is to identify the subject matter, “ultimate reality,” which has been done implicitly already in saying that it is the topic of many discussions. At this stage of the argument, “ultimate reality,” “ultimates,” “ultimacy,” “ultimate matters,” “ultimate dimensions,” and similar cognates are mere token concepts pointing toward and awaiting detailed analysis, most systematically in Part III.

The function of ultimate reality as a token concept can be understood somewhat from its history. Until approximately two centuries ago, Western scholars tended to identify religion with the worship and service of gods. This approach dated back to the comparison of the pantheons of different civilizations in the ancient Mediterranean and South Asian worlds, and worked well enough when there was general agreement that gods are supernatural beings with super-human properties. But not all religions have taken their basic principles to be personified beings, certainly not the East Asian religions that look to Heaven-and-Earth, the Dao, the Ultimate of Non-Being, and the Great Ultimate. Nor is this the case with the South Asian traditions that take the gods to be themselves subject to karma. Moreover, sophisticated thinkers for millennia in all the major religions have challenged the personified supernatural-being imagery in their own traditions. Brahman is very little like a person, especially Nirguna Brahman. Rather, the metaphoric base from which concepts of Brahman have been developed is more that of consciousness than of personhood, although Brahman also is identified with person-like Gods such as Vishnu and Shiva. The One of Neo-Platonism is not a person. Rather it is an effulgent reality beyond all determinateness from which everything else emerges, beginning with the emergence of difference per se, then relational soul that emerges from difference, and so on. Neither is the pure Act of To Be in Thomas Aquinas' conception of God much like a person: It is simple and fully actual with no potentialities, and has no capacity to relate to something different from itself. Yet all of these conceptions, derived from persons, consciousness, and emergence models, often seem to be competitors with one another in some sense. And when they are not, as in the case of Hindu traditions in which the world is populated with many gods of the personified sort that are not as important as more transcendent principles, this very difference is important. And so scholars thinking about comparative theologies have sought a term that is vague enough to embrace all these competitive and sometimes contradictory notions.

Vagueness is a technical term in pragmatic semiotics that means a category that is capable of being instantiated or specified by instances that are mutually contradictory.¹ Vagueness is requisite for any comparative category because comparison is always “in some respect,” and the respect in which things are compared is the comparative category of which they are instances. Things compared might be similar or different, overlapping or barely commensurable, contradictory or confused. Only the results of comparison can sort this out. But the vague category is required to bring the things into comparison in the first place. The tough problem with comparative categories is that they often are not vague enough to be fair to the things to be compared. It was a Christian or Western Enlightenment bias that suggested that religions are to be compared according to the conceptions of the gods they worship and serve. The conception of God had to be made more vague so as to allow the comparison of personified beings with more transcendent principles such as the Neo-Platonic One or the Thomistic Act of To Be. But then that vague conception of God had to be made even more vague so as to bring Heaven, the Dao, and Nirguna Brahman into comparison. This is the point at which scholars appreciate Paul Tillich's suggestion of ultimate reality as a properly vague term. Ultimate reality itself suggests that which is most real, most basic, that which explains without needing explanation, the uncaused cause of everything else, and things like this. Of course, all these notions need to be analyzed in detail as they are instanced in candidate conceptions of ultimacy.

Yet perhaps these connotations of ultimate reality are not yet vague enough. Some Buddhists, especially the Madhyamaka, argue that any worry or even curiosity about ontological realities, ultimate or otherwise, is part of the religious problem.² What is ultimate for this kind of Buddhism is not an ontological reality but rather the task or project of obtaining release from suffering. This is an anthropomorphic rather than an ontological ultimate reality. So ultimate reality, ultimates, ultimacy, ultimate matters, ultimate dimensions, and their cognates embrace anthropological as well as ontological instances.

Tillich himself approached ultimate reality through the anthropological route with his analysis of ultimate concern.³ He held that every person has an ultimate concern with something. An ultimate concern is exclusive, setting all other concerns aside as proximate or preliminary in some sense. In actual fact, we might be self-deceived about our ultimate concern, thinking it is something properly pious or moral but discovering when push comes to shove that something else more egocentric or bizarre functions to make all other concerns preliminary. Whatever we think about our ultimate concern, the functional definition of ultimate concern is that it is the concern we would give up last. Whether every person has an ultimate concern, as Tillich thought, is an empirical question; perhaps not everyone has a functionally consistent set of concerns (I, 5). But for any person who does have an ultimate concern, ultimate reality is the putative object of that concern, said Tillich. Theology, for Tillich, has as its object whatever is worth being an object of ultimate concern. That is Tillich's first formal criterion of ultimacy. His second formal criterion is that whatever is the object of ultimate concern has to determine the being or non-being, in an existential sense, of the person with the concern. Tillich believed that the historical religions provide material criteria for ultimate reality.⁴

Thus, we have two tracks by which to explore ultimate reality. One is the ontological track of inquiry into what is most real, that which conditions but is itself unconditioned, whatever that might turn out to mean. The other is the anthropological track according to which ultimate reality is what is most important to people when it comes to defining their identity and existence. The present volume explores the first track, although with significant discussion of ultimate concern. Philosophical Theology Two and Three will explore the second in several ways.

The purpose of Philosophical Theology One, Part I, is to collect some of the more important tools necessary for a responsible analysis of ultimate reality. Accordingly, its chapters address the following four general questions.

First, what is the primary location in human experience of the symbols that define ultimacy? Chapter 1 will put forward the hypothesis that those symbols are located in sacred canopies that are accepted, more or less, by individuals and groups. An analysis of sacred canopies requires the development of some technical philosophical categories.

Second, do the symbols in sacred canopies that seem to refer to ultimate realities and ultimate dimensions of experience really do so? And if they do so, can they do so truly? Chapter 2 will explore the problems associated with scientific approaches to the study of religion that analyze religious symbols but prescind from asking whether these symbols refer to realities and do so truly. For religious people, whether their theological commitments are true or false is a point of utmost importance about their religion.

Third, by what theory of interpretation or reference can we understand the ways in which symbols of ultimacy in sacred canopies engage their objects? A theory of symbolic engagement will be developed in chapter 3 according to which three kinds of reference are required, iconic, indexical, and conventional.

Fourth, how do sacred canopies, with their symbols for engaging ultimacy, connect with the rest of life, with the “mundane” parts in contrast to the sacred elements? Chapter 4 will develop a theory of worldviews that connect the sacred canopies with other dimensions of experience along three “formal” continua. One is the continuum from the sacred to the mundane. A second is the continuum from intimate (often anthropomorphic) to transcendent symbols of ultimacy. The third is the continuum from sophisticated thinking to folk thinking along all points of the sacred/mundane continuum. Three “existential” continua will be developed in addition to the formal ones, concerning how different individuals share a larger cultural worldview, concerning how comprehensive a worldview is in providing articulation to the multitude of affairs of life for individuals and groups, and concerning how intense the commitment to a worldview is on the part of individuals. The existential continua of worldviews are more important for Philosophical Theology Two and Three than for the present volume.

CHAPTER ONE

Sacred Canopies

I. A THEORY OF SACRED CANOPIES

The phrase, sacred canopy, derives from Peter L. Berger's book, The Sacred Canopy. The purpose of that book is to develop a theory of religion with the tools of sociology of knowledge; its argument is closely connected with the book Berger wrote with Thomas Luckman at about the same time, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger's general thesis is that human beings need to order their experience, and do so by imposing subjectively constructed ordering ideas on reality. “A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals. To say that society is a world-building enterprise is to say that it is ordering, or nomizing, activity.”¹ Although constructed by the human imagination, and thus subjective in this sense, the nomos imposed on the world is taken to be objective and people live according to it. The world, of course, has its own structure, which Berger calls “cosmos” in contrast to “nomos.” The human need for ordering experience in ways that relate to purposes of survival and flourishing is extremely practical. The human ordering of experience gives structure to everyday life and also copes with the terror so natural when people face a vast and violent cosmos unscaled to human interests. As people objectify the meanings they project on the world, they construe their nomos to be cosmos. They thus internalize the objective meanings they had subjectively invented and projected. A cyclical relation exists, Berger points out, between inventive subjective projections, objective construals of the world in terms of those projections, and the internalization of that objectified world so that people “know” the world in the terms they have invented for it. This is “the social construction of reality.”

But reality has tough feedback and not every human imaginative construction can be lived with as objective meaningful fact. A rough fit is required between actual “cosmic” structures and the “nomic” meanings by which people navigate the real world. So the objectified nomos is constantly being amended, which requires a new internalization, in turn stimulating new inventive subjective projections in an unsteady round of learning and inventing. Although Berger does not in this book relate explicitly to the pragmatic movement in philosophy, he is solidly within the pragmatic frame which says that people interpret reality by means of signs that frequently are amended so as to interpret better or that are abandoned because they miss what is important. The “social construction of reality” is not an idealist philosophy that represents human meanings as mere fictions with no relation to reality or that represents reality as a mere fiction. Rather, it is a realistic philosophy that provides an account for how reality corrects our interpretive, meaning-giving ideas.

“Corrects” is not always the right word, however. Whatever the cosmic structure of reality, from the standpoint of human experience it is terrifying and “anomic” except insofar as the nomos shelters experience with its imposed meaning. “The sheltering quality of social order becomes especially evident if one looks at the marginal situations in the life of the individual, that is, at situations in which he is driven close to or beyond the boundaries of the order that determines his routine, everyday existence.”² The perceived objective validity of the nomos is precarious in these marginal situations.

Although the social world is supposed to be taken for granted, in marginal situations certain of its elements “stand out” as providing the world-making meaning on which the rest of social world's nomos depends. These constitute what Berger calls the “sacred.”

Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religion is cosmization in a sacred mode. By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience. This quality may be attributed to natural or artificial objects, to animals, or to men, or to the objectivations of human culture. There are sacred rocks, sacred tools, sacred cows. The chieftain may be sacred, as may be a particular custom or institution. Space and time may be assigned the same quality, as in sacred localities and sacred seasons. The quality may finally be embodied in sacred beings, from highly localized spirits to the great cosmic divinities. The latter, in turn, may be transformed into ultimate forces or principles ruling the cosmos, no longer conceived of in personal terms but still endowed with the status of sacredness.… The sacred is apprehended as “sticking out” from the normal routines of everyday life, as something extraordinary and potentially dangerous, though its dangers can be domesticated and its potency harnessed to the needs of everyday life. Although the sacred is apprehended as other than man, yet it refers to man, relating to him in a way in which other non-human phenomena (specifically, the phenomena of non-sacred nature) do not. The cosmos posited by religion thus both transcends and includes man. The sacred cosmos is confronted by man as an immensely powerful reality other than himself. Yet this reality addresses itself to him and locates his life in an ultimately meaningful order.³

The function of the sacred cosmos, according to Berger, is not only to provide meaning at the boundaries of the social world, but also to provide legitimation for the institutions and authority structures of the social world. Because the marginalized situations threaten the sacred cosmos, the sacred cosmos is precarious, and so is the whole nomic world including the society's institutions and authority structures. Berger is concerned with tracing basic philosophical problems, such as theodicy, which threaten just about any given social cosmos. He is also concerned with understanding how modern science threatens the sacred cosmos of Western religion, especially Christianity. The sacred cosmos of our time is disjointed, inconsistent, often inapplicable or inadequate, and much broken.

Although appreciating and building enthusiastically upon Berger's work, the conception of sacred canopies developed in Philosophical Theology pushes the notion in directions that Berger himself did not do. Berger himself uses the phrase sacred canopy only in the title of his book. In the body of the work he uses sacred cosmos instead. But sacred cosmos suggests a contrast with mundane cosmos, or with chaos.⁴ However incoherent or fragmented, a sacred cosmos does not admit of alternatives, only of amendments or collapse. Sacred canopy is a better term because it suggests a great tent over a larger cosmos, a tent that depicts the boundary conditions for the world in which the socially constructed nomos also provides the meaningful details of everyday life. The metaphor of “canopy” is apt because is suggests an artifact shielding the human world from the transcendent void above and also because, when it breaks down, it can be said to be “rent” like torn canvass. In what follows, “worldview” is used, as is explained in chapter 4, to mean something like what Berger means by nomos. A sacred canopy is only the part of a worldview that symbolizes the worldview's boundary conditions.

The study of ultimacy can begin by locating the ultimate in human experience as that to which reference is made in sacred canopies. The symbols in sacred canopies refer to what is ultimate in the sense that they articulate the boundary conditions that define the world. The boundary conditions are the “last” in the various series of conditions that make up the interpretive structures of everyday life. This notion of ultimate boundary conditions is developed in many layers throughout Philosophical Theology.

The symbols in a sacred canopy have some degree of coherence, hence the unifying connotations of a “canopy” thrown over the affairs of experience. But the coherence does not have to be great, nor does it have to be formal. The symbols do not have to be consistent with one another as they would be in a theological system of doctrines. When a sacred canopy is functioning well, its symbols work together even though they are not consistent. When the sacred canopy is rent, the symbols do not work together, nor do they collectively address the issues of boundary conditions that arise in marginal situations. Robert Bellah, in Religion in Human Evolution, develops an anthropological tradition that makes a strong distinction between the symbols making up the world of ordinary life and those making up sacred or religious life, noting that many things can be approached in both ways and suggesting that the same individuals can step from one to another.⁵ That might be the way some religious cultures work. But there is no necessity that symbols of the ultimate constitute a different way of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Cross References
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Ultimates Defined
• PART II: Ultimates Symbolized
• Part III: Ultimates Demonstrated
• Part IV: Ultimates Known
• Notes
• Bibliography