The Sacred Universe

Composed within the context of profound realism, intimate life involvement, and struggle with the most destructive aspects of the human condition, these messages function best and become most intelligible within that context rather than simply as academic discussion. This is the time, indeed, when the deepest meaning of these ancient traditions should emerge, for all humanist traditions presently seek renewal by intercultural and interreligious dialogue.

Since students of the contemporary social sciences are not generally comfortable with the humanist phase of their study, they tend to encompass the human order of things within empirical science. This is one way of seeing the present situation of anthropology, the social sciences generally, and even religious studies. These disciplines derive their method, their mood, and their objectives from the social sciences, which themselves derive from the objectivist methods of Newtonian physics. Within this context, the human quality of life as previously known is considerably diminished, the intuitive experience of the real stifled, and the will and capacity for grandeur lost. Humans lose their place at the center of the real and end up in ash cans on the stage of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).

The question of the humanist and scientific dimensions of reality constitutes a crucial issue even as regards the physical survival of the human being. Scientists realize that their achievements, so grand in their scope and reach into outer space, have not enabled us to deal with the full magnitude of the human order, especially its interiority. The dominance of the social sciences powerfully influences religious studies today. Their vigor exhausted by analytical research, scholars of religion often find it difficult to push their studies onto the level of comprehensive humanist interpretation. Perhaps they are too close to the material for this deeper type of reflection; possibly the professional humanist, philosopher, or theologian is too far away from it.

Thus many of the great scriptural texts of the world, long available, remain without depth of interpretation or cultural influence. They seem not to have the vital impact seen in the movement of Buddhist texts from India to China, or Buddhist and Confucian texts into Japan, or the meeting of Christian Biblical texts with Patristic Hellenic thought, or in the Western accommodation of Christian tradition to Aristotelian treatises.

Thus in the present, insufficient thought is given to deeper levels of cultural creativity. One reason, perhaps, is that many Western scholars have no vital relationship with the deeper cultural currents of their own traditions. Their scholarly life is without relation to any experiential roots. Despite much excellent work in the translation and explication of diverse religious literature, we do not produce scholars of the Erasmus type, although this result is what we might eventually hope for. Creative personalities of such dimensions are arising more effectively out of scientific rather than religious studies. Not primarily due to deficiencies in the work of research scholars, this dearth of creative religious leadership is due, rather, to failures in understanding and communication of those supposedly in vital contact with spiritual and humanist currents of the West: philosophers, theologians, and cultural historians.

What is needed is an interaction of textual study and research with true humanistic insight and imagination. Present limitations in interpretation prevail in the imaginative and emotional orders rather than in technical skills of translation or the collection of research data. In the words of Mircea Eliade (1907-1986):

It is not necessary to let oneself become paralyzed by the immensity of the task; it is necessary above all to renounce the easy excuse that not all the documents have been conveniently collected and interpreted. All the other humanist disciplines, to say nothing of the natural sciences, find themselves in an analogous situation. But no man of science has waited until all the facts were assembled before trying to understand the facts already known.²

Eliade’s words are paralleled by similar statements concerning scientific insight by René Dubos (1901-1982): “Many great experimenters in all fields of science have described how their ideas were determined in large part by unanalytical, visionary perceptions. Likewise, history shows that most specific scientific theories have emerged and have been formulated gradually from crude intuitive sketches.”³

Like all studies, whether scientific or humanistic, religious sciences need visionary perceptions, artistic awareness, cultural creativity, and the ability to respond to that depth of human consciousness “below the analytical level.” The need is apparent especially at the present time, when global communities of scholars and a complex of cultures come together to establish the abiding context within which human life is to be lived and humanist studies carried on into the indefinite future.

Whatever the magnitude of the task and however vast the required imaginative range, we cannot really say that the work is proportionately so much greater or its objectives so different from the objectives sought and mission fulfilled during the early history of the classical civilizations. There was then, as now, the challenge of awakening to human meaning and purpose within a large and encompassing universe. The most primordial intuitions of humankind, as expressed in myths and spiritual disciplines, communicate to us across the ages—at least in outline—this cosmological context for cultural development.

In classical civilizations as well as in indigenous traditions, the comprehensive worlds of the divine, the cosmic, and the human were intimately present to one another. This, for example, is the very context in which early Chinese civilization emerged, as we see from the opening passages of the Book of History. Here is portrayed in extensive detail the human quest for integration of Heaven and the Earth, the effort to encompass the cosmos in its full extent and to order human existence in relation to natural systems.

There is, of course, much greater complexity in present cosmological, historical, and cultural processes than in those dreamed of by these ancient civilizations. Creation of a future world will always require new ways of integrating the human cultural complex in historical time and global extent. But it should help to know that humans have generally, from the earliest Neolithic period, functioned on a comprehensive cosmic plane, as evidenced by both archeological remains and living tribal societies such as Native Americans and the classical societies of India and China.

Here we observe that the work of ordering the world within its human context has, since its earliest period, been largely the function of hermeneutics, the most ancient form of human wisdom: interpretation. The great civilizations first read the text of the real from cosmic phenomena, then interpreted it, a reaction leading to the composition of scriptural texts handed down through the ages as revelation second only to the cosmos itself.

Ever since that time, humans have sustained and developed the greater cultures by constant reinterpretation of these ancient written scriptures in the light of new historical experiences. The constant renewal of civilizations, their very life process, has been associated with, and largely governed by, reinterpretation of these same texts. In our own present time, human beings must once again reinterpret their basic scriptures, this time in a context embracing them in multiform human traditions reaching from East to West on a global scale and in a historical time sequence witnessing the ongoing developments throughout the centuries and their present convergence. This present historical-cultural convergence must be seen as the primary context in which cultural traditions and religious studies now become maximally aware of themselves.

What must be sought for in the new hermeneutics is the recovery, through critical processes, of a second naiveté, an earlier interior experience of a harmonious and luminous universe, associated by the Chinese with the “lost mind of the child.” The manner in which this perspective is achieved must, to a large extent, be through language. This is why language studies are of such great importance and why language and its most ancient literatures must be constantly reexplored to yield their full original luminous meaning. Today’s religious scholar deals with the greater part of the world’s most sacred literature in an era that is becoming the supreme scriptural age so far in human history.

The ultimate achievement of scriptural scholarship is the recovery of what Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) designates as the fullness of language. We do not awaken to consciousness in a blank universe. We awaken in a universe wherein the cosmic script is already written, a universe in which the written scriptures have already been composed, a universe in which we discover, with Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529), a third scripture imprinted within our own being. Each of these scriptures—the cosmic, the written, and interior awareness—responds to the others, evokes the reality of the others, and is interpreted in their light. These three together guide us in our self-creation, our humanization. Out of these three scriptures the human cultures have been born and sustained and, when these cultures have declined, it is out of these three sources that they have been called back to life and renewed from century to century. Once more, in our day, all cultures face a challenge of severe proportions as the scientific assault on humanist and religious methodologies continues apace.

In the overall view, this confrontation is perhaps the special period of the third of the three scriptures, the inner awareness. This awareness, however, can come to life only through vital contact with the other two scriptures. Thus the period prior to the composition of early verbal and written scriptures is the period of unarticulated but deeply felt human response to the scripture of the cosmos. From it came the verbal scriptures so familiar to us over the last three millennia. Now we are in the third period, the period of inner awareness that reads the verbal scriptures within new scientific realizations of their context, in an evolving world and among diverse societies but without losing the older humanist and religious insights and values.

This is the crisis to be faced: the demythologizing and alienation from our humanist scriptural foundations, a period during which the scriptures survive only by objective, analytical study, more within an academic context than as part of the realities of human existence. This period of demythologizing is perhaps coming to an end at the same time as the period of cultural isolation—and at a time when the inherent limitations of technological achievements are being recognized.

At such a time, the interior awareness, this third scripture, awakens us to the need for renewed contact with the other two scriptural traditions, the written and the cosmic. A new period of scriptural vitality becomes possible. This is the meaning of creative movements emerging at the present time that may give this generation hope that a new humanism is being born. This reborn humanism will be the context in which religious studies will be carried out in the future. For the first time since its emergence in the historical process, Western culture has an opportunity to establish itself within a functional global complex of cultures in a spiritually cooperative attitude, rather than a spiritually antagonistic or competitive one.

The traditional antagonism has been largely the result of ignorance on the part of Western religious thinkers concerning the real nature and intent of the religious thought and practice of other peoples. But now, because of new types of religious studies, an extensive range of human religious development has been investigated in all its variety, from its simplest to its most complex forms. What emerges from these studies is that the various religious traditions, with all their differences, have much to say to each other. The beliefs and practices of each illumine the beliefs and practices of the others.

This sharing becomes evident in the case of Christian thought, which now has a broad range of data in world scriptural traditions upon which it can draw to deepen its own understanding of the divine and human orders and the relations between them. These data must now be incorporated into discussions of the divine reality in itself and in its relation to the phenomenal world. They must be drawn into discussions of the human condition, revelation, redemption, incarnation, the savior personality, faith, grace, sacrifice, rebirth, interior spiritual discipline, divine union, sacred community, communion with the cosmos, and final beatitude.

None of these can any longer be studied satisfactorily within a single tradition and without data from other religious cultures. With such data, Christians find not only that their own traditions can be further identified in their distinctive characteristics but also that their understanding of their own traditions can be considerably broadened, perhaps even more than biblical understanding was clarified and extended by contact with Hellenic thought.

Yet all of these advances require the development of a new and more satisfactory hermeneutics, the area of greatest urgency for scholars of religion. Extensive research remains to be done on materials not yet adequately interpreted. This advance can come about only by an increase in scholars with adequate cultural-historical backgrounds and the intellectual insight and imagination to incorporate existing data into more meaningful contexts.

Students of religion who work from a philosophical or theological basis are generally not acquainted with actual religious beliefs and practices on a sufficiently broad scale, nor do they always have the type of interpretative skills necessary. On the other hand, those involved in scientific research frequently are unable to go beyond their data and consider that “subjective” appropriation and interpretation of data contaminate pure scientific knowledge. This transition from scientific knowledge to subjective human meaning is indeed a big step and needs to be managed with extreme care. Yet any study of the human should be recognized from the beginning as a subjective activity involving the knowing person, the reality known, the means of knowing, and its purpose. The “scientific” process in the acquiring and organizing of data enables us to become more clearly aware of the human mode of being, but only when the construction of scientific methods and categories do not diminish or minimize the basic human quality of the process.

If, as regards studies of the religious life and literature of one people by another, subjective communication is not taking place, if religious personalities cannot speak to one another in terms mutually helpful in managing the human condition, if traditions cannot clarify for one another what it is to be human and assist one another in carrying out a redemptive or liberating transformation of the human subject, if the sacred space of the one is impenetrable to the other, then, it would seem, the study of our human religious and cultural traditions comes to an abortive conclusion. Yet we must admit that we have not yet satisfactorily learned the art of interreligious communication.

While history indicates extensive interreligious and intercultural conflicts and tensions in the past, it also presents extensive examples of religious and cultural influences successfully passed from one society to another. Indeed, intercommunion of traditions has taken place so widely as to seem almost universal. It would be difficult to identify any spiritual or cultural tradition as a “pure” tradition, an absolute self-creation. What has not yet been done and what is much needed is an understanding of how this religious-cultural process can be carried out more effectively in the conditions of modern times. As models from the past, we have such great periods of spiritual communication as the Patristic era of Christian development in the Mediterranean region, the assimilation of Buddhism into the Chinese world, and the spiritual and cultural interaction in the development and spread of Islam across south and central Asia.

The difficulty is that now the situation has grown extremely complex, with the impingement of all traditions on one anther in a flood tide of religious data and influence, on the one hand, and a lack of authentic human and spiritual communication, on the other. There is no proportion between the amount of data and the quality of genuine religious intercommunication taking place. The disproportion is due to secularist indifference, vigorous fundamentalism, and professional neglect, especially by Christian theologians.

Still, the entire dynamics of the modern world is, to an increasing degree, throwing people and societies together in close exterior proximity but without the capacity for interior communication. This failure to communicate interior human realities is the main difficulty we face. Formerly, peoples and traditions met on a limited scale, with limited personal contact, but within a fundamentally human and religious order of life. Now, communication has been intensified on the exterior without satisfactory deepening within: thus the reduction of human relations to economic, political, and social orders, with an overlay of the aesthetic and the spiritual. It may seem rather distant to speak about interreligious hermeneutics in such a context, but certainly we will need to interpret our deeper selves to one another if the human venture is to meet the challenges of the future for cultural and ecological survival.

Much has, of course, already been accomplished in the spiritual order. If we look to the larger cultural context of the present, we can observe a powerful gravitation of traditions toward one another: thus the popularity in the West of a variety of religious cults and spiritual disciplines from various parts of the world. There is a return to religious symbolism, participation in rituals, engagement in difficult and demanding meditation exercises, quests for the guidance of spiritual masters, and extensive reading in various world scriptures.

However, these activities are mostly a matter of personal interest and are unrelated to traditional religious establishments or to official teaching. In America, at least, we seem to have few theologians of recognized competence in world religions, although among Asian scholars and cultural anthropologists there is extensive commentary. Western theologians seem to concern themselves entirely with the challenge of secularism and prevailing philosophical currents of more recent Western derivation. Thus participants in a variety of exotic spiritual traditions are often without proper guidance. Still, even if they do not lead to substantial religious or cultural development, these activities at least bear witness to basic spiritual attractions of various traditions for one another and offer some indication of new forms of spiritual development that may someday take root in the West.

If there is, on the part of some, spiritual immobility and resistance to such sharing in the face of the meeting of peoples, there is also a trend toward intimate participation. The difficulty of the one is that spiritual traditions are not developing according to the historical dimensions required in this exciting period of human development and thus are not contributing significantly to the needed communion of peoples and traditions. The difficulty of intimate participation is that it makes too little distinction in responding to religious phenomena and thus finds no sustaining life program, nothing that can be elevated into a movement toward the cultural renewal demanded at this moment in history.

Here is the task of hermeneutics, to interpret traditions to each other so that, while keeping each tradition distinct, it brings them into the creative presence of the other. Only on the condition that each remains inviolably itself can the traditions help one another. Falsification or overly facile identification in an undifferentiated religious or spiritual context can cause the movement of interpretation to lose its effectiveness. Both continuity and discontinuity must be preserved. Diversity of traditions must be renewed while common spiritual space is established.

Each tradition will have a particular, limited microphase and a macrophase open to the broader meaning or resonance of comprehensive human traditions within which it now begins to function. This distinction of microphase and macrophase might very well serve to differentiate the larger, more universal phase of a tradition and its particular, limited phase. So it is with Christianity. It has its specific institutional phase, its community of the baptized; yet beyond these aspects there is the larger community of humanity with which it is associated, not simply in a purely spiritual manner but by way of observable Christian presence.

And so it is with all the religious traditions. Yoga, for example, has its microphase as expressed in association with Samkhya philosophical dualism and its macrophase in relation to spiritual disciplines associated with many of the world’s religions. We might speak, also, of the microphase and the macrophase of key terms used in various traditions: brahman, maya, nirvana, karma, dharma, li, tao, t’ien, jen. All have their origin and primary significance within a certain historical and religious context yet are now being universalized to enrich the religious and spiritual vocabulary of the global human community.

For example, we have already a rich variety of terms from a complex of traditions. Each reveals something not quite the same as that denoted by other terms, indicating that the experience itself is not quite the same. Yet the variety of terms from such a complex of traditions significantly assists us in our efforts toward identification of ultimate reality, indicating a “final term of reference” in the order of the real or in the order of human consciousness.

Proper use of these terms requires a special skill—a skill we are only now acquiring. It must also be added that when such a complex of terms is brought together, they all become changed and begin to enunciate things never enunciated before. The linguistic or theological “purist” is prone to object to such “abuse” of sacred words. Yet neither history nor culture nor language knows the type of permanence or constancy sought by those who would isolate language or thought from the temporal conditioning to which all things are subject. We cannot accept the position that languages are ultimately opaque to one another nor the attitude that thought systems or religious traditions or spiritual disciplines are incommunicable to one another.

Precisely here is where the creative intuition or visionary perception begins to assert itself. The horizon is open, extensive linguistic materials are available, and a larger vision begins to emerge within the global community. Past traditions have each made important contributions; the present has brought about a convergence of spiritual currents and their modes of expression. Now is the creative moment, the moment on a global scale such as that time within Western civilization when Paul began to write his epistles to the people of the Mediterranean world, or when Augustine enunciated his vision of a Christian historical order, or when Thomas brought Aristotelian terminology into Christian theology so that it could say things Aristotle himself never dreamed of saying.

There are no laws for such moments; there is no way of indicating the direction religious insight should take. These choices are determined by persons of superior religious imagination who understand the complex of past traditions and the opportunities of the present and who can construct a comprehensive religious vision adequate to present historical circumstances. Such persons choose and shape language suited to this purpose. Subsequent generations of scholars will fill out details within the established context until another period of major transformation arrives.

Lacking such a resolution of present problems of religious hermeneutics and religious thinkers of this magnitude, those in religious studies can only proceed within the limits of their ability toward creation of a truly functional religious vision. If we indicate, then, the need of Christian thinkers, as a first step, to incorporate data of other religious traditions into their study, then the second step, the development of a new science of hermeneutics, can be taken.

A third possible development concerns the need for studying Christianity according to the norms and methods of the history of religions. In recent centuries, the Christian tradition has been dominated by biblical expressions or their theological expositions from the medieval period. As the basis for explaining and defending beliefs considered essential to a Christian life orientation, this theological tradition achieved remarkable success, immensely sustaining and developing Christian thought and culture. At the same time, it severely limited Christian expression and the range of religious experience.

The only extensive cultural, religious, or philosophical influence on this Christian theological tradition so far has been that of Hellenistic philosophy from Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian sources. More recently, there have been influences from sources such as phenomenology, the existentialism of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and, lately, the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Thus one of the most effective ways at the present time of invigorating Christian thought might be to explore Christian tradition from the wider anthropological and cultural perspectives of the history of religions. From this perspective, the major outlines of biblical and Christian tradition emerge in a much clearer light, the terms and norms of comparison having been previously far too limited. Such a view of Christianity has already emerged in general studies of the history of religions and its companion discipline, the phenomenology of religions. Yet these early observations have not gone beyond basic observations; there is a need for a more thorough historical and phenomenological study.

A fourth avenue of growth and development for Christianity is increased study of the nature and limitation of symbolism, especially archetypal symbolism as set forth extensively by Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) and others. Religious life in recent decades is recovering from a devastating period of rationality and scientific analysis. The limitations of the strictly rational processes of the mind are, however, once again recognized, along with the inability of rational demonstration to evoke emotional response or sustained application of human energies. The more profound aspects of human awareness and feeling come from a depth of our being to which we ourselves have but limited access. Only from symbols emerging in our dreams or arising spontaneously in our consciousness do we know this depth. Cultivation of this inner capacity for understanding and responding to intuitions of the mind constitutes the basis of creative genius, whether in intellectual or aesthetic human life. It is especially important in spiritual and religious life, which, in its essential qualities, involves communication not only with transrational but with transhuman modes of the real.

Both from the standpoint of understanding and of efficacy in the spiritual, social, and historical orders, the recovery of contact with imaginative processes is of supreme importance. Also, in the renewal of the religious and humanistic phases of contemporary life and in the evocation of a greater intercommunion of traditions, hardly anything is more helpful than this new appreciation of the imaginative, symbolic, and mythical.

Of the various scriptures here mentioned, the cosmic, the written, and interior awareness, we might say that all come together in the common world of symbols. Rebirth symbolism, impressed upon us so powerfully by the sequence of the seasons and the periodic death and rebirth of living things, has entered into the myths, rituals, and sacred literature of peoples so extensively that it must express a common interior awareness. The specific manifestation and meaning of rebirth symbolism differs from one people to another, but the consciousness that, to achieve human status, we must undergo a death-rebirth experience has far-reaching implications.

Another symbol important in the spiritual intercommunion of peoples throughout the world is that of mythic narrative, in which human existence is seen as a story or drama depicting a journey wherein the human personality encounters obstacles to be overcome, demonic powers to be thwarted, and even death to be endured before, with the aid of superhuman powers, the true self, the divine presence, the grail, or the jewel of great price, everlasting life, is attained.

This journey motif dominates the ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh , the Homeric epics, and the Hebrew Exodus legend. It is found in the wanderings of Buddha, in the fictional account of Hsüan Tsang’s journey to India, and in the Hopi Indians’ tracing of their origin and destiny. Its Christian mode appears in Augustine’s (354-430) story of the rise, growth, and termination of The City of God and in the phases of Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Commedia. In all of these accounts, external pilgrimage is the symbol of the journey of the individual soul, the particular society, and the human order into those interior depths wherein the sacred presence shines forth, all peril is surmounted, and final security is attained.

A fifth area of study deserving consideration is the religious experience known in biblical and Christian terms as revelation. At least so far as the West is concerned, a more comprehensive study of divine revelation to humans remains an important need for broadening religious perspective. Understanding the full range and depth of revelation as a religious event will require both intensive research and greater insight into resultant data. These will provide the basis for a collection of world scriptures out of which new thinking of the religious order can be done. If, so far, only a few efforts have been made in this direction, we may hope that much more will be done in the future.

At first glance, revelation appears to be primarily a Christian concern and a human-divine communication so intimate as to be indescribable at the intellectual level. Revelation is, nevertheless, a phenomenon of universal importance and one of the most fruitful points of religious discussion, at least for theistic religions. Within the protocols of revelation, the various scriptures will not equate in any univocal sense. The revelatory nature of Hindu or Buddhist scriptures will differ in form from that attributed to Jewish and Christian scriptures, but the basic concepts cannot be totally unrelated. This kinship, as research identifies it, will provide the basis on which future thought must build and mutual validation of various scriptural traditions considered.

Finally, diverse religious personalities communicating major religious or spiritual teachings to a people might also be given mutual recognition. These include contemporary figures and earlier thinkers such as Aurobindo, Iqbal, Suzuki, and Teilhard, discussed in the first essay.

What can be seen from these suggestions is that, after the weakening of spiritual and cultural consensus in recent times, the former isolated situation can hardly be reestablished. The various religious traditions are irrevocably altered in their individual and collective significance. Our entire spiritual situation—the very mode of our religious consciousness—is changed. Suggestions that the sources of revelation be broadened for Christian theology, that multicultural and multireligious hermeneutics be now a central question, that the Christian tradition be studied according to the norms of the history of religions, that comprehensive study be given to divine revelation, and that a world scriptural collection be developed—these might be among the most significant issues to occupy our efforts in the immediate future. These will shift the content of Western Christian awareness into a new context, the multiform global religious tradition of humankind.

If, formerly, Christianity was studied from the inside out, it should now be studied from the outside in. In this situation, historians of religions are among the foremost religious creators of the twentieth century, primarily responsible for evoking consciousness of a universal human religious heritage in all its diversity. Also, they are responsible for creating the conditions in which extensive interaction of religious traditions and cultures is begun, to be continued indefinitely into the future. Of all the forces at work in the modern world, it is doubtful if any is more powerful than an enlightened religion in awakening ancient traditions to new phases of development. For none of the traditions is in itself complete. Seeming for long periods to remain unchanged, these traditions are now awakened to development and renewal as seldom before in their history. They begin to realize that they are not entirely stable forms of life but rather developmental processes that have changed considerably in the past and are destined, perhaps, for even greater change in the future.

Yet since these traditions have all undergone extensive interaction with other traditions over the past several thousand years, we should not exaggerate the newness of modifications brought about in the present. The sense of novelty results only from a more heightened intercommunion of traditions due to the definitive nature of present-day intercommunion, its comprehensiveness, and its pervasive nature, all results of modern means of communication. These means are bringing peoples and traditions of the world into one another’s presence to a degree never before possible.

Strangely enough, the very forces moving various cultures and religions out of the traditional into the modern world are exactly the forces enabling each tradition to recover contact with its most pristine forms and ancient literatures. Thus these traditions live more deeply in the past even as they move into the present and future. Each tradition is made more complete within itself, more integral with its primordial moments. From this earliest period, the historical movement of religions and cultures has been converging toward multiform global expressions in which each finds its place and each is in some manner present to the entire human society.