God at Play: Lila in Hindu and Christian Traditions

by Daniel Soars (Editor), Michelle Voss (Afterword), Sucharita Adluri (Contribution by), Ankur Barua (Contribution by), Stephen R.L. Clark (Contribution by)

Overview

The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion

God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.

Though līlā is often interpreted simply as “play,” the essays in this volume reflect a far richer semantic and conceptual field, ranging from spontaneity and gratuitousness, through joy and humor, to mercy and compassion. By focusing on the different contexts in which līlā is found in Hindu traditions and resisting any uniform translation of the term, the contributors to this volume avoid the risk of using predominantly western or Christian categories to understand the Hindu other. The volume thus explores how līlā functions in a variety of distinctive philosophical, theological, and devotional ways across Hindu traditions, and listens for echoes in Christian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God.

God at Play is a genuine experiment in deep learning across traditions. Each chapter reflects on what is learned by taking līlā as the category of comparison and invites the reader to think about what these conversations add, confirm, or change in relation to earlier twentieth-century scholarship on play—not least, in terms of what difference it might make to understand human life as an imitation and a participation in the divine life of a playful deity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781531510107
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Series:	Comparative Theology: Thinking Across Traditions , #11
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Michelle Voss (Afterword By)
Michelle Voss is Professor of Theology at Emmanuel College in the Toronto School of Theology. She is a scholar of comparative theology, with a particular focus on Christian and Hindu contexts, and has also written widely about aesthetics, gender, and embodiment. Recent works include Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Fortress, 2017) and The Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations, which she edited with Chad Bauman (Routledge, 2020).

Daniel Soars (Edited By)
Daniel Soars teaches in the Divinity Department at Eton College and is book reviews editor for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. Recent publications include a co-edited volume titled Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) and a monograph titled The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu Christian Conversation (Fordham, 2023).


Sucharita Adluri is a scholar of South Asian religions and Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cleveland State University. She has written a monograph titled Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014). Her recent publications focus on religious reading and commentary in Vedānta traditions.
Ankur Barua is Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He researches various aspects of Vedāntic Hindu worldviews in premodern and contemporary South Asia. Recent publications include The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes (Lexington Books, 2022); and Exploring Hindu Philosophy (Equinox, 2023).
Stephen R.L. Clark is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and Honorary Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. His principal recent works include Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice (University of Chicago, 2016); Cities and Thrones and Powers: Towards a Plotinian Politics (Angelico Press, 2022); and How the Worlds Became: Philosophy and the Oldest Stories (Angelico Press, 2023).
Francis X. Clooney, SJ, is Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at the Harvard Divinity School. His primary areas of Indological scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. Recent publications include Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How It Matters (University of Virginia Press, 2019) and his memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story (T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2024).
Rachel Fell McDermott is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author and editor of several books on Hindu Goddess traditions, and she is also keenly interested in Comparative Theology. Her most recent book, co-authored with Daniel Polish, is A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue (Lexington, 2024). Her current project engages Hindu-Muslim relations in Bengal and Bangladesh.
Jessica Frazier is Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a member of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Her research explores key philosophical themes across cultures, from Indian classical theories of Being to twentieth-century phenomenology. Her publications include Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Divinity (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box (Ashgate, 2014).
Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he taught for thirty-four years before retiring in 2003. He has written extensively on patristic and medieval theology, especially the history of spirituality and mysticism.
Douglas Hedley is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism. As well as a monograph on Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Coleridge, Philosophy, and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Hedley has written a three-volume work on the religious imagination: Living Forms of the Imagination (T&T Clark, 2008); Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (Continuum, 2011); and The Iconic Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2016). He has held visiting professorships in France, Germany, the USA, Canada, and India.
Srilata Raman is Professor of Hinduism at the University of Toronto. Her areas of interest are Tamil and Sanskrit Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva intellectual formations from the late medieval to the early colonial period, including the emergence of nineteenth-century socioreligious reform and colonial sainthood. Her publications include the monographs Self-Surrender to God in Śrīvaiṣṇavism (Routledge, 2007) and The Transformation of Tamil Religion (Routledge, 2023).
Daniel J. Tolan is a Fellow at The Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He received his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity as a member of Clare College, and his publications can be found in the Harvard Theological Review, Vigiliae Christianae, The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, and Studia Patristica.
Peter Tyler is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Spirituality and Director of the Centre for Initiatives in Spirituality and Reconciliation (InSpiRe) at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. A registered psychotherapist in private practice, he has contributed extensively to the current dialogue between psychology and theology. Latest publications include The Living Philosophy of Edith Stein (Bloomsbury, 2023) and John of the Cross: Carmel, Desire and Transformation (Routledge, 2024).
Dominic White OP, a Dominican friar, is a Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, a Research Fellow of the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge, and Prior of Blackfriars Priory, Oxford. His publications include The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Christian Cosmology, Contemporary Spiritualities and the Arts (Liturgical Press, 2015), and How Do I Look? Theology in the Age of the Selfie (SCM, 2020). He is a composer, and co-founder of the Friends of Sophia group.

Table of Contents

Introduction: God at Play: Līlā in Hindu and Christian Traditions | 1
Daniel Soars

Part I: Līlā as Divine Will and Divine Creativity

1 Play in East and West | 21
Douglas Hedley

2 Creating without a “Why”: Divine Play as Metaphor
for Creation in John Scottus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart | 43
Bernard McGinn

3 God’s Willand the Creative Act:
Origen on Divine Volition and the Intelligibility of the Cosmos | 63
Daniel J. Tolan

Part II: Grace, Compassion, and Suffering: Some Pastoral Connotations of Līlā

4 Creation, Vision, Bliss: Līlā as Grace according to Rāmānuja, with
Reference Also to Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas | 89
Francis X. Clooney, SJ

5 Līlā and Divine Mercy in the Hundred Verses to Compassion of Vedānta Deśika | 109
Sucharita Adluri

6 What Does It Mean for the Goddess to Play?
Līlā (or Its Absence) in the Śākta Traditions | 135
Rachel Fell McDermott

Part III: Some Aesthetic and Dramatic Dimensions of Līlā

7 “You have made me endless, such is thy pleasure”:
The Līlā of Love in the Metaphysical Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore | 153
Ankur Barua

8 The Metaphysics of Emotion: Divine Play in Caitanya Vaiṣṇava Philosophy | 178
Jessica Frazier

9 The Making of the Sacred City: Līlā as God’s Violence in a Tamil Śaiva Talapurāṇam | 197
Srilata Raman

Part IV: Human Playfulness as Imitation of Divine Līlā

10 Looking to the Leader: The Divine Dance in Neoplatonism | 221
Stephen R.L. Clark

11 Serio Ludere! Divine Lessons from Tricksters and Holy Fools | 244
Peter Tyler

12 The Serious Subject of Play: Play in Dance and Music | 264
Dominic White, OP

Afterword: Divine Līlā and Human Play | 289
Michelle Voss

Contributors | 299

Index | 303

Editorial Reviews

This is a crucial work for those interested in plumbing the depths of creative activity, both human and divine, in the multifaceted traditions of Christianity and Hinduism. The scholarship here is wide-ranging and insightful, and it will ensure that līlā in Hindu theology can no longer be translated simply as "play" without further qualification. Daniel Soars is to be commended for conveying so important a contribution for a closer understanding of two world faiths.—Julius Lipner, Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus Fellow of the British Academy.

The new millennium has witnessed the maturing of Hindu-Christian studies in depth and breadth. Gone are the days when one felt compelled to add necessary primers to every part of the endeavor, assuming the reader’s naïveté or incredulity at every turn of what might seem an idiosyncratic pairing. In this collection, Daniel Soars skillfully assembles distinguished scholars to examine līlā, or divine play, from multiple vantages. God at Play: Līlā in Hindu and Christian Traditions is emblematic of what scholarly Hindu-Christian studies can be: constructive, erudite, serious, revelatory, and, yes, even playful. The volume stands, then, as a milestone in the development of the field in its theological mode, and we are all the richer for it.—Kerry San Chirico, author of Between Hindu and Christian: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in Banaras

From the Publisher