Overview
Yadlapati traces religious perspectives on trust, humility, belonging, commitment, and lively skepticism as they relate to faith and doubt. Drawing on various doctrines, scriptures, and the writings of great religious thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Raimon Panikkar, Yadlapati demonstrates how doubt can serve to enhance faith, not hinder it. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, Against Dogmatism reveals an ecumenical middle way, a spiritual approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252095207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 333 KB |
About the Author
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Against Dogmatism
Dwelling in Faith and Doubt
By Madhuri M. Yadlapati
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09520-7
CHAPTER 1
Postures of Trust
Medieval Christian theologians drew a telling distinction between fides qua, the act of faith or trust in God, and fides quae, the specific content of belief statements. The former refers to the experience of having faith, of trusting in God, of recognizing the world as God's world. The latter refers to what one believes about that world, themselves, and God. At first glance, this distinction may look like one between a vague sort of feeling and a clearly articulated faith, but the way the medievals responded to these two forms of faith is interesting. They referred to the former as implicit faith and to the latter as explicit faith. Those with implicit faith participate in the life of church tradition in obedience without a clear and explicit understanding of the doctrines of the church. Explicit faith refers to the ability to articulate what one believes and why. Interestingly, the medievals held that implicit faith, on its own, was enough for a person's salvation, but explicit faith alone was not. Knowing the doctrines of the church and articulating them clearly was not viewed as sufficient to guarantee salvation. Trust, obedience, and participation in the tradition were required. On the one hand, this suggests a pragmatic concern with the uniformity of external practice over the intellectual deliberation on doctrine, and allows a simpler, minimalist sort of faith for the general uneducated medieval public that was distinct from the deliberate learning and doctrinal interpretation that was part of monastic study. On the other hand, the link between trust, obedience, and participation, or fides qua, and their practical superiority to the explicitly stated faith of fides quae, suggests that the act of trusting God was considered far more integral to the value of faith than one's clear understanding of God. Thomas Aquinas, while distinguishing faith from knowledge, still suggested that faith does yield proper knowledge of God because it is rooted in the act of assent to divinely revealed propositions of faith as directed by God's grace. The act of assent or trust that takes places in faith enacts a proper relationship to God's grace.
It is this priority of trusting God over creedal propositions that informs this first chapter. In many ways this runs counter to the need often articulated in today's very self-conscious society, that one should understand exactly why one believes something for it to be valuable and strong. I do not intend in this book to trace the development of the modern emphasis on what one believes, but we can certainly point to the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and the rising values of individualism, reason, and autonomy to identify the multilayered influences of this pattern of thinking. In one sense, modern people have appropriated the Socratic intuition that "a life unexamined is not worth living" to criticize faith that is unarticulated as perhaps only immature and inferior. We even refer to it in a derogatory manner as "blind faith." While that is very often a valid criticism of those who unreflectively cling to their views, it may also be a mistake to privilege the intellectual and logical exposition of doctrine over the emotional act described by the religious as trust. Although faith certainly includes the articulation of certain positive beliefs, its exclusive focus can overstate the role of individual autonomy in the spiritual life and fail to recognize the degree to which trust embodies an acceptance or acquiescence to being moved by something deeper, larger, or more sovereign.
Part I of this book comprises a descriptive approach to faith. If faith is not primarily about certitude or creedal statements, what is it? This first chapter explores several articulations of faith as the consciousness of humility or dependence, on the one hand, and belonging to a world of meaning, on the other hand. These two forms of experience together identify some defining sense of trust in the sacred. Treating them in turn allows me to better identify the relationship between humility and belonging, or between consciousness of dependence and spiritual confidence. I begin with a discussion of humility, as treated by several Christian mystics and ritually enacted by Muslims in the five pillars of faith. Humility functions somewhat differently in Christian reflection and Muslim reflection, given the unique Christian espousal of the doctrine of original sin. Next, I consider nineteenth-century Christian theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher's treatment of religious experience and Christian God-consciousness. Described in Christian terms, this consciousness of absolute dependence suggests two distinct moments: the consciousness of one's finite limitations and estrangement from God, and the consciousness of the reconciliation promised in God. The experience of reconciliation, whether as promise or as realized, then takes us to the third section of the chapter, which considers in detail a South Indian Hindu puja, the Satyanarayana vrata, as a ritual and mythic enactment of belonging to a larger world. These postures of humility, absolute dependence, and belonging are not mutually exclusive, but rather, together express the components of two complementary elements of religious consciousness: finitude and infinite possibility, or finitude and transcendence. The posture of religious faith both confronts one's human finitude and trusts in God's plan or in the transcendence anticipated in one's relation to sacred reality.
Humility as the Door to Faith
The Power of Humility for the Christian Mystics
Mysticism refers to the pursuit of immediate connection or communion with God or sacred reality, and it employs various spiritual techniques and training to bring about such direct experience. The Sufi tradition in Islam describes the mystic as one who is impatient for God. While others may hope to unite with God in the afterlife, the mystic craves this contemplative union right here, right now, in the midst of life. The writings of the mystics of different traditions are often filled with expressions of aching hunger or desperate thirst for the divine object of devotion.
Among several common elements in the writings of the Christian mystics is the articulated need for discipline and structure in the practice of contemplative prayer. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite nun, wrote The Interior Castle as a manual on contemplative prayer for her fellow nuns. In it, she describes the soul as a castle composed of many mansions, and prayer as the door by which one enters this interior castle. The thirteenth-century Italian theologian Bonaventure likewise explains in The Journey of the Mind to God that the journey to seeing God more clearly begins with prayer. He writes that prayer is the "mother and origin of every upward striving of the soul." By praying, he says, "we are given light to discern the steps of the soul's ascent to God. For we are so created that the material universe itself is a ladder by which we may ascend to God." There are many spiritual fruits that are born out of the disciplined life of prayer for mystics, but the one that is most applicable for the present discussion is the lesson of humility.
In Christian teaching, believers must recognize their own sinful nature and their dependence on God. Teresa writes, "It is God's will that His elect should be conscious of their misery and so He withdraws His help from them a little—and no more than that is needed to make us recognize our limitations very quickly." Recognizing one's own limitations enables an individual to see clearly what she lacks and needs and what she receives only from God. This requires a surrender of the will to God's will that is achieved only as the result of great spiritual training and discipline to overcome and subdue the individual will. She writes, "what matters is not whether or not we wear a religious habit; it is whether we try to practice the virtues, and make a complete surrender of our wills to God and order our lives as His majesty ordains." What such a commitment requires above all is a humble and thorough surrender to God's will. Teresa says it is the lack of humility that prevents progress in the spiritual life and through the interior castle that is the soul. She urges her readers to renounce self-love and self-will in a particularly eloquent image of a silkworm, which she likens to the soul that truly comes to life when it surrenders its will and receives the Holy Spirit and nourishes itself with church teaching, meditations, and sermons. "Let the silkworm die—let it die, as in fact it does when it has completed the work which it was created to do. Then we shall see God and shall ourselves be as completely hidden in His greatness as is this little worm in its cocoon." Teresa even identifies becoming spiritual with becoming "slaves of God."
Many readers note with interest a paradoxical use of humility in Teresa's work. While she urges humility and claims weakness, her actions argue otherwise, as she boldly seeks to teach others based on her spiritual experience. It seems her humility is only with respect to God and not to the male priest confessors whose judgments she depended on. Carol Slade presents a feminist analysis of Teresa's strategic use of humility to establish her authority to teach the word of God in a climate where a woman independently interpreting scripture would have faced excommunication. Slade points out the strange position in which Teresa found herself. She was at the mercy of male priests to evaluate her spiritual experience, yet most of those confessors did not have the range or intensity of spiritual experience she did, so she needed to supplement her accounts of experience with the criteria for measuring them; therefore, she advises confessors to use correspondence with scripture as the test of truth. Slade argues that Teresa's feminist interpretive principle consists of a dual hermeneutic of humility and enjoyment. With the former, she denies any capacity to understand scripture by active means of analysis. However, this very inability enables women to receive understanding by direct communication with God, from the enjoyment of spiritual union. Teresa uses an admission of weakness to assert the strength of her authority to teach the word of God. It is a cunning and powerful sort of authority, as she denies any individual power as a woman and instead claims only a passive reception of God's direct communication, which she claims women are better able to receive because they are not inhibited by the masculine skills of rational analysis. Teresa's clever citations within her prayer manual of the male superiors who would undoubtedly read and correct her own poor attempts at communication are themselves a strategic cautionary defense against any potential charges of heresy. Beyond such strategic claims of weakness on her part as a mere woman, Teresa's use of humility in the service of self-discipline to help prepare the soul to approach God echoes themes raised by other Christian mystics.
Perhaps fourteenth-century English nun Julian of Norwich expresses the theological purpose of suffering and humility in the most powerful and imaginative way. Like Teresa, she suggests that God intends people to learn humility, to become conscious of their limitations in order to become open to God's help and grace. Julian uses the rich metaphor of a mother whose tender yet tough love will lead her child to learning its limitations.
Often when our falling and our wretchedness are shown to us, we are so much afraid and so greatly ashamed of ourselves that we scarcely know where we can put ourselves. But then our courteous Mother does not wish us to flee away, for nothing would be less pleasing to him; but he then wants us to behave like a child. For when it is distressed and frightened, it runs quickly to its mother; and if it can do no more, it calls to the mother for help with all its might. So he wants us to act as a meek child, saying: My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my beloved Mother, have mercy on me. I have made myself filthy and unlike you, and I may not and cannot make it right except with your help and grace.
In Julian's description, shame is not the best response to the clear understanding of our wretchedness because it can be paralyzing. The related but distinct posture of humility, however, is the first step toward genuine prayer because it means both admitting a need for help and requesting that help.
Humility can serve as a first step in prayer or proper relationship to God, by admitting need and vulnerability because it enables openness and receptivity to the other. Just as we become open to another person when we ask a genuine question and then listen because we do not already know the answer, humility, by admitting a need for something beyond our own production capability, enables receptivity to God. Prayer as a faithful address to God reflects a posture that is very different from a creedal assent to certain propositions about God. Rather than describe God in the detached way in which we talk about mere things (a very presumptive stance, in any religious circle), prayer hopes to engage God in a plaintive relationship and therefore respects the distance and transcendence of the sacred over the world of things that we can understand, manipulate, and discuss.
Julian explains that only by seeing our weaknesses clearly can we come to enjoy spiritual rest in grace. Humility is necessary to open the heart from its own self-sufficiency, to make it open to what can only be given it by God in grace. "Though we may be lifted up high into contemplation by the special gift of our Lord, still, together with this, we must necessarily have knowledge and sight of our sin and of our feebleness; for without this knowledge we may not have true meekness, and without this we cannot be safe." Meekness or humility is a necessary spiritual virtue because without it, we are unable to be receptive to God's entering into us and working on us. Here Julian connects the value of humility with a traditional Christian interpretation of grace, in which God's salvation is given to individuals as a gift, a free gift that cannot be earned or deserved or repaid. Given the Christian concept of God's grace, humility is needed for salvation. An individual must acknowledge her weakness in order to become open enough to receive this unearned gift. In fact, Christian theologians like twentieth-century British author C. S. Lewis discuss the spiritual value of trying to earn salvation, of working hard to better oneself, even while supporting the doctrines of original sin and divine grace and acknowledging that we cannot perfect ourselves. Aiming for self-perfection is ultimately doomed, but it may be a necessary preliminary step because this failure to perfect oneself prepares one to become open to God's grace through genuine humility.
Having discussed the prominent Christian mystical acknowledgment of the need for humility, I turn now to some ritual manifestations of humility in Islamic tradition. Whereas the Christian mystical concern is with adequately preparing to become open to the need for God's grace, in Islam, the virtue of humility helps express the absolute and unique sovereignty of God.
The Exercise of Humility and Islamic Faith
The five pillars of Islamic faith embody the value of humility in the spiritual life, and they help illustrate the experience of faith as a posture of trust in God rather than a set of beliefs. Chapter 2 expands on this discussion with a look at an Islamic treatment of the integral human responsibility as God's deputies on earth. This section focuses on the theme of humility as it is exercised in the five pillars of faith, that is, the five ritual observances required for Muslim identity: the shahadah, or witness to faith; salat, or daily prayer; zakat, or almsgiving; Ramadan, a month-long fast; and the Hajj, or pilgrimage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Against Dogmatism by Madhuri M. Yadlapati. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Beyond Fundamentalism and Atheism 1PART ONE. RE-EXAMINING FAITH IN ACTION
One. Postures of Trust 15 Humility as the Door to Faith 17
Friedrich Schleiermacher: Religious Consciousness of Absolute Dependence 24
Hindu Puja: Belonging to a Protected World 29
Conclusion 33 Two. What Is Our Sacred Responsibility in the World? 35 Hindu Dharma 35
What Can Mere Humans Do in Narnia? 41
God's Caliph on Earth 46
Covenantal Responsibility, Partnership, and Struggle 51
Conclusion 63 PART TWO. THE CENTRALITY OF DOUBT
Three. Christian Faith and the Protestant Principle 67 Soren Kierkagaard 68
Karl Barth 76
Paul Tillich 85
Conclusion 96 Four. Faith and Transcendence in Hindu Traditions 97 Mystical Experience and the Limits of Understanding in the Upanishads 100
Bhakti, Transcendence, and Freedom in the Bhagavad Gita 103
Maya: That Which Is Not 107
The Ambiguity of Hindu Theism: Shiva 112
Conclusion 118 PART THREE. RECONCILING WAYS OF FAITH AND DOUBT
Five. Resisting the Reification of Religion 123 Humanist Criticisms of Religious Dogmatism 124
The Mystical Path of Unknowing or Unlearning 131
Buddhist Teachings on Emptiness 140
Conclusion 145 Six. Faith and Hope for the Twenty-First Century 147 Jurgen Moltmann on Eschatology 148
Raimon Panikkar's Pluralistic Theology 156
John Caputo's Postmodern Religion 162
Conclusion 170 Conclusion: Dwelling in Uncertainty 171
Notes 175
Index 197