Unity through Multicultural Religious Experiences

Transcription

1 Fernandes, Nuno Unity through Multicultural Religious Experiences BIOGRAPHY: (Nuno Fernandes is a student at Central Washington University) In 1968 my parents and three siblings emigrated from the Azores islands to Angola, where I was born three years later in Four years later a civil war broke out and my family emigrated again, this time to Washington State. Growing up poor and foreign, I developed the art of being outsider; I was perceptive, introverted, and in awe if not shock at the world around me. The amazement I found myself in at being American, European, and in my heart, African, all at the same time, sparked an inner curiosity that as an adult has dragged me through five continents and an untold number of books on world this and global that. However, the common denominator of everything I ve done and thought has been the drive to understand unity and difference, as they relate to harmony and conflict. ABSTRACT: Rich multicultural societies operating through multi-symbolic systems are the perfect context in which to have multicultural religious experiences. Using the work of John Hick, Paul Tillich, and Bhikhu Parekh, I will show how and why religious pluralism is both possible and desirable as a way of erasing divisions that have traditionally threatened the relationship between the great monotheistic religions. I will also show an intimate connection between religious perspectives and realities, as well as reveal that this connection broadens one s spiritual horizons. Like siblings who as adults cannot agree on what life was like at home in their youth, the three children of Abraham Judaism, Christianity, and Islam need to look together at the nature of their memories, at how they are symbolically constructed realities that divide their three religions, and at how their realities are grounded in the same pre-symbolic reality that can unite them. In other words, my paper looks closely at the nature of religious symbols, and at how they can be transcended at various levels of religious experience, and significantly at the interaction between human nature and human culture as the nexus of human identity. The result is an understanding of religion that should make us less susceptible to the machinations of political fundamentalists on all sides. I conclude by arguing further that religious pluralism, though still immature, is the most viable option in the long run for this multicultural, and increasingly integrating planet that is, if the planet is to remain multicultural and integrated. Unity through Multicultural Religious Experiences Religious experiences, and especially mystical experiences, are rare, but nevertheless, given the impact they have on individuals, communities, and traditions, they are important enough to give serious attention to. In particular, the ineffable nature of mystical experiences is important to note because ineffability ensures that the various religious

2 narratives resulting from such experiences cannot literally be true and therefore cannot literally be in contradiction with each other. In short, religious narratives that arise from mystical experiences cannot in any meaningful way be mutually exclusive. More importantly, the fact that today s multicultural social environments are yielding more and more individuals who claim dual religious identities (e.g. Messianic Jews and people who claim to be both Christians and Buddhists, etc) bespeaks of the emergence of multicultural religious and mystical experiences; such experiences might suggest a deeply spiritual way of resolving long entrenched religious conflicts. Although many people resist anything that looks like cultural relativism, such multicultural religious experiences can expands the experiencer s self-identity to include what would otherwise constitute otherness in a way that ameliorates the fears driving that resistance. The three monotheisms are like siblings who as adults cannot agree on what life was like at home in their youth. Pluralism suggests that the three children of Abraham Judaism, Christianity, and Islam need to look together at the nature of their memories, at how those memories are culturally constructed realities that divide the family, and at how their differing constructions are grounded in the same reciprocal processes by which the ineffable comes to be symbolically coded, and by which those codes lead one to the experience of the ineffable. I take it as axiomatic that these two related processes create a feedback loop upon which religious communities and traditions are founded. That is, mystics claim religious narratives and symbols arise ultimately from religious experience, and that those very narratives and symbols can guide true believers back to that experience. However, a multicultural reconstruction of those religious narratives and symbols has begun to arise from the multicultural religious experiences within pluralistic societies, and that reconstruction also promises to lead others to a now-multicultural religious experience that can yield a deep sense of unity which cuts across previous exclusivist claims to religious truth. Moreover, the identity constructed from multicultural religious experience can make us immune to those forces that would have us fight over any particular set of narratives or symbols. Still, a critic might claim that pluralism just creates another set of beliefs competing for adherents alongside those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, according to Harvard sociologist Randall Collins, there are two ways of understanding what it means that there exist multiple and contradictory descriptions of reality. The first is to suspect that, multiple realities and competing truths will turn out to be complementary.we may hope that the competing factions of philosophers or sociologists are pursuing multiple paths of advance into the same wilderness (879). The second way is to suspect that, The paths may never intersect. the future will consist in still further fanning out rather than convergence (Collins 879). However if the critic is patient, I believe that from the work of Paul Tillich and John Hick, I can show that religious pluralists are justified in speaking as if the former possibility is indeed the case, while actually recognizing that neither possibility can be literally true due to the nature of the ineffable as revealed even in mystical experiences generally.

3 To begin with, both Hick and Tillich focus on the nature of symbols in relationship to the Real, a relationship that Kantians might call one of mediation between phenomena and noumena. It is also understood that the particular symbols of each of the Abrahamic traditions function by the same means and to the same ends; each is a tradition that tries to lead one semantics aside from ideas of god to God him/her/its self. No particular culture can hold in its solitary possession the keys to what Hick calls, our final salvation/liberation/enlightenment/fulfillment (Hick 566). Because, in his words: Each of the great religious traditions affirms that in addition to the social and natural world of our ordinary human experience there is a limitlessly greater and higher Reality beyond or within us, in relation to which or to whom is our highest good. The ultimately real and the ultimately valuable are One, to give oneself freely and totally to this one is our final salvation/ liberation/ enlightenment/ fulfillment. Further, each tradition is conscious that the divine Reality exceeds the reach of our earthly speech and thought. It cannot be encompassed in human concepts. (Hick 566) All religious architectures have as their cornerstone the ineffable experience of the Real. Such experience, however, when brought back into the phenomenal world and redressed in either rhyme or reason has historically lead to exlusionist claims, because prior to the multiculturalism of pluralistic societies religious experience tended to be the result of a single set of religious claims and thus reinforced that particular set of symbols, narratives, practices, etc. However, this exclusionist consequence is not inevitable; for example, notice how Paul Tillich describes the mediating role that symbols play in our journey to the transcendent. He explains that, everything in reality can impress itself as a symbol for the special relationship of the human mind to its own ultimate ground of meaning. [That is] religious symbols are taken from the infinity of material which the experienced reality gives us (381). The idea here is that there is a sense in which symbols play an absolutely crucial role in religious experience, but also there is a sense in which they are absolutely arbitrary. In other words, despite the ineffability of what Tillich calls the ultimate ground, and John Hick calls the Real, symbols do play a necessary role in guiding us there. In fact, it is because reality is surprisingly and exquisitely manifold yielding various scientific, social, and metaphysical descriptions that more often than not our first clear sight of one of its folds is enough to blind us to its further unfolding. Therefore a pluralistic study of religious phenomena can not only help us keep our hearts and minds open, but it can also enlarge the categories through which we experience the religious. In the case of conflicting views from Jews, Christians, and Muslims it is doubly important to recognize that often, just as in the past, what one sees is what one is culturally conditioned to see; however, unlike in the past, in today s multicultural societies, people say someone undergoing a religious experience who is equally familiar with Catholic and Muslim views can emerge from that experience with an acceptance of both the symbols of the trinity and the language of Allah. Moreover,

4 religious pluralists may begin to speak multiculturally about their experiences and thus contribute to others attaining multicultural religious experiences. The Messianic Jewish community that arose in the 1960 s might be such an example. So I agree with Hick when he writes that: even the most advanced form of mystical experience, as an experience undergone by an embodied consciousness whose mind/body has been conditioned by a particular religious tradition, must be affected by the conceptual framework and spiritual training provided by that tradition, and accordingly takes these different forms. (570) But I would also go further and say that if the tradition in question is itself multicultural and pluralist, then what results from a mystical experience arising from that tradition is a reaffirmation of a deep unity that transcends previous mono-cultural descriptions of reality. Randall Collins also makes clear a crucial point about the relationship between symbols and reality or, as he says, the, images or concepts that have been generated at the interface between the Real and the Different patterns of human consciousness (347). One need take only a small step further to see the pluralist implication of Randall s point. In The Sociology of Philosophies, he observes: Symbols are the residue and the continuity of experiences over time. They flow through individual brains, shaping their attention and emotions, setting up the possibility of transcendent private experience, and then bringing those experiences back into the network of social relations which give them meaning, and which re-create the possibility of other person s acquiring their own private experience Social reality is at once creating and bringing down religious experience (my emphasis). (347) That being the case, it seems clear that rich multi-cultural societies operating through rich multi-symbolic systems are the perfect context in which to give rise to rich multi-cultural religious experiences. And, given the increasingly pluralistic social reality of today, it should be obvious that religious pluralism though still immature is the only viable option in the long run for this multi-cultural, and increasingly integrating, planet; that is, if the planet is to remain multi-cultural and integrated. Authentic religious pluralism strips pogroms, jihads, and crusades of their ideological impetus. However, given the cannibalistic nature of some of our planet s dominant cultures, the continuation of the trajectory of religious pluralism as an antidote to religious conflict is not as predictable as I might have made it sound. Unfortunately many people feel that religion itself is the main engine driving today s greatest conflicts and thus reject any religious pluralist solution, claiming that such a solution could only lead to cultural relativism. Bhikhu Parekh s discussion of human nature, in Rethinking Multiculturalism, is an important contribution to our understanding of cultural relativism, although it was not intended as such. While Parekh explicitly

5 eschews cultural relativism as a fact that needs to be included in any account of our species as social beings, his work ironically demonstrates that it cannot be ignored. Parekh s views on multiculturalism are predicated on the fact that no single individual from any one particular cultural viewpoint can legitimately pass judgment on someone of another culture without first coming to some understanding of the moral and ontological assumptions embedded in that culture. The resulting cross-cultural evaluation, he argues, will then be a reflection of our values juxtaposed against theirs in a way that the pragmatic concerns for what has been agreed upon as minimal moral values are brought to the forefront and used as a standard for mutual evaluation of each other. However even those minimal moral values are not seen as eternal or culturally independent, and therefore must be deemed culturally relative. Specifically, Parekh describes culture as that which lies between the universal and the particular in human beings. He argues that what is universal, for example biology, acquires different meanings that are associated with a particular culture, while what is particular, for example symbols, is grounded in the universal like biology, or geography, or geology, etc. What is particular to a culture, like religious narratives, is related to different cultures by virtue of being equally embedded in and limited by what is physically beyond culture. Biology, Parekh claims, though universal, is always seen through a cultural lens and therefore we cannot tell where the universal begins or where the cultural ends. Moreover, for Parekh the relationship between what is cultural and what isn t is not only mutually limiting in some static sense, but is actually a dialectic relationship in a more creative and dynamic sense. Indeed, this dialectic, he claims, has created a situation where: [N]ature has been so deeply shaped by layers of social influences [that] we cannot easily detach what is natural from what is manmade or social. [In short] cultures are not superstructures built upon identical and unchanging foundations but unique human creations. [that in turn] give rise to different kinds of human beings. (122) However, I argue there is a problem in Parekh s philosophy that can best be address by understanding the true implications of cultural relativism, and thus the acceptability of pluralistic religious experiences of the ineffable. There is a danger in believing in different kinds of human beings, but a danger which can be made innocuous by accepting the actuality of cultural relativism. The danger is that someone might as has often happened come along and argue that some kinds of humans are more important than others, that perhaps some nations have a manifest destiny to dominate the globe, or that infidels are a threat to one s true god, or that one s people are the chosen ones while others are not; that is why the existence of cultural relativism is so important to recognize. In affect, cultural relativism states that if one culture is valuable then all cultures are valuable. There are real differences between cultures which simply can t be theorized coherently because the very notion of coherence only has meaning from a consistent set of cultural values. Multiculturalism is itself such a set of liberal cultural values. It cannot yield any meta-view on the inherent worth of culture as such. But the fears that secular theorists of pluralism have of being labeled cultural relativist, or morally incoherent, need not be

6 shared by their religious counterparts. Unlike secular multiculturalism, religious pluralism is ultimately founded on a multicultural religious experience of the Real that while ineffable in itself like all mystical experiences yields the multicultural religious understanding that all non-mystical experiences are grounded not in the eternal but the temporal, and are thus historically contingent and therefore culturally relative in a way that doesn t undermine the intrinsic divine, holy, sacred nature of existence. In other words, the ineffable once experienced and multiculturally understood eliminates the unfounded fears of relativism by grounding one s existence in that which transcends time, history, and culture. In this respect, Parekh was only half right when he wrote that, cultures are not superstructures built upon identical and unchanging foundations. That is, he does not understand the ineffable nature of those foundations. He does not understand that one cannot say either that those foundations are identical or different, unchanging or dynamic. Indeed, it is because the Real is ineffable that phenomenal reality can absorb so many different cultures, or superstructures. In conclusion, I would like to add that I am not prescribing that we actively try to encourage multicultural religious experiences as a way of uniting the family of monotheisms. I believe that the given-ness of the mystical experience, what some have called the condescension of divine grace, effectively renders any such program naïve and doomed to fail. However, that being said, I also believe it s clear that multicultural mystical experiences are in interesting phenomena that could positively influence the way the dialogue about ethnic and religious conflict in our communities frames the issues that threaten to divide us. Works Cited Collins, Randall. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, Hick, John. Religious Pluralism. Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Eds. Michael Peterson et al. New York: Oxford UP, Parekh, Bhikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, Tillich, Paul. Religious Language as Symbolic. Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Eds. Michael Peterson et al. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.