Abstract
This essay is an attempt at opening parallel but contrastive avenues into the respective Christian and Buddhist outlooks with respect to the metaphysical notion of relativity in contradistinction with the concept of the Absolute. The main thesis is that Christianity and Buddhism present us, in their respective normative intellectual economies, with analogous, yet profoundly different ways of envisioning metaphysics from the vantage point of their sui generis soteriology. In other terms, our argument is that Christian and Buddhist metaphysics are essentially informed by the tenets of their spiritual way, whether redemptive or emancipative. Furthermore, these forms of “soteriological metaphysics” could be encapsulated in the twin nutshells of an “absolutization of the relative” on the one hand, and a “relativization of the absolute” on the other hand. The first formula refers, more specifically, to Christian Trinitarian theology, and the second to the Buddhist ontology of emptiness. These two formulas provide a theoretical framework that suggests both the internal coherence of each tradition and the ways in which this coherence is variously understood within the tradition itself. In the soteriological emphasis of these two traditions lies a possible—but not exclusive—way to open a wider space for a hermeneutics of aspects and vantage points, as well as for warding off any overly rigid conceptual crystallizations through a deeper recognition of the interplay between principled intellectual unity and the manifold of human existence. This essay is the first section of the submission, which is focusing on the Christian tradition.
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Notes
“Caitanya (or consciousness), therefore, connotes absolute freedom in respect of all knowledge and activity (paripūrnam svātantryam). The Great Lord, Highest Śiva alone has that (absolute freedom).” Śiva Sūtras.
“This much at least is clear: that the amalgam of inner piety and outer institution that at a certain stage in their dynamic development was intellectually reified under the term ‘religion’ and ‘religions’ was conceived thus because some people (rather inadvertently) fell into the habit of doing so. And the religions have names because we have given names. Once he has become aware of what has happened, man cannot escape choosing between whether or not he will continue to use these particular concepts. To me, for reasons that I have set forth, they seem now clearly inadequate.”
“Scholars might fruitfully historicize and particularize various definitions of Buddhism, might preserve a certain skepticism regarding historical claims to preserve a historical and universal truth, and might seek to reveal the social and political conditions that motivate those claims—but they will need as well to grapple with the tension between academic angles of vision that currently privilege the study of local and historically situated Buddhisms and Buddhist visions of their tradition as crossing or transcending time and space.”
This is, couched in religious language, the fundamental objection presented to the doctrine of the Trinity by the Quran. Thus, we read in 5:73: “They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allāh is the third of three; when there is no Allāh save the One Allāh.” The status of God as “third” is nothing else than an expression of its dependency on a first and a second, therefore precisely his relativity.
“The ‘divine Person’ means relation as something subsisting (relatio ut subsistens). Otherwise put, it means the relation by way of that substance which is the subsistent hypostasis in the divine nature (relatio per modum substantiae quae est hypostasis subsistens in natura divina); though that which subsists in the divine nature is nothing other than the divine nature.”
“Reply to Objection 2: As we say ‘three persons’ plurally in God, and ‘three subsistences,’ so the Greeks say ‘three hypostases.’ But because the word ‘substance,’ which, properly speaking, corresponds in meaning to ‘hypostasis,’ is used among us in an equivocal sense, since it sometimes means essence, and sometimes means hypostasis, in order to avoid any occasion of error, it was thought preferable to use ‘subsistence’ for hypostasis, rather than ‘substance.” V. 1, part 1, q. 29, a. 2.
“From the perspective of its being, like all the other accidental predicates which we attribute to God (such as good, wise, great, and so on), relation does not retain the mode of an existential accident when it is ascribed to God, but exhibits the substantial mode of existence of divinity itself. In God, relation is not something which inheres: it is what God is. Its existence is that of the incomprehensible being which God is: from this angle, relation is identified with an ‘absolute’ in God. This identification is hard for us to deal with intellectually, because, in our experience, a relation is not an ‘absolute’: ‘a substance is never a relation’.”
“(…) The energies hold a middle place: on the one hand they belong to theology, as eternal and inseparable forces of the Trinity existing independently of the creative act; on the other, they also belong to the domain of ‘economy’, for it is in His energies that God manifests Himself to His creatures: as St. Basil says, ‘they descend even to ourselves.”
In Christianity one accepts modes for Energies (in the East) but not for the Persons, and one refuses to make degrees out of mode.
“St. Irenaeus expresses a similar idea, in a way which is characteristic of the Christian thought of the early centuries: ‘for that which is invisible of the Son is the Father, and that which is visible of the Father is the Son.’ The Son who renders visible the hidden nature of the Father is here almost identified with the manifesting Energies.”
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Laude, P. Absolutizing the Relative and Relativizing the Absolute: Metaphysical Implications of the Christian and Buddhist Soteriological Perspectives, Part I. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 33, 75–97 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-016-0051-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-016-0051-0