Abstract
[Because this essay is rather long, I preface it with a more brief abstract of the main elements of the general theory explained in more detail in the body of the essay]
Common approaches to understanding and reasoning about religions focus on beliefs themselves: What do Buddhists believe, what do Christians believe, etc. This is also the common focus when religious beliefs are subject to rational criticism, leading for example to arguments and counterarguments about the existence/non-existence of God.
But beliefs themselves are the tip of the iceberg. We have to focus on “believing” as a human enterprise. We have not fully understood believers as human persons until we have understood how particular beliefs figure in the totality of their lives. In particular, we have to try to understand, (1) what motivates particular beliefs, which often include particular experiences, as for example experiences at mediation, or experiences of emotional responses to religious imagery in reading or listening to inspiring teaching or preaching. We also have to try to understand (2) what are the practical consequences of a given set of beliefs. What particular concerns or problems does a given set of beliefs provide and answer to? Can we construct a before-and-after narrative: What might a person’s life been like before believing, contrasted with their life after coming to believe? Or what practical difference does belief make in a person’s basic way of being in the world and relating to the world? These two elements are often intertwined: What motivates people to believe, and to continue believing in the face of doubts, is often the perception that their lives are much better with beliefs than without them.
These ideas about how to understand beliefs and believers should also govern our approach to religious classics from antiquity. These are the closest we can come to understanding the human origins of particular belief systems, before they became hardened into doctrinal creeds, belief in which became membership requirements in religious organizations. We should resist the tendency to follow these later believers and just try to extract from each of these classics a set of doctrines and beliefs. These writings themselves often invite the different approach advocated here. The Daodejing, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Pali Canon, and the Christian New Testament, are all full of references to particular human experiences, practices, descriptions of particular concerns, ideas about how ideas expressed should ideally affect a person’s life, criticisms of opposing views, and so on, which form an important total context of which doctrinal beliefs are only a part.
Issues described above should also determine the focus of critical reasoning. Briefly: A given belief is a good belief when it has good motivations and good consequences. “Good” should be understood here in the context of (1) a pluralist and Platonist idea of ideal “virtues.” “Good” should also be understood as (2) what it is that fulfills “man’s quest for meaning” to a superlative degree. Beliefs in otherworldly entities like God, Brahman, Dao, etc. are good beliefs when they inspire individuals to strive for higher ideals of virtue and meaning in their lives, higher than they would be if they tried only to live up to more “worldly” standards of success prevailing in their society. I operate here also with a pluralist account of goodness, virtue, and meaning. Goodness-ideals presented in different religious classics are very different from each other. (I think the common view that “all religions teach the same thing” is mistaken.)
We should be able to give descriptions of the experiences, motivations, and practical consequences mentioned above in purely human terms. They should be describable without reference to beliefs in otherworldly entities. We should regard beliefs in unseen otherworldly entities as interpretations of and support for experiences and ways of life, which we can have some basic understanding of without reference to the beliefs. From an “insider’s” point of view–the point of view of a believer’s way of seeing things and living her life–believers typically say that their life is “based on” their beliefs. But when we try to reason about religious beliefs, we are taking an “outsider’s” point of view, and need to shift our focus, focusing instead on questions about the goodness of motivations for belief and the goodness of practical consequences of believing.
Plato’s account of “Socratic” reasoning provides a basic model for critical reasoning about goodness. It essentially amounts to trying to articulate the essence of some particular kind of goodness, uncovering flaws in this concept, then remedying these flaws with the aim of formulating what some goodness-ideal would be at its most perfect, free of these flaws. Among other things, this prevents beliefs being invoked in support of ways of being and relating that would appear clearly not admirable if considered on their own (e.g. religious intolerance and fanaticism).
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How to Understand and Reason about Religions: Outline of a Theory
[The body of my essay.]
I am posting on this website some essays that are the result of many years study of different religions, focused mainly on the classic “scriptures”–the Christian New Testament, early Hindu and Buddhist writings from ancient India, and an early Daoist writing from ancient China called the Daodejing. I add to these some ideas on spirituality drawn from writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, which I find helpful in formulating a rational approach to spiritualities from other traditions.
In these essays I address, firstly, questions about how to understand these religious classics, which were written for people existing in a culture very different from our own. These are often read today just for inspiration, addressing issues and problems of interest to us living in this modern age. Questions have been raised as to whether it is even possible for us to recover the meaning that these writings had for their original authors and audience living so long ago and so far away. And if this is possible, there is still the question about what important purpose this might serve?
Secondly, there are questions about the truth of teachings taught in these writings. These classic scriptures have been regarded by many as teaching some very important truths, the basics of which are most often left unquestioned. Is it possible to subject this to critical questioning? Is it possible to reason about these truths, to weigh evidence and provide rational arguments for or against accepting particular teachings as true? In the Christian case: is it possible to “reason about faith”?
The theories I present here give positive answers to both these questions. I think it is possible and worthwhile to try to recover the original meaning of classic scriptures. I present here some theories about how to approach these scriptures in a way that works toward this goal. Other essays on this website present interpretations of several particular religious classics from Eastern and Western traditions, giving detailed examples of what it means to use this approach.
I also think it is possible to ask about any given set of teachings found in these writings: Are these teachings true? I present here some rather offbeat theories about what “truth” means here. What kinds of truth are these scriptures trying to teach? What would it mean to weigh evidence and give arguments either supporting or undermining claims these various scriptures make to be teaching truth of some kind? E.g. What does it mean to rationally evaluate the truth of the early Christian belief that God sent Jesus to save us from our sins?
This is a brief outline of what I mean by “critical reasoning” about the teachings found in these writings. Further more complex details will be found in the body of this essay.
I’ve ended up with theories and interpretations that do not fit easily into standard academic boxes– the reason I call them “offbeat” theories. Although I have a doctorate in New Testament studies, I did not stick to this field, but ranged into other fields like early Daoist and Buddhist writings and Plato, applying methods of interpretation developed in biblical studies to the interpretation of these classics. My interest in thinking critically about religion has also led me into wide reading in modern philosophy, and especially thinking about the challenge to religious thinking represented by modern science.
For these reasons, I think it will be helpful to preface this introduction with some biographical information which I think might help readers understand the route I took in developing the approach illustrated in the writings I will be making available.
Biography
My interest in thinking more deeply about religious issues began when I entered a Roman Catholic seminary in 1953 at age 14, continuing until I finished seminary training in 1966. Life in this particular seminary program was semi-monastic, focused on the practice what I now think of as late medieval Catholic spirituality. The writings of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, had a great influence on me from an early age. The systematic thinking of medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and many modern “neo-Thomists” also greatly influenced my ideas about what it means to take a rational approach to religious doctrines.
After seminary training, from 1968-78 I was a graduate student in biblical studies, first at Graduate theological Union in Berkeley California, then at Harvard Divinity school, from which I graduated with a Th.D. in New Testament Studies. My main interest was in method in bible study, rational methods of recovering the original meaning of biblical writings. I employed and developed these methods first in study I published in 1983 on the apocryphal Acts of Thomas (situated in what mainstream Christians regard as the “heretical’ Gnostic tradition), then in several publications in the early 1990’s trying to recover the original meaning of a Chinese Daoist classic, the Daodejing. These latter publications on early Daoism are the works for which I am mainly known in academic circles today. Principles and methods of text-interpretation which I learned in my graduate program in New Testament Studies have been the most important guiding principles guiding my approach to the Daodejing and other religious classics treated in these essays. I learned so much by participating for several years, in Berkely and at Harvard, in a weekly seminar led by the late Dieter Georgi, a pupil in Germany of the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Seminars led by Dr. Georgi were devoted to close reading and interpretation of the Greek text of the Corpus Hermeticum, a classic in the gnostic and occult tradition.
In the mid-1970’s I had the opportunity to attend two intensive meditation retreats under the direction of a Buddhist ex-monk from Thailand, where I learned the practice of Mindfulness meditation, which I continued to practice. My approach to the study of spiritualities of different world religions has been also very much influenced by participation in a group under the direction of Claudio Naranjo, whose approach was greatly influenced by the Gurdieff tradition, but who mixed Gurdieff’s ideas with ideas from many other sources. This is also a period in which I developed both a personal and scholarly interest in the Daodejing, and also in certain aspects late medieval and modern occultism (which I recognized as a continuation of the Gnostic tradition). During the mid 1970’s I led groups of interested students who met weekly in my house in the study of these very different types of spirituality.
From 1978 until my official retirement in 2015, I taught in the Study of Religion program at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, where I was known as the specialist in Asian traditions (I was director of Asian Studies 1995-2010). This enabled me to study many additional religious classics I was interested in besides the Bible (early Daoist, Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist writings) , as well as to pursue my interest in questions about how to reason critically about these writings. I was teaching mainly undergraduates from many different backgrounds; this gave me an interest both in what possible relevance these writings might have for these students, as well as an interest in teaching them how to think critically about religion and spirituality in general. I taught a course called “Buddha, Jesus, Plato” every semester for most of my 36 year university teaching career. It is in this context that I began to get ideas about how some aspects of Plato’s thought could be used as a model for how to reason critically about otherworldly spiritualities, which could be applied as a way of reasoning critically about many different traditions. This eventually resulted in a book on this aspect of Plato’s thought published in 2017.
These biographical notes may help understand many elements of a theory about how to understand and reason critically about religion that I present in the essay below, and illustrated in many other writings I intend to post on this website. This theory is in many ways unique and out of the mainstream of religious studies and the philosophy of religion today. I hope it may have more general relevance to anyone who shares my interest in the understanding religions, in recovering the original meaning of religious classics, and in subjecting religious teachings to thoroughgoing critical rational thinking.
An Offbeat theory
A general tendency in Religious Studies is to focus on doctrines and beliefs. What do Buddhists believe? What do Christians believe? And so on. This affects the study of religious classics as well. The tendency here is to try to extract from any given writing a set of doctrines regarded as the core of its message. The results of this approach make their way into “World Religions” textbooks, trying to describe briefly “What do Christians believe?” “What do Buddhists believe?” and so on.
One reason I describe my theory an “offbeat” theory has to do with my fundamental departure from this common approach.
I think doctrines taught in any given writing are the tip of the iceberg. We need to understand the ancient authors and intended audience of these writings as flesh and blood people like ourselves. We cannot understand them simply by understanding the content of their beliefs, as though these beliefs hang in the air independent of the rest of a person’s worldview and way of life, the basic life-experiences that shaped their fundamental attitudes and motivations, the effect that belief has on the way they lead their everyday life, and so on.
Religious classics themselves frequently suggest this kind of background. Early Buddhist writings suggest an audience wholeheartedly devoted to bringing about an internal transformation, making progress toward an ideal mental state they called Nibbana. The Gospels and the Letters of Paul in the New Testament have the form of emotionally charged preaching, likewise intending to bring about a fundamental internal transformation (“conversion”) in groups of people addressed.
I think we have not understood early Buddhist writings, for example, until we have managed to reconstruct in our imagination what it is that large numbers of people in ancient India found so attractive about the Nibbana ideal that they would devote their entire lives to its pursuit. And we have to imagine how exactly their concrete lives would likely be changed as a result of making progress toward Nibbana.
Likewise we have not understood early Christian writings if we pay attention only to their overt content, the “doctrines” they teach about God, Jesus, etc. We have to imaginatively reconstruct an audience whose life experiences prepared them to be intensely moved by the concepts and imagery presented in these writings. And if they were moved, what kind of lasting transformation might be brought about by this emotional response? How would this affect their fundamental ways of relating to the world around them?
Admittedly, in reconstructing imaginative pictures of these kinds, we frequently have to rely on educated guesses about background assumptions implicitly assumed by a given writing, rather than directly stated. But the price of not making such guesses is that we end up with emasculated sets of doctrines divorced from the lives of concrete people who found these doctrines inspiring and whose lives were fundamentally changed by their encounter with the message we have access to through writings that have come down to us.
What is faith?
Another way of delving into this same set of issues is reflecting on the puzzling character of common ideas about religious “faith.” I think especially reasoning about religions has to start with a better account of religious faith.
For example, Christian believers in God think of this belief itself as the basis on which they live their lives. This gives rise to the idea that critical reasoning about this belief should consist in reasoning about whether God exists or not. I think this is based on a misunderstanding of the structure of belief, what is based on what. Believers are seldom motivated to believe in God because they have conducted impartial examination of evidence. “Proofs for the existence of God” typically happen after people have already come to believe, and are not really what motivates their belief. And arguments against the existence of God, no matter how convincing in themselves, will seldom cause true believers to cease believing in God. This is because people do not arrive at belief in God through rational arguments. It is not the real basis for their belief. In the best case, they are motivated to this belief because they find themselves moved and inspired by certain ideas about God. They find these ideas uplifting. They are attached to this belief because see it as essential to a way of life they are attached to.
So, when we set about trying to apply critical reasoning to religious beliefs, we have to take into consideration not only the content of the beliefs themselves, and ask whether they can be shown to be objectively true. Religious belief is a more complex phenomenon. It contains an “objective” element, the apparent factual truths which are the direct object of belief. But it also contains more subjective elements, consisting mainly in (1) the motivation for belief, what it is that motivates a given person to base their lives on certain beliefs? Often it is certain kinds of experiences that motivate beliefs, so that beliefs are often best understood as interpretations of human experiences. This more subjective element consists also in (2) the practical impact this belief has on a person’s everyday life, answering questions like: What practical difference does it make for a given person to commit, or not commit themselves, to basing their life on particular beliefs? What would this person’s life be like if she was not a believer?
Since these two factors are the real motivating basis for belief, they should be the focus critical reasoning.
The importance of these experiential and practical elements in faith is the cornerstone of the present theory when it comes not only to understanding religious beliefs but also to reasoning about them. This also differentiates this approach from other more common approaches. The more common approach is to concentrate on the content of the beliefs themselves, assuming that, in relation to any given person or group, understanding “what they believe” gives us everything we need to know about their religion. Believers often operate on this assumption when asked to explain themselves. Many scholars studying a given religion also tend to operate on this assumption, extracting from a given writing a set of stand-alone beliefs, comparing them to other beliefs, proposing theories as to where these beliefs might have originated, and so on. But I think beliefs never exist by themselves. In the case of any given believer or group of believers, they are part of an experiential, motivational, and practical complex, and we have not understood these individuals and their religion unless we see the beliefs as part of this complex.
The essay Eva the Believer and Other Concrete Illustrations explains this theory of faith in more detail using more concrete examples. “Faith” in God-Given Rights: A Modern Example reflects on this more familiar modern example to illustrate my theory about the structure of faith.
A theory about what motivates religious belief in the best, most ideal case.
Of course, answers to questions about what motivates belief and the practical impact of believing can vary greatly from person to person. I have no developed theory about what does actually motivate religious belief in all cases, or even in the majority of cases. It does seem obvious that there can be good motives and bad motives for religious belief, and religious beliefs have been a force for both good and bad in human history.
A central basis for the theory of religions I have come to is an ideal model, what in the very best case motivates religious beliefs, and in the very best case what practical difference particular beliefs make in a person’s life. I have a theory about how to apply critical reasoning to decide this kind of question, a rational method of differentiating between well-founded belief and ill-founded belief, when it comes to these latter issues. This is ethics-based–in a very broad sense of ethics–in that what is to be reasoned about is the ethical quality of a person’s motivation, and whether believing has an ethically uplifting influence on a person’s life.
These ideas apply especially when it comes to trying to understand supernatural elements in the teachings of religious classics, references to unseen otherworldly entities like God, Dao, Brahman, and so on. I will refer to these as “mythical” elements, the product of myth-creation and mythological thinking pervasive in the ancient world, but which have become the focus of controversy in the modern world.
In the approach I argue for here, mythical ideas involving unseen supernatural entities need to be understood as part of larger complexes, mainly (1) human experiences and concerns that make certain mythical imagery attractive and motivates belief, and (2) practical consequences of believing, the difference it makes in human life to hold certain mythical beliefs and make them central to one’s worldview and way of life.
We should be able to describe these other elements in terms of humanly understandable experiences and concerns, understandable without any mention of supernatural imagery. We should understand mythical imagery as interpretations of this humanly understandable complex; their function is to provide an alternate “otherworldly” evaluative context for seeing one’s life, higher than the normal “worldly” context in which most people otherwise see themselves and their lives, determining what counts as a “successful” life, a life well-lived. (Understanding Mythologies in Religious Classics explains these ideas about mythical elements in much more detail.)
“Higher” here should be understood in terms of what Plato calls “the Good,” what Wittgenstein calls “ethics” defined as “what is valuable, what is really important… the meaning of life, what makes life worth living, the right way of living,” including also what Viktor Frankl speaks of as a “meaningful” life, a life experienced as meaningful.
I assume here a radically pluralist view of these matters: there is no single view of what is valuable, really important, what makes life worth living, what counts as a right way of living. There are many different ways of living a meaningful life. But this is also a critical view, based on applying Socratic questioning to any given concept of what is valuable, really important, etc. Any particular set of ideas on these subjects must prove their validity by their ability to withstand sustained Socratic questioning by counterexample. This prevents supernatural beliefs from being invoked in support of ways of being and acting that are obviously not ethically good, valuable, meaningful, etc.
These latter ideas constitute a rational way of arriving at a very idealizing concept of any given set of religious beliefs, what a way of life centered on these beliefs would be at its most perfect, its “Platonic Form.” This provides an ideal standard for evaluating a way of life centered on a particular set of beliefs. Such a way of life merits being regarded as centered on something “transcending the world” in the perfection of its goodness, to the degree that it is able to approximate some ideal standard developed along the lines described above. This way of life is what we should reason about, not the existence/non-existence of particular supernatural entities (God, Brahman, Dao, etc.)
Critical pluralism.
Of course, this invites a skeptical response from some people. Sometimes it is claimed that one big advantage of religious belief is that it gives people a rock of certainty in a world where there exists a a great deal of doubt and a bewildering variety of views about what exactly is “uplifting” and what constitutes a really good life.
What my theory amounts to in this respect is a critical pluralism. My study of classics from many different traditions has led me to the conclusion that what they offer is a variety of highly inspiring and uplifting visions of what human life would be at its best, that are very fundamentally different from each other–not versions of a single answer, but a fundamental “plurality” of good answers to this question. At the same time, my theory is critical, in that it includes a model of critical reasoning, able to differentiate between rationally well-founded and ill-founded versions of early Christianity, rationally well-founded and ill-founded versions of early Buddhism, and so on. Thus it is a critical theory while still allowing for a very fundamental pluralism–that is, without positing the existence of one true religion, or some single One Truth taught by all religions.
The “critical” aspect of this theory relies heavily on some ideas about critical reasoning taken from Plato’s writing, explained in detail in my book Rational Spirituality and Divine Virtue in Plato. This is also connected to my view that the most important thing we have to learn from the study of religious classics is not doctrines that they each. The message of each centers on some kind of fundamental and lasting internal transformation, different in each case, leading to a fundamentally different way of being in the world and relating to the world. Critical thought about this internal transformation is based on extending Plato’s ideas about “virtue” or what he calls arētē, “(human) excellence”. The transformation involved in each case is a good transformation insofar as it raises a person’s life to a higher level, based on a higher kind of virtue or human excellence.
At the end of the present essay I will describe in detail the basic Platonist ideas that are the foundation for a mode of critical reasoning that can be used to develop ideas about what each religious ideal might be in its highest form, the “Platonic Form” of each. Thus this theory involves a Platonist account of religious “transcendence.” Mythological thinking in the ancient world led many religious thinkers to represent transcendence in the form of unseen entities (God, Dao, Brahman, etc.) imagined to literally exist in an unseen otherworld “transcending” the visible world we see around us. Some modern thinkers have tried to maintain the basic idea of a transcendent otherworld in the form of an unseen transcendent “metaphysical” realm.
I offer here a different, Plato-inspired account of religious transcendence based on a theory about what in the best case would constitute a valid motivation for belief in an otherworld transcending the present world. In this theory, we have to understand the content of mythological beliefs in a larger context consisting in particular experiences, motivations, and practical consequences connected with these beliefs in the mind and way of life of a believer. A believer has good reasons for commitment to otherworldly beliefs insofar as this entire complex has the effect of raising the believer’s life to a higher otherworldly level. “Higher” here should be understood in terms of higher levels of goodness and meaning. “Otherworldly” should be understood by comparison with inferior levels of goodness and meaning that would result from striving for “worldly” standards of success prevailing in a given society (wealth, status, prestige, power, privilege, etc.). Centering all this on a desire for higher levels of meaning and goodness allows for rational treatment using Socratic/Platonic modes of critical reasoning, described in more detail below and in other essays on this website. The rational foundation for this approach lies in Plato’s theory of transcendent virtue-Forms, which can be rationally shown to “transcend the world” in the perfection of their goodness, by their ability to withstand all Socratic questioning-by-counterexample. “Virtue,” Plato’s arētē or human excellence, just has to be expanded to cover a broader area including not only “ethical” goodness proper, but also the entire realm described by such words as “value,” “truly important,” “truly meaningful,” “what really matters,” “what makes life worth living,” and so on.
Explanations so far have been rather general and abstract. They can perhaps be made more clear by giving more specific examples of what it might mean to analyze a few religious classics from different traditions in a way that illustrates what it means to consider particular beliefs as part of larger complexes of experiences, motivations, internal transformations, and practical consequences.
Early Buddhism.
In the case of early Buddhist writings (the Pali Canon), the internal transformation aimed at was the main and very direct topic of the teaching, described in very psychological terms, and accompanied by detailed instruction for meditation techniques effective in bringing about this transformation. The original group of people who gathered around the Buddha and others in his school, was made up of individuals already very alienated from their society, who had become so dissatisfied with normal family and village life that they “left home for homelessness,” in search of just such a transformation that would lift them to a state “beyond the normal ways of human beings.” Central to the early Buddhist message was the observation that, in a world made up of constantly changing conditions, inflexible attachment to any particular set of conditions makes person vulnerable to deep distress when those conditions change. Conversely, Nibbana (Nirvana), the Buddhist ideal, consists in a fundamental internal change which would constitute “liberation” from such attachment. Early Buddhist writings contain descriptions of techniques such as meditation, which if practiced over time would bring about such psychological change and “liberation.” In other essays I show what it would mean to try describe Nibbana as the pure and perfect world-transcending Platonic Form” of a particular cluster of virtues including such virtues as self-contained self-confidence, composure, and resilience.
Early Hinduism.
The early Hinduism presented in the Bhagavad Gita also centers very explicitly on meditation practices aimed at bringing about an internal transformation, making a person less dependent on worldly success for a sense of self-worth and meaning in life. In this case, meditation techniques were employed leading to an experience of internal bliss, an internal fulfillment of man’s search for meaning, “a self satisfied in the Self alone.” As in Buddhism, this internal fulfillment was highly valued as an an alternative to seeking fulfillment in external involvements in the world, which both Buddhists and Hindus at the time regarded as fickle and unreliable, leading ultimately to continued frustration and disappointment. The Hinduism of the Gita however differs from early Buddhism in the unreservedly positive value placed on the experience of meditative bliss, which the Gita interprets as union with the highest being Brahman. (Early Buddhist writings mention meditative bliss, but treat it also as a potential source of attachment to be transcended in order to reach Nibbana (Nirvana). And Nibbana is never interpreted as union with a higher being.) The lasting internal transformation brought about by experiencing “the bliss of Brahman” can be described as an alternate, completely internal and self-contained way of fulfilling man’s quest for meaning, so that a person would no longer depend on any reliance on external connections for such fulfillment.
The Daodejing.
The early Daoist Daodejing also had its origins in a group of people very critical of the society around them. One target of their criticism, for example was the prevalence of a competitive spirit in society, causing people to compete with each other for wealth, social status, and influence. This they thought not only interfered with social harmony which they valued, but also distorted a person’s own natural internal growth as a person, causing individuals to value in themselves qualities valued by society around them, rather than good qualities that came naturally to them as unique individuals. This was then for most individuals a source of internal conflict, fighting against natural inclinations in the name of social ideals foreign to that individual. But it is not only “society” that is the culprit. A person’s own “natural” competitive desires for status, approval, and admiration by others must be struggled against in order to achieve an internal harmony that is “natural” to a person in a deeper sense. “Dao” was the name of a particular state of mind, way of being, and fundamental attitudes and values emphasizing this cultivated “naturalness” and internal harmony, what each unique individual would be at her very best. Just as in Buddhism, this ideal state of mind, which they called Dao, was something to be consciously and systematically cultivated. Daoist mythology also pictured this Dao as a cosmic origin, and the root of everything valuable, from which everything had originated, but from which artificial society had departed, the goal then being to “return” to this imagined natural/original state. Dao can be understood as the perfect Platonic Form of a particular kind of human excellence, the highest form of internal “organic harmony,” what a person’s unique personal traits and capacities would be when developed at their very best and working together in complete harmony.
Early Christianity.
Understood in their original setting, early Christian writings now gathered into the New Testament, were rooted in charismatic preaching, not teaching people doctrines but presenting emotionally moving images aimed at bringing about in them a dramatic internal transformation change or “conversion.” One central image in this preaching was the idea of a perfectly just “Kingdom of God,” specifically contrasted with the present unjust world in which the bad succeed and the good suffer, and in which there is no relation between status and power on the one hand, and true goodness on the other. Being dedicated to true rightness was therefore understood to require setting oneself in opposition to the forces that prevail in society, and being willing to suffer for this. This accounts for the central place that the image of the crucified Jesus held in the early Christian imagination, and also the image of the “martyr” as a central culture-hero in the Christianity of this earliest period.
In the case of Paul’s writings in particular, these are oriented toward an ideal in which a person feels carried away by an emotion-driven “passion for rightness,” which Paul describes in mythological terms as spirit-possession, possession by an otherworldly divine “Holy Spirit.” At is Platonic ideal best, this would result in a way of life driven by concern to do the most right thing in all one’s dealings with the world and other people.
Method in Interpretation.
These brief summaries of four particular cases are the result of more detailed studies of classics in different religious traditions, some of which I have published elsewhere, others of which I am posting on this website. These studies have been partly guided by interpretive principles developed in modern biblical studies in the last two centuries. But in the course of further reflection on these developments, and working out their implications for the study of diverse writings, I have worked out further elements of a distinctive approach. The four examples given above, related to early Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, and Christianity, give brief illustrations of what this approach means in practice. Here I explain some main elements of this approach in more detail.
One important aspect of this approach is the assumption that individuals belonging to early Daoist, Christian, and Buddhist communities were not intellectuals interested in abstract truth for its own sake. They were flesh-and-blood people like us, who were intensely moved and inspired by the messages (different in each case) which we now find preserved in early writings.
As explained a above and illustrated in several cases, we have not yet fully understood these messages until we have reconnected the thought-content of the messages to the human experiences which made the messages so convincing and life-transforming for so many people existing in the communities out of which these writings originated and for whom they were written. Basically, this means working back from the character of these writings themselves, to try to imaginatively recreate an original audience which would have found them moving and inspiring. This would mean asking, for example, about any given writing: What kinds of questions might such an audience be asking, that this writing tries to provide answers to? What sorts of concerns and life-problems might such an audience have been struggling with, which this writing might be addressing and might be trying to resolve. What might be the mindset of an original audience which would have made ideas and images presented in this writing particularly moving and compelling? Writings are most often trying to bring about some particular kind of change in some intended audience; what change might this most likely be, in the case of some given writing we are studying?
In short, writing is a kind of human communication, and communication is a two-way process, involving words by an author who has some particular audience in mind. And these words were meant to invite a certain kind of involvement and response on the part of a particular audience. We have not understood the original meaning of these words, the meaning they had for a particular intended audience, until we have managed to put ourselves in the place of such an audience, and tried to imaginatively and vicariously experience the words of a particular writing the way this audience would have experienced them.
This is not always easy. I have met many people who find the writings of Paul in the New Testament very difficult to view sympathetically. In terms described above, the mindset that comes most naturally to them is so different from the mindset of the ancient individuals who found Paul’s writing so moving and inspiring, that they find themselves very resistant to entering into any perspective that would find his writing anything but repellent.
There is no reason why anyone has to try to gain this sympathetic understanding of Paul. The “critical pluralism” described above envisions a great variety of ways of living a good and great, “virtuous” human life, very different from the kind of great and virtuous life that would have characterized Pauline converts. It is just that refusing to temporarily and vicariously enter into a mindset that would find Paul’s writings immensely inspiring, will prevent a person from ever really understanding the original meaning of his writings. And, given the enormous influence of Pauline thinking on the early development of mainstream Western Christianity, it will prevent them from ever understanding the historical origins of this kind of Christianity.
So my argument here is that understanding the meaning of any given religious writing includes not just understanding the words. “Meaning” in this case includes such things as the emotional force of the words, the impact that they had for an audience who found themselves engaged and involved with these words in some particular way. We have not fully understood the originally intended meaning of any given religious classic until we have managed to at least temporarily and vicariously let ourselves become personally involved in this writing the way that the originally intended audience were involved.
By comparison, think of songs like the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and what it would take to understand the “meaning” that such songs have for a great many Americans today. Among other things, one has to understand that these songs evoke times of war, involving two wars that have become founding events for the present-day American republic. These are among the particular associations that give these songs the emotional meaning that they have for many Americans.
I do not mean that all religious writings have this intensely emotional component. I think the Christian Gospels do; but most writings making up the early Buddhist Pali Canon are very dry and abstract from this point of view. My main point is that this is a kind of question we should ask about any given set of religious writings. How does the Gospel of Mark intend to engage its intended audience? How does any given sutta in the Pali Canon mean to engage its intended audience? What kind of experiences do the authors of these writings assume on the part of their originally intended audience, which we might need to know in order to fully understand the entire “meaning” that these writings might have had for this original audience?
These ideas about interpretive method can be contrasted with other approaches which (unfortunately I think) developed in many traditions in subsequent generations.
For example, subsequent generations of Christian commentators were often concerned with developing a set of doctrines defining Christian orthodoxy, believing in which would be obligatory for all members of a given Christian community. This concern led them to approach the Gospels assuming that these writings were meant to address this same kind of concern, thus treating them as though teaching such doctrines was central to their original purpose. There do of course exist writings written with this particular purpose. It is just that anyone asking this question about the Gospels would never guess that this is their particular purpose.
Similar things can be said about the approach taken to early Buddhist writings by subsequent Buddhist “scholastic” commentators, and about modern treatments of “Buddhism as Philosophy.” I think it would be obvious to anyone reading the suttas that they assume an audience of individuals intensely involved in practices whose aim was to bring about in themselves an internal transformation which they called Nirvana. Subsequent Buddhist commentators tended to extract from the suttas a set of doctrines defining some particular version of Buddhist orthodoxy. Similarly, modern treatments of Buddhism as Philosophy tend to neglect this practical side of early Buddhist teaching, assuming that early Buddhists were “philosophers” on the model of modern science-oriented philosophy, trying to describe objective facts about “the nature of reality.” This of course could in principle have been the primary purpose of early Buddhist writing; my point is only that this should be a question to be asked, rather than just something determined by the interests of interpreters.
This same argument applies to those who approach early Buddhist, Christian, or Daoist writings already assuming that there is some single core set of teachings taught by all religions, causing them to look for passages in any given set of writings that can be interpreted in this way. Of course this cannot be ruled out as a possibility. The problem is that this tends to be a self-proving strategy, searching for passages that can be interpreted this way, then citing such passages as “evidence.” One can only find out whether early Buddhist, Daoist, and Christian writings all mean to teach the same set of truths by first examining each separately and impartially without already assuming this, but posing this as a question to be answered on the basis of evidence.
Absolutes, relativism, and critical pluralism.
What I have found by applying rational methods to the study of writings from different traditions is that each was connected to a particular kind of experiential transformation, and that the transformation involved was quite different in the case of different writings. My theory easily accommodates this fundamental diversity by (1) treating the internal transformation aimed at in each case as a kind of “virtue,” (2) assuming the existence of a potentially indefinite plurality in the number of virtues there might be.
Some might object that this amounts to a kind of skeptical relativism, the idea that Goodness is whatever anyone thinks it is, or whatever any given society teaches its members. Some allege, then, that the only remedy for this moral skepticism is to posit the existence of a single set of Absolute and Timeless Truths valid for all people everywhere throughout all times. My theory instead envisions a “critical pluralism”: “Pluralism” allows for the possibility that there may be an indefinite number of fundamentally different ways of leading a good, or even a great, human life. “Critical” means that not just any way of leading a human life is a good or great one, and there is a rational way of differentiating good ways from bad ways, mediocre ways from great ways. The “rational way” in question is based on ideas drawn from Socrates and Plato described earlier. Among other things, this entails serious efforts to think of “counterexamples” involving motives, attitudes, states of mind, and ways of behaving which might accompany some given set of beliefs, but which you would not regard as admirable, and trying to formulate ideals free of the flaws thus uncovered.
What this would amount to in practice is “internal criticism” of any given religious ideal. That is, the goal of reasoning about religion should not be to discover the One True set of religious beliefs. Reasoning should take as its object the particular kind of internal transformation or “virtue” central to any given religion, and use Socratic questioning to find flaws in any given concept of this particular virtue, with the ultimate aim of formulating a concept of what this particular virtue would be at its very best. In the case of the main religious writings I have studied, the end result would be a concept of what the early Buddhist ideal would be at its very best, what the early Daoist ideal would be at its very best, and what the early Christian ideal would be at its very best, and so on.
Thus this theory allows for a good deal of personal choice regarding which Goodness-ideals to pursue. What any given person will find most inspiring will differ from person to person. On the other hand this theory does not encourage anyone to choose whatever set of teachings seem most easy for them to practice, enabling them to feel satisfied in themselves just as they are without much effort. On the contrary, taking the ideal Platonic essence of any given virtue as a model to model oneself on will always be a very challenging undertaking, requiring a person to struggle against social pressures, as well as many human tendencies that come most naturally to this person, and also strive for a high level of excellence rather than settling for mediocrity.
A theoretical basis for reasoning about personal transformation: Plato on Goodness and virtue.
Certain aspects of Plato’s thought focused on models of human excellence (arētē), or “virtue,” as this is commonly put today, play a central part in my theory about how to reason critically about religious beliefs. I have very briefly described relevant ideas above. In this final part of my essay, I want to describe the main ideas in more detail.
What is a virtue?
I noted above that, in the present theory, Plato’s ideas about “virtue” or “excellence (arētē) needs to be expanded to include a broader realm describable by a number of English words such as “meaning,” “value,” “what really matters,” and so on. In what follows, I will concentrate on several of Plato’s ideas centered on “virtue” proper. These ideas can be applied mutatis mutandis to this broader realm as well.
A virtue is a well-established and admirable character-trait, an habitual state of mind, an habitual way of relating to the world. Consider kindness, for example: If I am a kind person, if kindness is an ongoing part of my personality, kind feelings will spontaneously arise in me in situations that call for kindness, and automatically express themselves in kind behavior appropriate to the situation. (If I have to think to myself, “What would a kind person feel and do in this situation?” I am not yet a kind person. Kindness is not yet an ingrained part of my personality, governing my spontaneous reactions).
Thus the virtue of kindness has an intrinsic relation to kind behavior, but it is not the same thing. A person can imitate the behavior of a kind person–in the case of a politician wanting to win votes, for example–without actually being a kind person.
Thus becoming a more “virtuous” person requires an internal transformation in a person’s fundamental psychological dynamics, in which certain kinds of more admirable motivations come to habitually take preference over others. This idea is central to my account of religious “conversion.”
Socratic questioning.
Plato offers a model of critical thinking about virtue whose goal is to formulate an ideal concept of virtue which an idealistic person can use to model her character on, with the assurance that every step she takes in this direction will invariably make her a better person. Such a concept must represent some given virtue that is flawless in its ability to represent something only and always perfectly good. Not that any person can actually be perfectly good, but in striving for excellence of character, one has to have a model to move toward, known to be flawless in its Goodness. Otherwise, moving toward a flawed concept of goodness might make person more flawed, rather than the reverse.
Plato learned from his mentor Socrates, a method of critical reasoning about human excellence capable of detecting flaws in particular concepts and removing those flaws, enabling a person to move toward flawless virtue-concepts. The main such method involves the use of “counterexamples.” For example, in one of Plato’s dialogues, an individual called Polemarchos proposes a definition of the virtue of “being an upright person.” “Rightness,” he says, consists in “returning to everyone what belongs to him.” Socrates poses as a counterexample: Suppose a friend leaves his weapons with me for safekeeping. He subsequently goes insane, but then returns wanting his weapons back. Is it right to return weapons to an insane person? Polemarchos says no, this would clearly not be right. As Plato puts it: Following the rule “return to each what belongs to him” will “sometimes result in doing the right thing, sometimes result in doing what is not right.”
Socratic questioning and flawless Platonic virtue-essences.
This is a simple example of a reasoning method Plato proposes capable of detecting flaws in particular virtue-concepts. In other parts of his writing he makes suggestions as to how these flaws can be remedied, gradually leading to virtue-concepts rationally known to be flawless representations of something only and always perfectly good to mold one’s character on, known to be so by their ability to withstand all Socratic questioning-by-counterexample. Plato calls this ideal concept of any given virtue the “essence” of that virtue. (I am posting elsewhere on this website some examples of how this reasoning process might work in practice, using as examples some virtues like humility, honesty, and romantic love.)
There is also an experiential aspect to this, because this is not only an intellectual exercise. Since the subject matter of this thinking is human goodness, gaining a grasp of something perfectly good, the Platonic essence of any given virtue, would be as Plato says a wonderfully inspiring “revelation.”
The midwife principle and Platonist individualism.
One important facet of Plato’s thought about virtue is expressed in one passage where Socrates compares himself to a midwife. He says that in his conversations with other individuals he does not play the role of a teacher, teaching them conclusion that he or others have arrived at. He only tries to play the role of a midwife, helping others to “deliver” their own intellectual babies. Plato himself echoes this same idea elsewhere, where he says that knowledge of true virtue is not something that one person can arrive at, then convey to others. Everyone must do this for themselves.
This has important implications. What it means is that, in the case of normal adults, Plato assumes that personal experience of human conduct, human attitudes, and human character traits that they have perceived as admirable and not-admirable has already given them an intuitive knowledge of different virtues and kinds of human excellence. They already have an intuitive knowledge of what is admirable about courage, kindness, patience, humility, and so on. The problem, as Plato sees it, is only that this intuitive knowledge of virtues exists only in an unclear and imperfect form, in which perfect goodness is mixed with many other things that are not perfect goodness. A useful analogy here is silver-mining: Pure silver already exists in silver ore. It only exists there in a form mixed with many “impurities” that are not pure silver. Digging up silver ore must be completed by a “refining” process, separating the pure silver existing in the ore from everything that is not pure silver.
But, in the context of what we now know about cultural diversity, this “midwife” principle also I think implies an individualism and indefinite pluralism when it comes to reasoning about virtue. If we took a collection of individuals gathered from many different cultures, and asked each individual to articulate what her experience has taught her about what it means to be a good or great human being, we would certainly end up with a great variety of concepts.
Concrete reality is a changing mixture of good and not-good.
So what Plato is after are concepts of what any given virtue would be in its most ideal form. And he has a rational method for arriving at such an ideal form of courage, love, uprightness, and so on. A given concept of a particular virtue would show itself to be perfect in its goodness by its ability to withstand serious and sustained Socratic questioning by counterexample.
And one thing that such questioning will show when pursued over time is that perfect Goodness can never be defined in terms of anything concrete and visible to the senses. This means that no rule for concrete behavior can precisely describe something only and always perfectly good. This is true, for example, of any attempt to define honesty by saying: To be honest means to tell the truth on all occasions. There may be occasions when it is not good to tell the truth (e.g. telling a murderer the whereabouts of his victim). And it is always possible to tell the truth for bad motives (e.g. repeating hurtful gossip).
And it is true as well that no concrete person will ever be perfectly good, so it will not always be good to imitate any such concrete person. This applies to concrete institutions, such as one’s country, and also to religious institutions. Insofar as a religious institution consists in concrete individuals in positions of authority, concretely visible rituals, and rules for concrete behavior, from a Platonist point of view following these concretely defined membership requirements of any given communal religion will always be ambiguous regarding true goodness.
Among other things, this implies what is sometimes conceptualized as a difference between “religion” and “spirituality.” Merely belonging to a given religious community, believing in the required set of religious doctrines, obeying a set of religious rules, attending religious rituals, will as Plato might say, sometimes make a person a better person, and sometimes not. True human goodness can only be exactly defined in terms of internal personality traits not directly visible from the outside. Since the state of a person’s internal virtues is not something directly visible to the general public from outside, this can never be a requirement for membership in a particular religious community. This marks a major difference between what I will call “communal religion,” to be contrasted with “personal spirituality.” Most of the essays on this website are about personal spirituality, not about communal religion. (And as to Plato, I focus here on what Plato offers in the way of a reason-based virtue-centered personal spirituality, different from “Plato’s philosophical doctrines”.)
Another essay, A Theory of Communal Religion, presents a psycho-social theory of communal religion as contrasted with personal spirituality.
The difficulty of formulating perfect Platonic virtue-essences.
Sustained practice of Socratic questioning of any particular virtue will show that it is quite difficult to formulate a concept of this virtue that will withstand such Socratic questioning. Plato in fact says that a grasp of any given virtue in its most ideal form will be “beyond words.”
How difficult it is to give a precise verbal definition of the pure Platonic essence of any given virtue is indeed something I experienced over many years trying to conduct Socratic discussions with students. It is much easier to make up counterexamples showing flaws in any given definition, than it is to formulate a definition free of any flaws. This was in fact something students found most frustrating. They expected that at the end of a difficult assignment, they would arrive at a perfectly satisfying conclusion. I had to assure them that I would not grade their papers on this basis, but on their ability to make progress, so that a definition they arrived at at the end of a 4-6 page paper was better than the one with which they began. I count myself very fortunate to have been able to engage in Socratic discussion of quite a number of different virtues, which has given me a more intuitive sense of what a pure Platonic essence of any given virtue would be like.
Analogy and participation.
It is also true that Buddhists, Daoists, and Christians have held that the focal centers of their respective religious visions–Nirvana for Buddhists, Dao for Daoists, God for Christians–are beyond human abilities to describe in words. Plato agrees: the pure Platonic essence of any given virtue will generally be very difficult to grasp, and will be beyond words to represent.
Plato offers one helpful device to remedy this problem, which later became the basis for the doctrine of analogy developed by medieval Christian theologians. They developed this as an answer to the question about how human beings, with their limited cognitive abilities, might be able to understand the unlimited, infinite goodness of God. Their answer: God’s goodness is not completely unlike the limited goodness possessed by human beings. Limited human goodness is “analogous” to unlimited divine goodness, so that the limited goodness we perceive in concrete human beings can serve as starting points for understanding the unlimited goodness of God.
The corresponding concept Plato himself uses is the idea of “participation.” No concrete human being can ever achieve the perfection of goodness represented by pure and perfect Platonic virtue-essences. What we should aim for is to “participate” in this perfection by greater and greater degrees.
For example, in some writings on Buddhism posted on this website, I will use this concept of analogy to try to understand Buddhist Nirvana. Some passages in early Buddhist writings claim that Nirvana is beyond ordinary human understanding. But I think that analogies are available to give us starting points for understanding Nirvana. The virtue of self-confidence is one analogy. Self-confidence is something we find admirable. But normal self-confidence is based on something particular, some particular personal abilities or achievements, for example. But Nirvana is a state in which one’s self-esteem and self-confident is not dependent on anything external to oneself, which is hard to imagine.
So my proposal is that ordinary self-confidence is not Nirvana, but it is “analogous to” Nirvana, providing us with a starting point for getting some sense of the less limited Goodness which is Nirvana itself, much more difficult to understand as it is in itself. Among other things, this also allows for the possibility that human beings can “participate” by greater and lesser degrees in the perfect Goodness which is Nirvana, without ever achieving Nirvana in its full perfection. (I say this from a purely rational “Platonist” point of view, which I recognize is contrary to the way Buddhist writings tend to picture Nirvana, as an all-or-nothing affair.)
In practice, this idea of analogy is connected to the fundamental pluralism that is part of the theory I am outlining here. Analogies helpful in understanding Nirvana are different from analogies helpful in understanding the early Christiana and early Daoist ideals.
Plato’s two worlds.
The reasoning processes described above led Plato to the idea that concrete reality visible to the senses is invariably an imperfect and changing mixture of good and not good. Nothing in the concrete world we see around us deserves our completely unreserved and unconditional loyalty and commitment. It is possible to formulate in our minds ideal virtue-concepts that are so deserving, but these concepts must be “abstract,” separated from anything concrete and visible to the senses. Part of the reason for this is the fact that virtue itself, as a character trait, is by nature invisible from the outside. I can directly see honest or loving conduct with my eyes. I cannot directly see with my eyes a person’s honesty or love as an internal character trait. Concrete honest behavior is relatively easy to understand and describe in words. The perfect Platonic essence of “honesty” as an internal virtue, is more difficult.
Plato sometimes represents many of these ideas in a more graphic form in terms of a contrast between two worlds. There is the concrete world visible to the senses existing “over here.” But there is another world populated by pure and perfect Platonic virtue-essences existing “over there.” Sometimes he uses religious language to describe this ideal otherworld, speaking of these virtue-essences as “divine.” And he says in one place (Theaetetus 176a-c):
…. it is impossible that evils should be done away with [in this world]… they cannot have their place among the Gods, but must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this region over here… God is in no way and in no manner unrighteous, but is most perfectly righteous, and nothing is more like Him than any one among us who becomes as most nearly perfect in right-mindedness as possible.
This makes Platonism an “otherworldly” worldview. One’s ultimate loyalties are to these ideal Platonic virtue-essences existing in a world “over there.” A good Platonist takes these ideal virtue-essences as models to model her character on, and her ambition in life is to be as much as possible a representative of otherworldly perfect virtues in a very imperfect world. This is Plato’s model of “transcendent” reality, which I advocate applying to understand religious transcendence expressed in more mythological terms in many ancient religious classics.
Not taking these images literally.
I do not take these images literally, as though this otherworld “over there” is an actually existing place, a parallel universe existing alongside the visible universe we see around us. Platonic virtue-essences are ideals to strive for. Ideals often exercise powerful influences on people’s lives, as when a person strives to be as perfect a mother as she can be, become the best high-jumper or the best cook in the world, or be the most popular person in her high-school class. But ideals as ideals do not necessarily literally “exist” anywhere but in the minds of those striving to achieve them. The question to ask about ideals–including Platonic virtue-ideals–is not whether they exist, but whether they are worth striving for.
Critical pluralism about virtues.
Another question it is important to address here is: How many virtues are there? If we tried to take a survey of individuals from all the cultures in the world, and asked them to name the character traits that they found admirable, we would certainly end up with a very long list. Plato of course discusses only a relatively short list of virtues admired by an Athenian elite of his time, but he never tries to prove that these are the only character traits that deserve our admiration.
I think if we took a purely rational approach to Plato’s thought, asking not just “What did Plato believe?” but “What did he have good reasons to believe?”, the logical result would be a critical pluralism about virtues. The result would be that (1) it is possible that there exist an indefinite plurality of virtues, but (2) not just any virtue-concept can show itself to be a flawless concept by its ability to withstand Socratic questioning by counterexample.
Plato offers no reasoning method limiting the number of virtues there might be, or telling a person which virtues are the most important ones. This is a matter of individual choice. Once a person has chosen which virtue to focus on, Plato offers a reasoning method for detecting and remedying possible flaws in any concept one might begin with, aimed at formulating a concept of what this particular virtue would be at its ideal best.
Platonism as a model for understanding otherworldly religion.
The ideas expressed above about Plato’s otherworldliness, I take to be a useful model for understanding the otherworldly visions presented in many religious classics that have been the main focus of my attention as a scholar: The Christian New Testament, the Buddhist Pali Canon, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Daoist classic the Daodejing. Like Plato, each of these religious classics present a generally negative view of what might be called normal concrete standards of success prevailing in any given society. People feel pressure to live up to relatively concrete “worldly” standards of success that prevail in any given society, which we sometimes call “social pressure.” These are partly a matter of “materialistic” standards like wealth and material comfort, but consist also in the approval of others, social status and standing in a community, living up to standards of respectability consisting in norms for visible conduct, and so on. In this sense, for most people, the surrounding society and relatively concrete standards of success prevailing in that society constitute the “world” which function as an “evaluative context,” a context determining a person’s sense of self-worth and meaning in life.
Each of the writings mentioned above is severely critical of this ordinary worldly context, and presents an “otherworldly” vision consisting of a fundamentally different and a fundamentally superior context for self-evaluation.
In each case, the vision presented was found to be immensely inspiring by considerable numbers of people, witnessed by the rapid spread of movements which took these writings as foundational. I think what was most important about the teachings presented was the fundamental internal transformation that they inspired and served to support. It is not only that the people involved came to believe certain doctrines. More important was the way they found the worldview presented in these writings greatly inspiring, which in turn transformed their internal psychological dynamics, their core values, and consequently their basic way of being in the world and relating to the world.
