Review: Gandhi 1914-1948: The Years That Changed the World

Gandhi 1914-1948: The Years That Changed the World by Ramachandra Guha
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Guha’s book serves as a magisterial and highly readable account of Gandhi’s years in India and will likely remain the definitive Gandhi biography for many years to come. Guha offers readers a nuanced portrait of Gandhi’s personal and social life, contextualizing the latter’s achievements in ways that bring out the important contributions made by others, both allies and adversaries, to India’s revolutionary struggle for Independence. We learn of the multiple influences on Gandhi’s social and political philosophy and the ways in which Gandhi was willing to develop his position on certain matters in light of changing social conditions. Previous biographical accounts of Gandhi have been criticized for their overly hagiographical treatment of their subject; Guha doesn’t shy away from legitimate criticism and probes some of Gandhi’s more controversial experiments and commitments. This warts-and-all approach provides us with a fuller, more human portrait of Gandhi. Guha’s epilogue reflects on Gandhi’s contemporary relevance and suggests that the latter’s commitment to religious pluralism, eradication of caste oppression, and environmental sustainability means that he has as much to contribute today as he did during India’s freedom struggle.

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Developing a comparative theology of the sacred image: a reflection on Visnu's presence in the sacred image and Christ's presence in the Eucharistic Sacrament

Hindu ritual activities tend to revolve around the worship and veneration of images of deities, present either in the temple setting or a home shrine. According to Hindu tradition, seeing (darsana) the deity (or more importantly, being seen by the deity) is one of the most effective ways to obtain the blessings and grace of God. Worship of the sacred image (puja) involves honoring the deity with flowers, garlands, fruit and offerings of ghee lamps and incense.  The liturgy performed in Hindu temples ensures that the sacred image is given all of the care of a royal personage: the sacred image is bathed, fed, clothed, put to rest for the night, and ceremonially awakened in the early morning. Students of Hinduism will know that some of the most moving and passionate devotional poetry composed by Hindu poets and saints is directed to God as present in the sacred image.

 

While the worship of sacred images is common to many Hindu religious traditions, the theological justification offered for the practice differs amongst theological traditions. For example, in some Hindu philosophical schools, the significance of the sacred image is viewed in functional terms: the sacred image, on this view, functions primarily as a focus for meditation and worship, i.e. as a symbol of the divine and as a useful pointer to the ultimate Reality to which it points and represents. The Hindu theological school that I will probe in this essay takes as its point of departure the ontological oneness of Deity and sacred image: on this view, the sacred image is regarded as the very embodiment of the Deity.

In this short blog post, I will take a comparative approach to the study of sacred images. Before exploring the theological and devotional foundations for image-worship as it developed in Hindu Vaishnava theology, I will offer an overview of Christian sacramental theology as it pertains to the sacrament of the Eucharist. I believe that the insights developed by Christian theologians in thinking through the problem of how Christ is present in and through the Eucharistic sacrament can be brought to bear in our appreciation for Hindu theology as it relates to the worship of sacred images. 

Vaisnava theologizing of the sacred image takes place in a conceptual and theological framework that has as its central core the personality of Lord Visnu. According to Vaisnava theology, there is only one Supreme God, Lord Visnu, who is sole creator, ruler, protector and dissolver of the universe. All of creation, including the multiplicity of souls that inhabit it, exist in a state of eternal subservience to God. Although they may have extraordinary powers, all other ‘gods’ , such as Brahma and Ganesa, are viewed as subsidiary divinities that derive their power and godliness from Visnu himself. Vaisnava theologians describe Visnu as possessing a body that is the abode of innumerable auspicious qualities, wholly pure and taintless, and entirely different in nature from all others.

Vaisnava theology understands God to exist in five primary forms: 1) the Transcendent God Visnu (para) who is wholly beyond the range of speech and mind and dwells eternally in the highest heaven surrounded by liberated souls who serve and praise him endlessly; 2) the four-fold aggregate of his creative cosmic emanations (vuyahavatara); 3) Visnu’s periodic incarnations on earth (vibhavatara) (such as Rama and Krishna); 4) the Immanent Visnu who indwells in all of creation and in the human heart as antaryamin; and 5) God’s worshippable incarnation in the properly consecrated sacred images. It is the last of these forms, Visnu’s incarnation in the sacred image that forms the focus of this blog post.

The Yatindramatadipika, an important Srivaisnava theological handbook, describes Visnu’s incarnation in the sacred image in the following way:

“The Lord’s iconic incarnation is that special form which, without remoteness of space and time, accepts for its body any material chosen by the devotees, and “descends” into it with a non-material body; The Lord thus becomes dependent on the worshipper for bath, food, sitting, sleeping, and so forth; The Lord’s iconic-incarnation bears everything and is replete with all auspicious qualities; in it, He is present in houses, villages, towns, sacred places, hills, and so forth.”

 

For those outside the Vaisnava tradition, it may be tempting to see the construction of sacred images as an attempt to project God in the human image, especially given that sacred images oftentimes reflect divine persons with human-like forms. Vaisnava theology anticipates such objections but notes in response that such criticisms ignores the subtle theology underpinning the construction of sacred images and the accompanying emphasis on the divine intention to conform to human expectations (given the human predilection for the familiar and comprehensible): as we imagine God, so God becomes apparent to us. Writing in the early centuries of the CE, Poykai Alvar, a poet-saint from the Alvar tradition, sings passionately of Visnu’s divine accommodation to human preferences:

 

“Whichever form pleases his people, that is his form;

Whichever name pleases his people, that is his name;

Whichever way pleases his people who meditate without ceasing, that is his way –

The One who holds the cakra.”

 

Commenting on this verse, Appillai, an important 12th century Sri Vaisnava theologian writes that:

 

“Thus the Lord does not consider his own greatness, but holds as his own forms, names, deeds, etc., those that please people who take refuge in him. Thus Poykai Alvar reflects on and makes known the excellence of the nature of the sacred image with which the Lord serves those who take refuge in him”.

 

Vaisnava theologians emphasise the significance of the radical accessibility of Visnu in his sacred images: the Transcendent Lord, who dwells in the highest heaven and is otherwise inaccessible, becomes accessible, in a tangible and material way, through his divine presence in the sacred image. Visnu’s presence in the sacred image is an expression of his gracious condescension and radical accessibility- qualities which reveal his deep and enduring love for and desire to be intimately connected with his devotees.  Vaisnava theologians argue that Visnu’s willingness to become dependent on his worshippers (to the extent of limiting himself) is for the sole purpose of facilitating intimate communion with his devotees. This argument is not dissimilar to Kenotic approaches to Christology which emphasise that God the Son must have divested himself of certain divine properties or functions, or even limited his divine being, for the purpose of existing in human form.

 

The ritual and devotional significance of the sacred image is hard to overstate; for Vaisnava theologians, the sacred image occupies a foundational role in the ritual and spiritual life of a devotee, no matter how advanced his or her spiritual development. This approach stands in contrast to the arguments advanced by some Hindu schools of thought that the sacred image is a useful ritual tool for neophyte practitioners to aid in their meditation and spiritual discipline but can otherwise be relinquished at mature stages of spiritual realization. In contrast, for the Vaisnava theologian, the sacred image is a source of delight and rapture to those already devoted to God while also serving to elicit self-surrender to God on the part of the neophyte devotee. Pillai Lokacarya, a highly influential 12th century Sri Vaisnava theologian, writing in his Srivacana Bhusana, notes that:

 

“[t]o the soul uncorrected by the scriptures, distracted by other objects and continuing in aversion to God, the sacred image produces an attraction or taste which converts his aversion. Having produced a taste it becomes a means (upaya) and after the means has been grasped, it stands as an enjoyment”.

 

The charge often ascribed to idolators then, i.e. that they are guilty of making God in their own image, appears less threatening in the context of a theology that emphasizes the accommodating intent of a God who chooses to be like us. Further, the charge of idolatry makes little sense in the context of a theology that recognizes both the transcendence and immanence of God; while God is present in the sacred image, the sacred image is not considered to exhaust God’s presence. In other words, while God may be present in the sacred image, God’s presence is not limited to the sacred image.

 

A Vaishnava theology of the sacred image must engage phenomenologically with the practice of image worship as it is experienced by Vaisnava devotees. Accessing the subjective religious experiences of Vaisnava theologians is difficult however as the literary genres of biography or devotional works relating personal religious experience (such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love) is largely foreign to Hindu literature. That said, devotional compositions, such as stotras, offer useful and personal insights into their author’s religious experiences and so exploring such compositions can serve as a useful substitute for biographies and other such first-person accounts. In Vaisnavism, the self-manifestation of God is intimately associated with his presence in the sacred image. The extraordinary and profound sense of wonder that this presence elicits in the devotee is a theme to which poets return again and again. Advanced devotees perceive the sacred image as mystically active and alive, responsive to prayers and keen to bestow blessings and grace. In his Varadaraja Stava, a poem of praise to the deity of Vishnu enshrined in the Varadaraja temple in Kancipuram, Kuresa writes:

 

“[a] sidelong glance from your eyes, O Lord,

Manifests your majesty

Spreads forth radiance

Reveals your boundless compassion

Rains down raptureAnd melts the hearts of your devotees.”

 

The devotional rapture experienced by devotees at being in the presence of the sacred image is matched, Vaisnava theology argues, by the bliss which God himself experiences at being in the presence of and dependent upon his people. This mutuality of the relationship between Visnu and his devotees is a distinctive element of the Vaisnava understanding of God and is frequently alluded to in the devotional poetry of the tradition. In his commentary to the Bhagavad Gita, Ramanuja argues that Visnu’s inability to bear separation from his devotees is the cause of his choosing to reveal himself in any form his devotees desire. Kuresa and Parasara Bhattar bring out this theme beautifully in the following verses:

 

“O Lord at Srirangam!

You delight in being worshipped in this world

In temples, homes and hermitages…

Completely dependent upon the temple priests.” (Parasara Bhattar in his Srirangaraja Stava)

 

“O bestow of boons!

Unable to suffer delay in embracing your devotees

And not even allowing them enough time to be purified

You, most patient one,

Were so eager to take them immediately

To your own abode in the highest heaven

That you descended here!

But what is this?

You woo even those who haven’t taken shelter with You!

Yielding the sight of your auspicious and holy body to them!” (Kuresa in his Varadaraja Stava)

 

The preceding paragraphs provide a rough overview of the Vaisnava theology of sacred images. Students of comparative religion that focus on Hindu worship of the sacred image tend to compare the practice to Christian (more specifically, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) veneration of statues and icons. Whilst this approach is understandable, it runs the risk of conflating two sets of devotional practices that ascribe radically different ontological and ritual significance to the sacred image: to be sure, whilst both sets of traditions view the sacred image or icon as ‘ritually significant’, they differ enormously on the question of the extent to which the image embodies God and/or mediates his presence.

 

Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist: A Catholic Perspective

 

“[I]n the august sacrament of the holy Eucharist, after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things” (The Council of Trent)

 

“If any one denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema” (Canon I, On the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, The Council of Trent).

 

“And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me." And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.” (Luke 22:19 – 20)

 

In the next few paragraphs I will try to show that the Catholic understanding of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist bears some theological similarities to the Vaisnava understanding of the divine presence in the sacred image. At the Council of Trent, Catholic Christianity affirmed that “in the august sacrament of the holy Eucharist, after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things”. As we try to unpack what this affirmation means in the context of Christian theology, we will discover how Catholic theologians have evolved their understanding of how Christ comes to be present in the Sacrament of the Eucharist and have thought through and have sought to respond to problems associated with the doctrine. This exercise, I hope, will allow us to develop a comparative perspective in thinking through the issue of God’s sacramental presence and the effect and role that such a presence plays in the lives of religious believers. 

 

The Catholic tradition regards Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic Sacrament to be true, real and substantial. These terms serve to distinguish the Catholic conception of the Eucharist from competing approaches which consider that Christ is only ‘representationally’ or ‘symbolically’ present in the bread and wine of the Sacrament. We noted earlier that a similar tension exists in Hinduism where a distinction is usually drawn between traditions that view God’s presence in the sacred image in ‘representational’ terms and those that consider the sacred image to be an actual and real embodiment of the deity. The fullness of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is reflected in highly elaborate Catholic liturgies that purport to treat the Eucharistic Sacrament as the Church would treat Christ himself. In developing its sacramental theology, the Catholic Church drew a distinction between the different ways in which Christ is present in the Church; while the Church accepts that Christ is present in the Church when, e.g., (i) it prays, (ii) when it performs acts of mercy, (iii) in its preaching of the Gospel, etc., the Church affirms that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is different from the above-mentioned ways of presence: Christ’s is substantially present in the Eucharist as truly as he is present at the right hand of the Father.  During the Second Vatican Council, reflecting on the fullness and truth of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, Pope Paul VI delivered an important doctrinal encyclical in which he noted that describing Christ’s presence in the Eucharist as a ‘real’ presence does not imply that other types of Christ’s presence are ‘unreal’ but that Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is presence in its fullest sense, “a substantial presence by which Christ [is] wholly and entirely present”.

 

To what extent can this distinction between types of presence be utilized by Vaisnava theologians in thinking through the theology of the sacred image? This distinction between types of presence captures, I think, an important tension that exists in both traditions between on the one hand affirming the ontological oneness and unicity of all of God’s presences and on the other in drawing meaningful distinctions between types of divine presence that reflect the lived experience and religious phenenomology of believers. A theological commitment to Visnu’s unicity and the fullness and completeness of all of Visnu’s manifestations would problematize a theological strategy that sought to draw a distinction between types of Visnu’s presence. However, that there is a typology or hierarchy of sorts amongst Visnu’s manifestations is clear; the difference only is that while Catholic sacramental theology draws a distinction between types of presence, Vaisnava theologians argue for a difference in the relative accessibility of each of Visnu’s manifestations. We drew attention earlier to devotional poetry in which the poet-devotee emphasizes the extraordinarily accessible nature of Visnu’s presence in the sacred image. While Visnu is equally present in each of his manifestations, he is far more accessible in the sacred image: this is what bestows special significance to the practice of image worship in Hinduism: while Visnu is present in the ritual sacrifice (yajna), in his sacred name, in his supreme abode, he is present most accessibly in his sacred image.

 

The poet-devotee’s celebration of Visnu’s willingness to render himself more accessible by becoming present in the sacred image has parallels in the Catholic tradition through the development of private Eucharistic devotions which allowed the laity to view the consecrated Host (the Eucharistic bread that had been appropriately consecrated) and to marvel in awe at the self-effacing humility of Christ. There is a deeper point here which relates to the experience that the divine presences engender in the life of the religious believer. We noted earlier that for the Sri Vaisnava, the sacred image communicates something essential about the inherent nature of Visnu: the Lord, out of his merciful condescension, manifests and is fully (and most accessibly) present in the sacred image in order to achieve a more intimate communion with his devotees. The Catholic would say, in not too dissimilar vein, that the risen Christ, in his great humility, invites his devotees to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist in which his salvific sacrifice on the Cross is re-enacted by his real presence in the Eucharistic sacrament.

 

We have seen that the Vaisnava understanding of God’s presence in the sacred image is based on a sophisticated theology that emphasizes and celebrates divine accessibility. So as to be tangibly present before his devotees, Visnu manifests himself in the temples and home shrines, incarnating in whichever approrpriately consecrated form is offered to him. We have also seen how the Vaisnava concept of sacred image bears a close resemblance to the Catholic understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharistic Sacrament. Both traditions consider such divine presences to be real, full and complete, and to some extent, different from all of the other ways in which God is present to his devotees. Both Vaisnavas and Catholics agree that the divine presence in the sacred image and (for Catholics) the Eucharist is an expression of divine humility and a channel for divine grace.

 

Review: Polemics and Patronage in the City of Victory: Vyasatirtha, Hindu Sectarianism, and the Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Court

Polemics and Patronage in the City of Victory: Vyasatirtha, Hindu Sectarianism, and the Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Court by Valerie Stoker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Valerie Stoker’s Polemics and Patronage in the City of Victory is a deeply informed and highly readable study of the politics of religious patronage in the 16th century Vijayanagara Court. The book’s focus is on Vyasatirtha, a virtuoso intellectual of the Madhva school, who used Vijaynagara patronage and his own expertise in polemics to transform Madhva Brahmanism into a major intellectual, social and political force throughout South India.

While acknowledging the religiously diverse nature of the Vijaynagara court and polity, Stoker’s study of the inscriptional and narrative evidence demonstrates that the Vijayanagara court was, in fact, selective in its patronage of primarily Hindu religious institutions. Importantly, the motivations behind this selectivity, Stoker argues, were not always religious. Rather, Vijayanagara patronage of Hindu sectarian groups responded creatively to a variety of incentives in ways that reflected the particular circumstances of specific locations. This opportunistic flexibility of Vijayanagara patronage, coupled with its generosity, galvanized Hindu sectarian leaders to pursue certain kinds of intellectual projects as well as to form different intersectarian alliances and rivalries. The overlapping nature of these alliances and rivalries coupled with distinctions in doctrinal and practical matters had the effect of creating, simultaneously, a shared religious sensibility and significant sectarian divisions. One of the most rewarding aspects of the book is its focus not just on how specific socio-political factors implicated Hindu religious traditions but equally importantly on how theological argumentation and religious practice shaped social and political reality.


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Review: Embodiment: A History

Embodiment: A History by Justin E.H. Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

'Embodiment, A History' is a new addition to the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series. In common with other members of the series, this book offers a multidisciplinary and historical study of its subject, the problem of embodiment. The book offers a useful survey of the various problems that embodiment is thought to engender and reviews various solutions that have been offered as responses. The close attention to historical context and the willingness to look beyond the philosophical canon and to a wider intellectual landscape are useful and commendable features of the various articles that make up this book. That said, the book would have benefitted from a closer engagement with South Asian and Middle Eastern philosophical contributions to the problem of embodiment; a more comparative approach to the articles would have also been desirable.

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Review: Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1935, Martin Heidegger delivered a series of lectures at the University of Freiburg. In return for proclaiming his allegiance to Hitler’s national socialism, Heidegger, arguably the most influential of 20th century philosophers, was given the job and title of rector at the University of Freiburg. As he commenced his lectures, Heidegger declared “Why is there being rather than nothing at all” to be the deepest, the most far-reaching and most fundamental of all questions. Indeed, ever since Leibniz first posed the question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ in the early 18th century, philosophers, theologians and physicists have expended much intellectual energy in thinking about the question and possible solutions to it. In ‘Why Does the World Exist’, Jim Holt sets out on a personal philosophical quest to explore the various scientific and philosophical theories that have been advanced in recent years in an attempt to penetrate the enigma of existence. Holt’s quest makes for a tremendously exciting and rewarding read: profound yet humorous, erudite and yet accessible, Holt’s work is a veritable tour de force of philosophical and scientific writing.

The book is structured around interviews and conversations with the following eight thinkers: David Deutsch, Adolf Grünbaum, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, Roger Penrose, Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg and John Updike. Holt’s interviews with these thinkers and reflections more generally on contemporary debates in cosmology and philosophy makes clear that there remains profound intellectual disagreement regarding the question of the universe’s origin and the purpose of its existence. The philosopher Robert Nozick suggested that anybody who proposed a non-strange answer to the question of ‘why something exists rather than nothing’ shows that he or she doesn’t understand the question. Nozick had a point and it is worth reflecting on some of the theories that Holt’s interlocutors have proposed by way of an explanation of the origins of the universe. Before we do, it is worth reflecting, if only very briefly, on why it is that Leibniz’s question, as he initially formulated it, provokes such existential angst among thinkers.

Leibniz’s question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ derives its force from a seemingly obvious fact about the world and the objects that populate it. The world and the objects in it strike us as being contingent. That is to say, it is entirely coherent that the world or any object within it might not have existed. Mahatma Gandhi existed; but it is entirely possible that he might not have existed. Indeed, if his parents had not engaged in sexual congress, India would not have had a Gandhi to shepherd the country through its movement for independence. Reflect on the world around you and you will notice the frighteningly fragile grip that things have on existence; things come into existence and go out of existence and therefore, Leibniz argues, it makes sense to ask why it is that the world exists, especially because its non-existence seems simpler. This last point is not with controversy. The suggestion that non-existence is simpler derives from what Robert Nozick called ‘the presumption in favour of nothingness’. The argument is that worlds that contain things pose explanatory questions that are not posed by ‘empty’ worlds (that is, words containing nothing). Given the presumption of nothingness, the existence of the actual world cries out for explanation. Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason holds that there must be an explanation for every fact, an answer for every question. What then can be explanation for the world? Importantly, Leibniz argues that the existence of contingent entities (and the world is such an entity) can be explained only by appeal to a necessary being. A necessary being is an entity whose existence is not contingent. Leibniz argues that God is such an entity because he contains within himself the reason for his own existence. Leibniz’s response to the question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ is therefore clear and decisive: the world exists because of God; only God can furnish the ultimate resolution to the mystery and enigma of existence.

This Leibnizian resolution to the mystery of existence has been subject to philosophical attack from all quarters. Most have sought to challenge the ontological coherence of ‘necessary beings’. One thinker who also reasons from the apparent contingency of the world to God but who adopts a somewhat different approach to that of Leibniz in getting there is Richard Swinburne. Swinburne also views God as the terminus of the explanatory chain and considers that one cannot go beyond God in the quest to resolve the mystery of existence. However, Swinburne does not believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason; he considers that there does not need to be an explanation for everything (this allows him to avoid the question of why God exists). Swinburne, in contrast to many contemporary philosophical theists, does not believe that God’s existence is logically necessary. The important point for Swinburne is that God’s simplicity renders him the most likely and probable cause of the world. For Swinburne, God’s existence is just a ‘brute fact’ and there is no point in asking why it is that God exists.

Holt’s fifth chapter deals with what he describes as the ‘hotly contested’ issue of the world’s temporal nature: is the world finite or infinite? In the thirteenth century,up the Catholic Church declared it to be an article of faith that the world had a beginning in time. This of course was many centuries before scientists discovered evidence of the so-called Big Bang and so it is worth asking why the Catholic Church committed itself to such a position even though Aquinas, ever the loyal Aristotelian, insisted that the point could never be proved philosophically. Of course, the account of Genesis has been read by many Christians as suggesting that the world was created at a point in time and therefore is not eternal. Additionally, some theologians, including Aquinas’ contemporary St. Bonaventure, argued that the universe could not have an infinite past. Bonaventure considered that the eternality of the universe was logically impossible. This argument has been developed by the contemporary Christian philosopher of religion, William Lane Craig. Craig argues that the universe must have had a beginning and that this conclusion is supported on both philosophical and scientific grounds. Let’s consider his argument from philosophy. Craig argues that the notion of an actual infinity does not make any logical sense and that there could be no such thing in the real world. Following al-Ghazali, Craig argues that if past time were infinite then Saturn and Jupiter would have completed the same number of revolutions. But, Saturn and Jupiter obviously wouldn’t complete the same number of revolutions in any given period of time for Jupiter completes a revolution in twelve years whereas it takes Saturn thirty years to complete a revolution. On this basis, past time cannot be infinite.

Holt suggests that there is nothing absurd about an infinite past and points to the examples of Galileo, Newton and Einstein, all of whom had no problem conceiving of the universe as being infinite in time. Even the Big Bang, Holt argues, may not necessarily be evidence of the finite nature of the past. Holt argues that the current theory that best explains the Big Bang is called the ‘new inflationary cosmology’. The theory predicts that the universe-engendering explosions like the Big Bang should be a fairly routine occurrence and that our universe is likely to have emerged from the space-time of a pre-existing universe. Our universe then is just an infinitesimal part of an ever-reproducing multiverse. Although each of the bubble universes within this multiverse had a definite beginning in time, the entire self-replicating ensemble may be infinitely old.

One of the most interesting chapters of the book includes Holt’s interview with the speculative cosmologist, John Leslie. Leslie’s solution to the mystery of existence is distinctly Platonic in nature and holds that reality is ruled by abstract value. Following Plato, Leslie believes that the ethical requirement that a good universe exist was itself enough to create the universe. In Plato’s Republic, the Form of the Good is said to ‘bestow existence upon things’. Leslie’s view requires belief in goodness as an objective value (i.e. that there are facts about what is good and evil and that these facts are timelessly and necessarily true, independent of human concerns). More controversially, Leslie’s account requires that we believe that the ethical needs that arise from such facts about goodness can be creatively effective – that they can bring things into existence. It is this claim that most would reject as too implausible. How, Holt writes, could objective truths about goodness summon up a world out of sheer nothingness?




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Review: Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood

Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood by Sugata Bose
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is much of value in Sugata Bose’s latest book, ‘The Nation as Mother’. The book comprises an assortment of essays, all of which focus, some more tangentially than others, on the theme of nationalism and the formation of the nation-state. The book’s title comes from the defining chapter of the volume in which Bose interrogates ‘the sacred biography of the Mother’ - the provenance and history of the maternal metaphor in India’s national consciousness. The metaphor of ‘nation as mother’ was formed in the intellectually fertile terrain of Bengal and inspired creativity in provincial and nation-wide expressions of nationalisms through a litany of art forms including literature, poetry, music and painting. Bose’s incisive narrative brings to light the historical and enduring unease that Indian Muslims have had with the maternal symbol and its overtly religious symbolism and use. Bose’s fascinating study of Aurobindo sheds light on the latter’s political and religious philosophy and represents a much-needed corrective against recent attempts by secularist historians to paint Aurobindo in communal and sectarian colors. Throughout his volume, Bose cautions against the seemingly dominant tendency of viewing Indian nationalist thought through the prism of European discourse. Treating the former as derivative of the latter has resulted, Bose argues, in a vacuum of native subjectivity. In seeking to rescue Indian intellectual history from its impoverished state, Bose invites readers to consider the extent to which modern Indian nationalism drew significantly on rich legacies of precolonial regional patriotisms, kept alive through a ‘constant process of creative innovation’. In many respects, Bose would have done well here to engage more robustly with the recent work of Ananya Vajpeyi who does more than Bose to demonstrate how the creative engagement with precolonial patriotisms shaped and informed colonial and post-colonial Indian nationalisms. That said, Bose’s analysis reminds us that Indian history provides for a rich diversity of nationalisms and that there is nothing particularly indigenous or inevitable about the oppressive, parochial and exclusionary-based nationalism that informs India’s contemporary political discourse. Bose argues, correctly in my view, that our national project today should be about recovering a more generously formed vision of national belonging and patriotism that does, among other things, justice to the spirit of cosmopolitanism that permeates the writings of thinkers that Tagore and Aurobindo.

Several of the essays in the volume deal with Partition. Bose attributes significant responsibility to the Congress Party and its commitment to a “monolithic concept of sovereignty borrowed for modern Europe” for the eventual dismemberment of India. Bose argues that the Congress Party’s lust for power denied the multiple identities and several-layered sovereignties that had characterized India’s pre-colonial past. Bose’s criticism of the Congress Party’s (and the Hindu Mahasabha’s) role in bringing about Partition must be seen in light of his Bose’s treatment of Jinnah’s culpability and role regarding the same. Bose’s account of Jinnah (and of the Congress Party) is consistent with Professor Ayesha Jalal’s thesis (Sugata Bose is married to Ayesha Jalal) which holds that Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan was merely a bargaining chip to be used against the Congress with the aim of securing a more federated post-colonial India. While scholarship in this area remains (to some degree) in a state of flux, recent scholarship does more than enough to undermine Jalal’s central claims. For example, in reviewing Venkat Dhulipala’s 2015 book, ‘Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Colonial North India’, Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote that the book ‘decisively demolishes Ayesha Jalal’s idea that Pakistan arose in a fit of ideological absentmindedness, a stratagem in a bargaining game gone awry.’ Dhulipala’s book convincingly argues that the idea of Pakistan, an Islamic state that is both a homeland for Muslims and the vehicle for regeneration in Islam, had deep roots in political, theological and literary debates (in other words, giving lie to the oft-quoted assertion that Pakistan’s problem was that it was ‘insufficiently imagined’). The final section of the book contains a transcribed selection of Bose’s Lok Sabha speeches. Commenting on the controversy over Jaswant Singh’s eulogistic portrayal of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Bose writes that ‘majoritanism, whether in secular or saffron garb, continues to be a potential threat to Indian democracy. Regional rights were once thought to be a counterpoise to the anti-democratic tendencies of an over-centralized state. Regional parties run by petty and insecure dictators are proving to be as ruthless as the all-India parties in the suppression of internal dissent’. I wonder who Bose had in mind when he wrote these words; isn’t it ironic how this would strike most readers as a particularly apt description of his own party, the Trinamool Congress and his party leader, Mamata Bannerjee.


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Notes on Divine Foreknowledge and Freedom

What is omniscience?

Most classical conceptions of God view God as omniscient. Most religious believers would struggle to accept a God that was ignorant of some states of affairs or certain important facts about the world or our selves. That God be omniscient therefore seems right; however, the notion of omniscience is more problematic than it first appears. Take an initial question: what does God being omniscient actually mean? In other words, what does God have to know to be omniscient?  

One of the biggest challenges to the coherence of omniscience concerns the compatibility between omniscience and human freedom or free will. Suppose that tomorrow you decide to eat pizza for lunch. It follows that there is now a true proposition to the effect that you will eat pizza for lunch tomorrow. Propositions of this kind are known as future contingents. If God is omniscient, and if omniscience requires knowledge of all true propositions (as many would argue it does) then God now knows that tomorrow you will eat pizza for lunch. But if God now knows that you are going to eat pizza for lunch then you cannot do so freely for if this decision were free then you could refrain from making it. But, if you were able to refrain from making such a decision then you would be able to make it the case that God has a false belief. However, you are not able to make it the case that God has a false belief for that would be inconsistent with the fact that God is omniscient, and essentially so. The dilemma then is this: either God isn’t omniscient or genuinely free action is not possible. Most religions require the possibility of free agency and so this problem of foreknowledge and freedom threatens to require theists to reject God’s omniscience.

Here are two of the most common attempts to resolve the problem. The first response takes issue with the assumption that there are propositions about future contingents. According to this line of thought, first popularised it seems by Aristotle in his sea-battle argument and adopted now by the contemporary philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, if the future is genuinely open, in other words to revert to our earlier example, if it is now possible for you to eat pizza for lunch and also possible for you to refrain from such a decision (i.e. by choosing to have soup for lunch instead) then it is not the case that there is now a true proposition to the effect that tomorrow you will eat pizza for lunch. And so it follows that if there is no such proposition then there is nothing for an omniscient being to know (or for that matter, fail to know). It is only when you actually consume pizza for lunch that the relevant proposition comes into existence.

From a theological perspective, does this argument make sense? One of the problems with this argument is that if future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a huge gamble, for God didn’t know what human beings would do with their capacity for free agency. But if Einstein is right that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, this argument seems unsatisfactory from a theological perspective.

The second response to the problem seeks to contest the notion of foreknowledge itself. The problem of foreknowledge and freedom presupposes that God is temporally bound or located in time just as we are. This view of course requires that some events take place in God’s present, others take place in God’s past and still others take place in God’s future. Many theists have argued that this view is mistaken and that God’s relationship to time is utterly unlike our own. Boethius, famously argued, for example, that God’s eternity consists in the ‘complete possession of an endless life enjoyed as one simultaneous whole’.

The argument here is that God is not like humans who exist wholly at each finite moment in time and endure through time. A human possess his or her life only in a small finite window which we call “now” – the past life is no longer possessed but gone, the future is not yet realised. Since our human life is lived in a finite “now”, it is never full and complete but is fragmented. God, however, is perfect and God’s life is not fragmented like the life of a temporally enduring human. He lives in the eternal “now”. His “now” streteches over our past, present and future. Our finite present is representative of God’s eternal present, but our finite present is only a faint and imperfect model.

This view of God as existing outside of time holds that God’s properties are not indexed to particular times in the way in which our properties are. We have properties at particular times – for example, you have the property of being asleep at some times but not at others- the atemporalist argues that God does not have properties at particular times. God no more has a history or a future than abstract entities such as numbers do. Just as it is incoherent to ask how long the number eight has been in existence or to wonder how long it will continue to exist, so too the atemporalist thinks that such questions are incoherent when asked of God. Let’s reflect for a second on how this atemporalist account of God could solve the problem of foreknowledge and freedom. To revert to our earlier example, suppose that you do indeed have pizza for lunch tomorrow. This event occurs in the future relative to your current temporal perspective, but it is not and never was, future relative to God’s perspective, for God has no such perspective. God is only ever aware of the temporal relations between events in absolute terms. Now to be clear, God is aware of the order in which various events occur, for example, God knows that you eat pizza for lunch a day after you read this blog post, but on the atemporalist account, God does not cognize this event as occurring in the past or the future.

Are there any problems with this account? Some have argued that the atemporal conception threatens God’s omniscience for there appear to be certain things that only a temporally located creature can know. Could an atemporal God know what time it is now? Many have argued not, on the grounds that one can grasp temporally indexed claims (such as ‘it is now 9 a.m.’) only if one is in time, and by hypothesis an atemporal God is not in time. I am not sure this objection is decisive. Any facts that can be represented indexically can also be represented non-indexically. Suppose, for example, that you ask yourself: ‘what time is it now?’ on 1 January 2019. Arguably, this fact is captured by the non-indexical proposition, ‘On 1 January 2019 you asked yourself, ‘what time is it now’?’ and even an atemporal God could know that proposition. In other words, the atemporalist might grant that although certain ways of representing temporal facts are unavailable to God, there are no temporal facts that are beyond God’s ken.

There is, however, a more serious theological objection to the atemporal account. The atemporal account seems difficult to reconcile with the claim that God is personal. Grace Jantzen, for example, argues: ‘a timeless and immutable God could not be personal because he could not create or respond, perceive or act, think, remember, or do any of other things which persons do which require time’.

Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An absolute delight. Muriel Barbery’s ‘The Elegance of a Hedgehog’ is a wonderfully innovative and highly erudite work of literary fiction that speaks to the power of fiction and its ability to find meaning in the seemingly banal monotony of human experience. “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” written in French and translated into English by Alison Anderson, revolves around three characters, Renée, Paloma, and Ozu (the latter of whom features less prominently but whose appearance remains central to the novel’s plot and significance). More than half of the book centers on the confessions of Renée, a middle-aged, widowed, and rather unattractive (Renée describes herself as “short, ugly and plump”) concierge in a Parisian block of luxury apartments. What makes Renée special is that beneath her stereotypical working-class persona lies an autodidact of incredible sophistication and highly refined taste. When free of the tasks that otherwise occupy her in her concierge day job, Renée reads Tolstoy, listens to Bach and reflects on the beauty of Japanese aesthetic sensibility. Paloma is much younger than Renée; she is a precocious 12 year old whose family also live in the luxury block of apartments in which Renée serves as concierge. Paloma is unlike other 12-year-olds. She is highly intelligent for her age and spends a lot of her time populating her notebook with ‘profound thoughts’. Unfortunately, Paloma believes that the world is meaningless and so has decided to commit suicide when she turns 13. Our last main character is Mr. Kakuro Ozu, a tremendously rich Japanese gentlemen who decides to purchase one of the vacant apartments in the luxury block in which Renée and Paloma live. The first part of the novel depicts daily life in the apartment building as it is observed through the vision of Renée and Paloma. Their meditations on daily life are inspired by the great works of philosophy and art and carry tremendous depth of meaning. The second half of the book brings all three characters together and their interactions and the experiences that result drive the plot until the end of the novel.

It would be somewhat of an understatement to describe the book’s critical reception as ‘mixed’. Apparently, readers either love the book or detest it. One recurring criticism takes issue with the apparently ‘pretentious’ spirit of the book. The philosophical ruminations that permeate the book are critiqued for their redundancy and are alleged to undermine the believability of the characters themselves. I think these criticisms are seriously off the mark. The philosophizing that takes place throughout the novel is absolutely central to the book’s structure and literary effect and so the charge of redundancy does not stick. Also, if all philosophically-laden books are to be deemed ‘pretentious’ what are we to do with Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ or other similarly-structured literary works. Barbery succeeds admirably in ensuring that her erudition doesn’t detract from the literariness of this philosophy-laden work of fiction. Her reflection, via the characters, on philosophy as it applies to daily life is rich with insight and carried out with a lightness of touch that helps to preserve the readability of the novel. In fact, Barbery has a wonderful sense of humour and as one reviewer puts it, it is this sly wit, ‘which bestows lightness on the most ponderous cogitations, [that] keeps her tale aloft’.


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