Those who have followed my work over the course of the past few years are aware that I believe we are in the early stages of a civilizational crisis –that as a civilization we no longer know what we are trying to accomplish, spiritually and politically. Specifically, I have argued, while the secular ideal of transcending finitude and contingency by means of inner worldly civilizational progress continues to order our social structure and drive policy and strategy at nearly every level, the ideal itself has lost credibility. They also know that I have advocated a re-engagement with the spiritual traditions of the Axial Age –Hellenic Philosophy, Judaism, Buddhism, the Upanishads, Confucianism, and Taoism, and those which emerged from them, such as Christianity and Islam, which I am convinced are by no means spent. I have also argued that these need to be brought into a new level of dialogue with each other and also with the “sane core” of modernity, the revaluation of the human civilizational project which characterizes secular society, as well as with postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion. But this is –and is intended to be—a broad mandate for dialogue and deliberation. Increasingly people are asking me what way I teach and follow, even as I recognize the value of others, especially in the light of the profound crisis of the two institutions which I served in my youth: the Roman Catholic Church and the international workers movement. It is the aim of this essay to provide an brief and accessible answer to this question, not so much because I believe that it is a way that many will want to follow (and ultimately we all have our own ways) as because it may help clarify my interventions in some disputed questions regarding the university, the church, and the public arena.
Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by a way. By a way, I mean, quite literally, a way of being, of participating in Being. Being a rock is a way in a very broad sense; being a star sapphire is a more specific way. Being a plant is a way; being a cinnamon tree a more specific way. And so on. But since (I presume) most of those reading this are human beings, for all practical purposes, we are talking about ways of being human, even if some of these ways point beyond humanity towards a transcendental end.
The term is, quite simply, intended to compensate for the inadequacy of certain other terms, such as religion, philosophy, ideology, etc. It does this in three ways. First, the term religion is associated in the West, at least, with theism. It also lacks precise equivalents in non-Indo-European languages. The term way embraces nontheistic, atheistic, and even nihilistic ways of being human –and ways which have boundaries which may not coincide with the difficult to define term “religion.” Second, it focuses on ways of life and indeed ways of Being and not simply systems of ideas. Finally, because of its breadth and the spiritual connotation it gets from its frequent use in translating the Chinese word dao, it makes it clear that every way presupposes, implicitly or explicitly, answers to a whole complex of philosophical and spiritual questions. What can we know and how? How is the universe organized and is it ultimately meaningful? Is there some first principle in terms of which the universe can be explained and human action ordered? If so, what can we say about it? If not, how, if at all, can we find meaning? Make judgments of right and wrong, good and evil? What does it mean to be human? What is an excellent human being? A just society? How do we get there? These are what I have been calling the fundamental questions of meaning and value. There are certainly other ways to draw up the list and, to a certain extent, each way is defined by the questions is poses and much or more than by the answers it proposes. But this list is broad enough to give my readers some idea of what I mean.
A way, we should note, may privilege the spiritual, in the sense of humanity’s ordering to some transcendental end or it may privilege the political, in the sense of civilization building, but every way, even those that are nihilistic on the one hand or radically otherworldly on the other, has both spiritual and political dimensions, and these dimensions of a way are integrally bound up with each other.
This said, it should be possible for me to define, at least briefly, the way that I teach and follow and am working to define. Let me say to begin with that my way is self-consciously syncretic. Having been born Catholic, I am heir to both the way of Hellenic philosophy and the way of Israel, and to the particular way in which these were been brought together to define a new Catholic civilization in Europe in the years following the collapse of Hellenistic-Roman Civilization and the Roman Imperium. I am also part of a modern secular civilization which, however much I may criticize it, has shaped profoundly the way I think and live and the problems and contradictions of which have in large part defined my spiritual and political journey. And I live in a globalized society which has posed by challenges to these ways, insights not available within my native traditions, and different approaches to forging a synthesis between foundationally very different spiritual and political traditions.
How has this all played out over more than fifty years of study and struggle? Let me begin by stating my two starting points, starting points which remain definitive of my current way. The first of these is the way of Hellenic philosophy, developed through the long “journey of the dialectic” which began with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, which continued in the great Muslim, Jewish, and Christian commentators, and culminated in the humanistic secularism of Hegel, Marx, and there interpreters. This way consists fundamentally of rising rationally to a first principle in terms of which the universe can be explained and human action ordered –and then ordering human action in accord with this principle, aiming ultimately at creating a collective political subject which makes humanity the master of its own destiny and, in effect divine. Most thinkers within this tradition have recognized that the resulting deification is collective only, leaving the individual finite, contingent, and alienated. And coming of age spiritually during the crisis of socialism (the traditions ultimate political expression) much of my own focus has been on understanding and coming to terms spiritually with the ultimate impossibility of divinization by means of innerworldly civilizational progress.
My second starting point was Israel’s encounter with God in the struggle with justice, a way which aims both at actually creating a just society and achieving knowledge of God, da’ath elohim in the process. This way, of course, merged with dialectics by the time of Philo, resulting in the various syntheses of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian commentators, and playing no small role in humanistic secularism. This philosophical syncretism between Athens and Jerusalem includes not only Ibn Sina, Moshe ben Maimon, and Thomas Aquinas, but also ibn Rusd and his Latin commentators, Gerhsonides and Spinoza, Hegel and Marx, and their interpreters. If it seems odd to include militant atheists in the same line with Thomas, remember where even the most radically critical dialectics has terminated. The dialectical tradition’s engagement with the God of Israel yields both Fromm’s monotheism so radical that it becomes a nontheism and Derrida’s late discovery of Justice (read Israel’s God) as the “undeconstructible.”
This way has, like all others, run up against serious challenges historically. Rabbinic Judaism is all about figuring out how to be just, and struggle for a just society, in a recalcitrantly unjust world in which the people of Israel have become a marginalized and oppressed minority. Islam, on the other hand, insists that it is indeed possible to join truth to power and command right and forbid wrong, if only we can solve the problem of leadership and institutionalization. The particular synthesis of ways into which I was born, and which represents my “native” tradition, i.e. Catholicism, takes the frustrations of the struggle for justice, symbolized by the culmination of Jesus’ own struggle on the cross, as the occasion of the “dark nights” of the soul which stretch us towards and beyond the fully human, leading to what Thomas called caritative wisdom, or a nonconceptual, experiential knowledge of God based on the supernaturally just act. These dark nights carry us beyond a rational dialectical knowledge of God and ethical/political conduct, through the illuminative way in which we come to understand the mysteries and beauty of a universe which is not ordered to us, and ultimately towards mystical union, in which we become one with the first principle which reason showed us but which only now, and still only dimly, really begin to know.
I know that this characterization of Christianity and even Catholicism will seem alien to many who owe allegiance to those traditions. And it is, to be sure, the result of a profound confrontation with what I have come to believe are irresolvable contradictions in core Christian doctrines. As one of my students taught me more than 25 years ago, the claim that Jesus was the Jewish messiah is inherently anti-Semitic and negates the validity of the Jewish way, a validity which, by the way, the Catholic Church reaffirmed in Nostra Aetate. If justification is not possible through works of the law but only through faith in Christ crucified, then the Jewish way just doesn’t work. But if the Jewish way does work, then Jesus of Nazareth’s death was at best a tragedy and by no means directly salvific. Similarly, as my grasp of dialectical metaphysics deepened, it became clear to me that it was quite impossible to be both finite and infinite, both necessary and contingent. And so ordinary understandings of the divinity of Jesus must be abandoned.
One response to this, of course, would be to simply embrace Judaism or Islam or some sort of Unitarianism. But I have always been deeply convinced that at the core of humanity’s spiritual drive is the desire to be God, even if spiritual growth ultimately requires us to come to terms with the fact that this is impossible. And just because the crucifixion was not salvific does not mean it was not meaningful –as a sign of the way in which Israel’s struggle for justice (and every other struggle for justice) ultimately stretches us beyond the merely human, leading us where we do not want to go (John 21:18). And while entitative deification is not possible, accidental deification, the deification taught by Cyril and Athanasius and explained by Thomas in his doctrine of connatural knowledge of God is. This is the deification which consists in loving with God’s own love and so being formed by and joined to God in such a way that we authentically share in Her nature. And so I continue to affirm my continuity with the Catholic tradition and the compatibility of my own teaching in this regard with what Thomas taught in the Summa, even in the face of excommunication laete sententiae.
This is what my own heritage as a Catholic living in secular, radically politicized communities with large Jewish and Muslim minorities allowed me to understand and live. But this was only a stage along the way in my spiritual and political journey. A much deeper crisis was to come. Understanding that Jesus could not have been divine in the sense most Christians imagine him to be was only a first step in realizing, deeply and experientially and not just intellectually, that no one can be divine in that way and that is, in fact, a fallen spiritual aim. The critical event here was my reflection on the crisis of socialism. My work on the religious question and its place in both socialist strategy and socialist construction left me with much to contribute to the political debate which followed on the collapse of the Soviet bloc. But it was much more difficult for me to come to terms spiritually with the impossibility of the communist ideal, the ideal of creating a collective political subject which would, grasp the “conditions, line of march, and ultimately general result” of the cosmohistorical process, make humanity the authentic “subject-object” of that process, “reconciling existence and essence” and, in effect, leading to innerworldly divinization. This is in spite of the fact that one of the thinkers who influenced me most profoundly, and who formulated this ideal better than anyone else, Gyorgy Lukacs, made it clear that “for the individual, reification remains,” a problem had which obsessed me ever since I first encountered Lukacs while attending Paul Ricoeur’s lectures on Ideology and Utopia in 1975.
As I was finally coming to terms with this really, I became more and more deeply depressed. I came to believe that humanity was trapped in a “contingency hell” from which not even God could liberate us. After all, there can be only One God, and “participation” in the life of God is still not the same as Being as Such. It is here that my serious engagement with Buddhism began. I had, to be sure, been exposed to Buddhism at a young age. My family spent time in Thailand when I was a child and I was, in part, raised by young Thai and Khmer women whose responses to my youthful temper tantrums demonstrated a calm, a firmness, and a wisdom that my mother never mastered –a response which always seemed to include a visit to some tiny street shrine and paying respect to those who had achieved a degree of enlightenment which, they gently reminded me, I had yet to attain. But intellectually I was as much an opponent of Buddhism as I was of Protestant fundamentalism or atheistic neoliberalism. Aristotelian, realist, politically engaged and civilizationally focused, Buddhist nominalism, the doctrine of emptiness, and what seemed like an incurably otherworldly ideal were all deeply troubling to me. And, frankly, I just didn’t buy the idea that life is suffering.
Until I realized that I did. What else is an inescapable contingency hell besides the most profound and incurable suffering –suffering for which even God is not an adequate answer? My engagement with Buddhism began at the practical level and was assisted by my already significant engagement with the Confucian tradition, and especially with the Song Dynasty dao xue, which joined a Confucian insistence on the centrality of civilization building and a metaphysics which affirmed the priority of Being over Non-Being, with a practical integration of both Taoist natural philosophy and alchemy and Buddhist (mostly Cha’an) spiritual practice. This practice was critical in helping me come to terms with the fact that there was, in fact, no practice, political or spiritual, which would allow me or anyone else, or even humanity collectively to transcend contingency and become the “unique subject-object” of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process.
Ultimately, however, I had to confront the seemingly fundamental contradictions between my Aristotelian and Hegelian philosophical commitments and my growing recognition that Buddhist practice was, in fact, illuminating. The groundwork for this had already been laid in Knowing God: the Journey of the Dialectic (Pickwick 2010) which, while affirming a metaphysics of Esse or Being, rejects the understanding of Being as substance, or self-possession in favor of a an understanding of Being as relationship, structure and organization –and ultimately as creative power or generativity. This approach allowed me to retain a number of core Aristotelian and Hegelian categories: Being, Essence, etc., while recognizing that individual participations in Being were, considered in themselves, empty of inherent existence. And even Being as such was not so much substance as relation, self-possession as a creative power that consisted in a pure and unlimited generativity.
These philosophical steps allowed me to understand clearly what Merton and other Catholics who have engaged seriously the Buddhist tradition concluded long ago: that Buddhism, especially in the tradition of prajnaparamita literature—is the apophatic theology or negative dialectics par excellence. Moving from metaphysics to spirituality or mystical theology, the message is simple. We cannot know what Being is for the simple reason that it isn’t something. We cannot know Being until we awake to the emptiness of all things in so far as the are perceived or pretend to exist in themselves. On the contrary, it is precisely through an awakening to emptiness that we discover Being as the pure power of creativity, a generativity which we know (as Moses knew yhwh) only in its passing. The result of this realization, however, is not a nihilism or really, when properly understood, even an atheism. It is a recognition that we live in each other’s embrace and that we live by embracing others.
This said, like Merton, I continue to affirm that beyond any mystical union, as understood in the traditional Dominican reading of the Carmelite mystics and beyond any awakening to emptiness, there is a higher degree of enlightenment in which we know ourselves in and as Being. It is, I believe, this degree of enlightenment which John Meister Eckhart sought to articulate in the fourteenth century and which the higher Mahayana and Vajrayana Schools of Buddhism point to with their doctrine of the Buddha-nature or tathagatagarbha, in which we all participate. Merton was working out this synthesis in the field of mystical theology when he died and the loss was immeasurable. It is our task to continue the work of synthesis across the sapiential and political disciplines today.
Let me say, in passing, that the resulting synthesis, even if it is forged through engagement between the ways of Hellas and Israel on the one hand, and Buddhism on the other, has much to learn from both what has come to be called Hinduism and from the dao xue. Santana dharma and the dao xue were also forged out an engagement between the positive and negative ways: the way of the Upanishads and the Confucian ru on the one hand and the ways of the Taoists and Buddhists on the other.
So what about politics? What remains of the struggle for justice and its privileged locus as the place where we, like Israel, meet God? While I affirm the value and even necessity of spiritual practice (such as meditation) I reject the idea that this alone can lead to enlightenment. It is, rather, life –with both its beauty and its tragedies– which creates the conditions for enlightenment. Spiritual practice helps us harvest the lessons which life teaches. Of course politics is not the whole of life –there is whole business of loving and rearing children, aging and dying, all of which contribute in no small way to our spiritual development, a topic which merits further analysis and reflection. But politics is our public life, and since it has always been a constitutive dimension of my way, I want to say a bit more about politics before I close.
First, while the ideal of full enlightenment calls us to stretch beyond the merely human, we are stretched in and through human processes. The work of building civilizations and struggling for justice remains a privileged locus both for the cultivation of human capacities and for engagement with the limits of the human condition, limits which point us beyond the human and the political towards enlightenment. Second, as much as I may have come to reject as impossible the historic spiritual aim of the communist movement –the construction of a collective political subject which can make humanity the master of its destiny, i.e. divine, and believe that this fallen spiritual aim was, in fact, one of the reasons the movement often succumbed to totalitarian temptations, I continue to believe that the market is, by itself, an inadequate way of centralizing and allocating resources, for the simple reason that it is agnostic regarding questions of meaning and value and does not know what impact various activities have on the integrity of the ecosystem and the development of human capacities. At the same time, I do not think that we really know yet how to transcend the marketplace without creating bureaucratic structures which unduly constrain autonomy and innovation and which create their own distinctive economic contradictions. I continue to believe in the necessity of conscious leadership if humanity is to progress. But I believe that this leadership must be predominantly (though not exclusively) a teaching authority and must be expressed in the context of a democratic and pluralistic polity with a strong civil society. In this sense I continue to see myself politically in the tradition of Gramsci and Silone and Mariategui. Of course this tradition must come to terms with the fact that industry, which socialism never questioned, may well be destroying our ecosystem and that we need to transcend it in favor of revitalized and extended hortic technologies which cultivate existing potentials for growth and development rather than simply “combusting” existing organization and using the resulting energy to do work. And we must come to terms with the fact that the “first oppression” and arguably the root of all others, is not that of some men by others, whether as social classes or peoples, but rather of women by men.
All of which brings us back to the irreducible and inescapable link between the spiritual and the political in finding our way. I have always rejected and continue to reject the claim of the deconstructionists that it is rational metaphysics and the whole via dialectica which is behind “Western” technological ecocide, patriarchy, imperialism, and other oppressions. Quite the contrary, dialectics, as I argued in The Journey of the Dialectic, began as an attempt to overcome those oppressions. But it is, I think (as Mary Daly taught us) the failure to address the patriarchal roots of all oppression which left us open to an uncritical embrace of industrial techne on the basis of what it could do to advance human autonomy and self-mastery, and to imagine that if only we got the analysis, strategy, and tactics right we could actually become “the unique subject object” of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process. Dialectics, in this sense, is always a partial way; it must be completed by higher spiritual disciplines which carry us beyond the human desire to be God, and even beyond a recognition of the impossibility of that ideal (which is one way to describe deconstruction) towards an encounter with Justice, which Derrida calls the Undeconstructible, with which we become connatural in the supernaturally just act, through an awakening to emptiness and a realization of the impossibility of any attempt at self-possession, to the full enlightenment in which we know ourselves in and as Being. Once we understand that, we can return to dialectics and use it appropriately as both a spiritual and political weapon, and begin to chart the next steps in a civilizational project now deeply in crisis.
