Finding Beauty in the Other E-Book

Peter Casarella

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 581

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Finding Beauty in the Other explores how beauty can be found in religions and cultures. It also views how the beauty of the Christian gospel should be communicated in different religious and cultural settings. This valuable collection of essays features a host of highly respected scholars, presenting a unique treatment of the concept of beauty as seen in a variety of religions and cultures. These include Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. In addition, beauty as seen in various African cultures is discussed.

Leseprobe

FINDING BEAUTY IN THE OTHER

FINDING BEAUTYIN THE OTHER

THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONSACROSS RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

EDITED BY

PETER CASARELLA

AND

MUN’IM SIRRY

A Herder & Herder BookThe Crossroad Publishing CompanyNew York

A Herder & Herder BookThe Crossroad Publishing Companywww.crossroadpublishing.com

© 2019 by Peter Casarella and Mun’im Sirry.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction

PETER CASARELLA and MUN’IM SIRRY

PART I: BEAUTY AND THE CATHOLIC THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS

1. Beauty and Truth in the Christian Theology of Religions

CATHERINE CORNILLE, Boston College

2. Hidden Beauty and Hope: The Face of the Other

MARIA CLARA LUCCHETTI BINGEMER, Pontifical Catholic University, Brazil

3. Tragic Beauty: The Cry of the Suffering and Interfaith Aesthetics

PETER CASARELLA, University of Notre Dame

4. The Beauty of Love and Forgiveness?

LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN, University of Notre Dame

PART II: BEAUTY AND ISLAM

5. Divine Mercy in the Qur’ān

GABRIEL SAID REYNOLDS, University of Notre Dame

6. Recognizing the Divine in the Other’s Religion: An Islamic Perspective

NAYLA TABBARA, Adyan Foundation, Lebanon

7. The Qur’ān, Salvation, and the Beauty of the Other

MUN’IM SIRRY, University of Notre Dame

PART III: BEAUTY AND HINDUISM

8. Traveling the Via Pulchritudinis—Both Ways

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY, S.J., Harvard University

9. The Mystery of the Infinite in the Hindu Spirituality and Theology of Non-Duality

BRADLEY MALKOVSKY, University of Notre Dame

10. Contemplating the Divine with a Sense of Wonder

ANANTANAND RAMBACHAN, St. Olaf College

PART IV: BEAUTY AND BUDDHISM

11. Finding Beauty in the Other: Buddhist Perspectives

DONALD W. MITCHELL, Purdue University

12. Seeing Beauty in Everyday Life According to the Lotus Sutra

GENE REEVES, Rissho Kosei-kai

PART V: BEAUTY AND AFRICA

13. Of Rainbow Nations, Kente Cloth, and the Virtue of Pluralism: Navigating the Beauty and Dignity of Difference in Search of a Livable Future in Africa

TERESIA HINGA, Santa Clara University

14.Agwa bu Mma: Virtue and Beauty in an African Community

PAULINUS IKECHUKWU ODOZOR, C.S.Sp, University of Notre Dame

Notes on Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The present volume is the fruit of the World Religions and World Church (WRWC) Inaugural Conference held at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana (September 10–12, 2015). Without generous support from the University of Notre Dame, the conference and the publication of this book would not have been possible. A debt of gratitude is owed to Fr. John I. Jenkins, who generously opened the conference. Matthew Ashley, chair of the Department of Theology at the time, was very supportive of the idea of hosting the conference.

We would also like to thank the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Institute for Studies in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame (and its remarkable staff, most notably Thomas V. Merluzzi, Alison Rice, and Elizabeth Kuhn) for their support. Three graduate students played a pivotal role in the preparation of this volume. Mourad Takawi was instrumental in maintaining contact with the speakers in preparation for the conference. Andrew O’Connor made the first pass at copyediting the entire manuscript in order to convert it from formless chaos into a readable text. In the final stages, Christopher Rios lent a sure hand as well. The editors are extremely grateful for these unsung labors. Finally, we thank Gwendolin Herder and Chris Myers of Crossroad for their remarkable support, encouragement, and help.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

Transliterations of Arabic follow the system utilized by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) <https://ijmes.chass.ncsu.edu/docs/TransChart.pdf>. Various English Qur’ān translations have been used in this volume, depending on each contributor’s preference. Some contributors may have used their own translation or a particular Qur’ān translation with some modifications.

The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) system is used for Sanskrit/Devanagari; the “Hanuy Pinyin” system for Chinese; the “Revised Romanization” system for Korean; and the “Hepburn” system for Japanese.

INTRODUCTION

Peter Casarella and Mun’im Sirry

Finding—A Non-Dualist Process of Discovery

This volume treats the search for the beauty of the Other in an interreligious and intercultural framework. Having said that, there is nothing self-evident about the beauty of the Other. Even if one presumed that beauty is more internal and moral than external and cosmetic, the task of pinpointing the attractiveness of another’s otherness is no small challenge. What keeps us from just looking for copies of ourselves? Can we really understand what is truly other, much less look for its genuine beauty?

The first set of questions that arises in thinking about the theme that undergirds this volume is, therefore, to explain the meaning of “finding.” Across the religions of the world, the concepts of beauty, the idea of transcendence, and the goal of learning from traditions other than one’s own differ sharply. Our goal in putting together this volume was to respect and explore these differences, not to discover exact replicas of what we already hold to be true. The academic area that we represent includes principally Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but the modes of diversity represented in the essays that follow go beyond differences in creeds or beliefs. In these essays, we encounter multiple types of difference: (1) the diversity of religious traditions, (2) the wisdom of Catholicism’s global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America), and (3) the internal diversity of each religious tradition and each continental reality.

In addition to highlighting diversity in the selection of contributors, we also learned about the process of discovering the beauty of the Other. One panel was arranged continentally, and others were set up to explore differences within the religious traditions on the question of beauty. We learned about the exchange of viewpoints and also about the to and fro of dialogue. In the final analysis, however, one participant boldly observed a salient point: there was no Jewish interlocutor in our discussions. This insight underscored the open-endedness of the process of discovery. We came upon a Pandora’s box and were delighted to discover new things upon opening it.1 So the first principle in finding the beauty of the Other is an openness to discovering something new about oneself and also about one’s academic program.

The poet said that beauty and truth are one.2 In this sense, the search for the beauty of the Other is without any doubt a search for truth. Western thinkers, influenced by the injunction of the Delphic oracle (“Know thyself!”), as well as its classic reformulation by the Platonic Socrates, have often embraced the learning that comes from unknowing. In a real sense, this tradition of recognizing the limits of one’s knowing also guides the approach to beauty taken by the authors of this volume. In bumping up against the limits of one’s knowledge of the truth, you also find that your grasp of beauty is equally, if not more, limited. Beauty is both familiar and attractive as well as foreign and novel. Otherness in this sense is built into the experience of beauty. In the Abrahamic religions, viz., traditions that foreground divine revelation (albeit in divergent ways), this openness to the unknown can be the beginning of what the divine Other beckons and enjoins.3 In other traditions, the shimmering and evasive nature of beauty’s call opens the eyes of the beholder in a different way to truth, or at least to a path that may yield it. Beauty may create its own path of discovery, one that resists being put under a microscope to the same degree that it rejects the relativistic principle that places it beyond the grasp of reason.

The German Enlightenment thinker Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) was the first to carve out a separate domain within philosophy for beauty. Even without agreeing with him altogether, in a certain sense we are still heirs to his own innovative idea that the new science of aesthetics operates as an “analogue” to reason.4 More recently, the Harvard literary critic Elaine Scarry has claimed that beauty beckons us so strenuously precisely because it shows for us in a key quite different from cold logic why we are so often wrong about our perception of reality.5 For both Baumgarten and Scarry (as for Plato long before them), beauty is not just irrational or contra-rational. Rather, beauty conjures up in the mode of a midwife a process or even a path that can lead to truth. Like the work of a midwife, all is not pretty or without effort in undergoing this process. Beauty can even wound the observer in the course of making manifest a new view of reality.6

To think about beauty in these terms is admittedly still very Western. The reflections in this volume on the oft-cited Sanskrit term advaita (non-duality) are thus worth recalling briefly. Non-duality can be a goad to engaging in dialogue, but much hinges on whether one develops an illusionistic or realist doctrine of non-duality.7 The recognition of the immanence of a Brahman in the “you” of the Other could just be a shimmering image of the true Brahman that lies behind the appearance of another. A Judeo-Christian thinker could also take issue with the difference between a creationist reading of non-otherness (such as in certain psalms that treat God’s wisdom in the created order) and the advaitic emphasis on the world as pure illusion. On the other hand, the Christian doctrine of Trinitarian unity in difference might also suggest a non-duality (and a distinctiveness) far deeper than the advaita doctrine.8 In general, however, the doctrine of non-duality as it has been inherited from the Upanishads can still encourage finding beauty in the Other. The wonder and astonishment at the epiphany of the ultimate reality in our interlocutor signifies a newly discovered openness to reality. Bradley Malkovsky states the following in his essay in this volume about the modern interpreter of the Upanishads, Ramana Maharshi:

Notice the beauty, serenity, kindness, even holiness of his face. His face shows us that non-duality is more than a mere idea or theological notion. It is because of that face that the words of Maharshi are so credible to so many people of so many religions or of no religion at all. Though his teachings are so challenging to our everyday ideas about ourselves and God, his face continues to invite us to probe deeper into our self-awareness and discover what is truly lasting and real about ourselves.9

That a Catholic theologian can praise a modern master of Hindu non-duality in sincere and vibrant terms is a fitting testimony to the relevance today of the challenging task of finding beauty in the Other. Rather than a hide-and-seek theology of finding beauty in the Other, the advaitic doctrine of non-duality helps us to recognize the fundamental mystery of the Other, a recognition that requires a continual process of reorientation of the self and re-discovery of what is real.

Beauty—Not Just in the Eye of the Beholder

The beautiful is infinite, and, as a result, there is no single instance of beauty’s self-manifestation that all will recognize as beautiful. Any portal into the myriad forms of beauty will remain just that, a point of entry into a mystery that eludes positive identification. Transcendent beauty is never just univocally beautiful, for the doctrine of univocity claims that that which transcends our understanding and that which stands before us as its surrogate are necessarily of the same genre. In fact, to the degree that something is like the beautiful itself, the beautiful is also unlike that same thing. This process of unity in diversity sets up a semiotic play of sameness and difference that adds significantly to the earnest game of beauty.

A fitting window onto the dynamics of transcendent beauty is the kābôd of YHWH (“the glory of the Lord”). The term has many usages in the Hebrew Bible. For example, it is often used to signify the presence of God in the tabernacle. When the Israelites were constructing the tabernacle, we learn: “I will meet with the Israelites there, and it shall be sanctified by my glory.”10 After the tabernacle was finished, God brought his promise to fulfillment: “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle”11 (Exodus 40:34). Awe-inspiring and eminently worthy of respect and honor, the Israelites see the glory of God in their daily lives.

This “condescension” of the glory of God was itself the result of a transformation that took place in the history of Israel as the physical presence of the Ark of the Covenant became less important:

With the disappearance of the Ark into the darkened sanctum of the Temple on Zion the ideas which it represented were transferred to the sacred site, which thus became the citadel of the imageless Yahweh-worship. These now underwent a strong process of sublimation. On the one hand they were associated with the prophetic conception of the universal God; on the other, through the priestly theological concepts of the sem and the kabod, the Name and the Glory of Yahweh, and through their identification with the tradition of the sacred Tent, they acquired a new significance. In time the earthly object to which these ideas were attached, the Ark itself, lost its importance, and its final disappearance, like that of the sacred Tent, occasioned no great distress. The fundamental principle, however, of which these two shrines were the focus, the concept of the distant God who yet condescends to be really present in the midst of his people and enables them to participate in the divine life, lives on in the symbolic language of the New Testament, which uses the image of the “tabernacling” to tell of the dwelling of the eternal God among men.12

The glory of the Lord (together with the name of God) thus remains fully transcendent but still radiant in the course of everyday life. This feature of being both “in” and “beyond” the ordinary is one of the key traits of beauty that we wish to underscore as we introduce the multiform approaches present in this volume.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was deeply influenced by the Hebrew notion of the glory of the Lord and gave it the kind of Christo-logical meaning that we find, for example, in 2 Corinthians 4:4 or Colossians 1:15, which speak of an eikón, an “image” of an invisible God in Christ.13 For Balthasar the glory of the Lord is not a generic reality. It is a unity more original than that of our finest artistries that is brought together by God into the midst of our lives. What von Balthasar calls Gestalt, or the form of the glory of the Lord, is one of several wholes that are greater than their individual parts in the world’s religions.14

Jean-Luc Marion highlights the process of visibilizing the beautiful with even greater precision when he distinguishes between “l’invisible” and “l’invisable.”15 The former is that which is not seen, and the latter is that which cannot even be brought into view. In the latter case, we encounter a view of the radiance of beauty that is not even a view. It is the outer edge of making something viewable to the eye. The admiration of beauty thus transcends the science of empirical perception and enters into a realm of the impossible. The Hebrew Bible had already touched upon this extreme negativity in the encounter with the glory of the Lord: “But you cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.”16 This suggests that in certain encounters with absolute radiance, not looking at transcendent beauty is the only proper response for the devout. With this insight, we come to the borders of iconoclasm, the religious insight whereby divine beauty can never be depicted in a representational form without profaning the divinity. If we stop our reflections here, then iconoclasm can quickly sink into becoming a blunt weapon for destroying beauty’s myriad and subtle radiations into being.17 Beauty is therefore a fragile reality, always on the brink of collapsing into nothingness. This weakness in beauty’s form of perception actually adds force to the conviction that beauty really matters. Like life itself, beauty hangs on the edge of existence. Rather than preening with the self-satisfied smugness of a wealthy art collector, the true lover of beauty is aware of the tragic dimension of existence and beauty’s unique ability, operating precisely out of its inherent poverty, to poeticize the chiaroscuro of life.

As the book of Exodus reminds us in equating the vision of beauty and mortality, beauty invokes a presence that is simultaneously an absence. We are commanded to withdraw from gazing upon the presence of the divine beauty precisely because beauty saturates and transfigures the everydayness of life with a presence that overwhelms our understanding of the finite. For this reason, we can say that transcendent beauty does not enter the stage of being as just another item on the ontological shelf. Transcendent beauty irrupts into the scenery of finite objects, blinding us with its radiance. Transcendent beauty questions many preconceptions that we hold about the divide between subjects and objects inasmuch as it questions both the arrogance of scientific rationalism (“beauty counts for nothing”) and the shortsightedness of mere aestheticism (“beauty evokes a merely subjective feeling”). Transcendent beauty has the power to re-orient us and make us search for a new frame for understanding Being, beings, and the ontological difference between Being and beings. Dionysius the Areopagite introduced a play on words (to kalon [“the beautiful”], kalleo [“to call forth”]) that elucidates the beckoning quality of beauty. Beauty calls to us from beyond the world in which we normally are situated to a new frame of reference. There is no mystical flight into the unknown here. On the contrary, the wound of beauty calls the viewer to examine her or his own vulnerability even as the mystery of the call uproots the viewer away from the narrowness of the complacent gaze. In choosing the theme “Finding the Beauty of the Other,” we opened ourselves to this vulnerability and sought contributors and interlocutors who would do the same.

Otherness—Recognizing Difference and the Difference that It Makes

In practical terms, we are all other to one another. No collective ever fully erases individuality, at least not without inflicting horrifying violence. In Spanish, the word nosotros (“we”) combines the Latin root for “us” with “those who are other than ourselves.”18 Every time that the “we” is defined as the community that banishes the foreigner, we also exclude alterity. In making the world into a network of private clubs, we lose sight of something essential in the human constitution of we-ness as relation. In the spirit of WRWC, we desired to see this volume celebrate not only the otherness of religious diversity but also the wisdom of Catholicism’s global south—namely, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Asia, for example, Christianity is always a minority presence. In Africa, sites that were once centers of genocide and tribal warfare are now viewed as historical wounds that need to be acknowledged and healed in order to create bonds of social reconciliation.19 Even in Latin America today, Catholicism is feeling growing pains and dealing with questions of religious pluralism in ways that were practically unthinkable fifty years ago.20 So the question of how to approach the Others of the Christian West is going to look different if we shift the point of view from the North to the South. Far too many of the present studies of world religions assume that the main dialogue partners are Euroamericans on the one side and the others of the West on the other side. This dialogue privileges Euroamerican discourses of pluralism without even acknowledging its limitations. Little attention has been paid to the new waves of thought and practice regarding pluralism that are emanating from the global South. In these cases, the South is not a mere “object” of scientific investigation that in its passivity confirms the value of the Western methods. The South, on the contrary, generates a new ethics of responsibility. This volume represents at least the possibility of beginning to think about the relationship between global religion and the North-South dialogue. From this point of view, the polarization between fundamentalism and secularism is no longer the main axis around which thought turns. Instead the questions of poverty and the legacy of colonialism need to be addressed.

The Lithuanian Jew Emmanuel Levinas is not treated directly in any of the essays that follow, but his brief (albeit cryptic) remarks about the glory of the Infinite in his book Otherwise than Being are still a good starting point for orienting our approach to the otherness of the Other.21 These remarks sketch out what it might mean to glimpse a trace of God’s beauty in the Other as Other. Levinas is the thinker of otherness par excellence, mainly because he strove so valiantly to question the foundations of what both the classical (metaphysical) and the modern (Hegelian dialectical) tradition had said about the notion. Levinas joins Talmudic glosses with profound insights into the shortcomings of Western metaphysics. In disavowing the language of being, Levinas turns the representation of beauty once again into a philosophical problem. If beauty can be represented as a reality that has a beginning and end in time, then its alterity is questionable. Truly transcendent beauty, the glory of the Infinite, comes and goes otherwise than as an essence. An artist’s rendering of a field of flowers is not trying to evoke the essence of the scene, as if the infinite variety of perspectives on this one field could all be brought into a mode of seeing and knowing that pivoted around just one point of reference or style.

The Levinasian glory of the infinite passes into our lives as a trace of the Other. Respecting its otherness, Levinas would say that we glean its passing through the face of a stranger. If I, as a Western Christian or Indonesian Muslim, see a trace of the glory of the Infinite in the visage of a foreigner whom I have never met, then several claims about the beauty of the Other are being invoked. First, the face of the Other is not my own concept of God or the beautiful. Levinas would say (and here his anti-metaphysical stance might betray its own weakness) that one is grasped by a sincere act of responsibility for the Other as other before one grasps that the glory of the infinite exists as infinite glory. The purely passive recognition of one’s own responsibility to the Other might, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, underestimate the resources within a properly dialectical notion of selfhood for recognizing alterity.22 On the other hand, Levinas’s breakthrough to ethics as a first philosophy leads to a profound new take on dialogue. Levinasian dialogue is thus not an exchange of niceties or an opportunity for academic progress or scientific advancement. Dialogue is inspired in the first instance by the requirement that comes from beyond being and remains otherwise than being ready to shelter, clothe, and feed the Other. The modern Western notion of tolerance, Levinas would argue, never took seriously enough the Biblical commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!”

The Levinasian injunction that we dialogue for the sake of offering hospitality (and not vice versa) helps to sharpen the meaning of “finding beauty in the Other.” In sum, in the encounter with the Other we are searching for a beauty that will ground a new ethics of hospitality. We did exchange information in our meeting at Notre Dame, and feelings of tolerance and goodwill abounded. There is nothing wrong with this. But our goal in publishing these papers extends beyond providing a record of new data and newly gained mutual respect. The ethical mandate to find beauty and the ethical mandate in finding beauty were evident in our discussions and need to be reflected upon more as we move forward. The beauty of the Other can never be taken for granted.

Levinas also alerts us to “the amphiboly of the said.”23 In general, an amphiboly is a grammatical misstep that leads to serious ambiguity. If you write a sentence with an amphiboly, what appears at first glance as intelligible can actually have two opposed but grammatically correct meanings. But since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and its Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection (in which Kant decried Locke’s sensualism and Leibniz’s idealism as both amphibolies, but for different reasons), the term has gained a wider philosophical meaning. It thus signifies in Levinas not just a problem with one’s grammar but the loss of meaning that results from a structural flaw in one’s attempt to translate reality into philosophical concepts that privilege being as a first philosophy over the post-metaphysical call to ethical responsibility. Levinas claims that any attempt to congeal “saying” (le dire) into a system of signs that inhere into an expression that seeks to copy the structure of being (le dit) will result in the loss of meaning. All linguistic systems bear this inherent weakness, and the fallible act of translation is but the Achilles heel that betrays it. Every translation is a betrayal, so goes the saying, and the translation of the act of speaking beauty into a concrete form is likewise a departure from the original, pre-ontological epiphany of the showing. In this critique of both structuralism and metaphysics, Levinas is a loyal follower of Jacques Derrida, who had made a similar critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralist linguistics.

Levinas’s claim for a rupture between the saying and the said has consequences for our understanding of the beauty of the Other if we want to take seriously the challenge of addressing the novelty of the Other—that is, of not colonizing and absorbing the Other into our own scheme of reality. In his groundbreaking book Languages of Unsaying, Michael Sells helps us to think with Levinas about the role of certain mystics in thematizing the difference between the saying and the said.24 He connects the mystical posture of apophasis with the ethical notion of unsayability, a position that Levinas himself disavows. Sells’s exploration of the hunt for unsayable wisdom is rich and exciting and takes him through a variety of texts, some well-known and others that were suppressed.

We will concentrate on his apophatic reading of Ibn ‘Arabi as well as his retrieval of the Sufi notion of bewilderment (hayra). Ibn ‘Arabi lived between 1165 and 1240 in Andalusia and, though not well known, is still acknowledged to be a grand master of the tradition of Islamic mysticism. While still an adolescent Ibn Rushd (Averroes) asked for a meeting with him. There is a hierarchy in Sufi mysticism based upon the notion of station (maqam), a testimony to his fame as a Sufi sage. The most sophisticated of Sufi mystics in the Middle Ages had developed a moral psychology with distinct levels of wisdom along the path of Sufism. In the Sufi interpretation of the figure of Noah in the Qur’ān, a certain station has been reached because Noah represents the triumph of the follower of Muhammad over the polytheists who perish in the flood. Ibn ‘Arabi, with his strong language of the breath of the compassionate and the heart of the mystic being wide open to God, introduces a twist into this familiar reading.

Whereas the traditional reading attributes deception solely to the polytheists, Ibn ‘Arabi says that both the polytheists and Noah are guilty of deception: “Noah had accused the polytheists of makr (deception, guise), but according to Ibn ‘Arabi, both Noah and his rival party practiced deception, hiding the true apophatic dialectic behind the polemic between monotheism and polytheism.”25 Instead of positing a difference between Noah and those who perished as a difference between good and evil, the mystic turns the perishing of the polytheists into a moment in the dialectical interplay between transcendence and immanence. Rather than showing the higher station of Noah that undergirds the great hierarchy of being, the story of the flood represents “the station of no station.” The bewilderment that the reader of the story of Noah faces in observing the perishing in the flood suddenly becomes a state of mystical contemplation: “Bewilderment is caused by an abandonment of the linear, dualistic logic represented by Noah’s calling his people ‘to’ Allah.”26 The mystical “Muhammadian” thus begs for more bewilderment so that the mystic is carried further into a circular path that can never be abandoned. In a sense, Sells focuses on the said rather than the saying, for he is interested in highlighting the many wordplays that are inscribed into the mystics’ poetry.

In the process, however, the text of the mystic deconstructs itself. Its beauty lies in its capacity to undercut the notion that the experience of God can be placed among one group of believers as opposed to another. All religions are not one, according to Sells:

No attempt has been made to show a common religious experience, or a common mystical experience. The goal of this study has been an understanding of a similarly structured semantic event that takes place within various versions of the apophatic mode of discourse.27

The deft reading that Sells accomplishes by using the Sufi mystic as his point of departure allows for an understanding of difference that is truly difference. Difference makes a difference because he heeds the semantic differences within the mystical text and brings them to the fore. This is genuine alterity, and in the hands of a mystic being read by a Master, the beauty of difference is realized through and beyond the text. The languages of unsaying are therefore a powerful tool for questioning social hierarchies that find their way into religious discourse. Without the confrontation with the radicality of the mystic, readers of religious texts are likely to become prone to homogenizations of traditions and of differences between traditions that result from not attending to the full dimensions of the semantic event in the text.

How do we discover the beauty of the Other? We are left with two modes of discovering the beauty of the Other: the analogy of the said and the apophatic figuring of the unsayable. The former prioritizes the efficacy of language to communicate otherness and the value of representing that which is truly unrepresentable. The latter questions all attempts to place the Other into a system of thought that is generated by the subjective self. The former undergirds the project of von Balthasar and his predecessors. Sells shows how a mystical language of unsaying is central to Neoplatonic Christianity, apophatic mysticism, and Sufi love poetry. To assimilate this tradition into the tradition of the analogy of the Word might lead to a domestication of its wildness. At the same time the tradition of analogy, as Erich Przywara tirelessly demonstrated, always included a moment of dialectic whereby the “ever more” of unlikeness between Creator and creature is the very condition for the possibility of searching for likenesses.28

Beauty and Holiness

Levinas and Sells both take an an-archic approach to the beauty of the Other. This simply means that the revelation of beauty in difference takes away rather than posits the first principle or arche. Such discourse destabilizes the very notion of dialogue and can lead to a kind of preferential option for the otherness of the Other. That provocation represents a distinct gain in the discourse about dialogue. There is, however, a less radical but equally profound path to finding the beauty of the Other that contributes in equal measure to this volume. This is the path of holiness or sanctity. In this view, the command to heed beauty comes from above and is issued in prayer.

Here the otherness of the beautiful is just as radical, but the path to beauty is more directly connected to daily life. In speaking about the beauty of holiness, we are therefore not trying to put iconic religious figures on pedestals, as an elite core of devotees that the masses can then blindly follow. While holiness is not necessarily a universal desire of humanity, the idea of holiness as a way of beauty opens up a surprisingly broad notion of belief and interchange.29 The beauty of the living witness of saints, especially saints who come from among the poor or from marginal groups in society, can subvert ingrained cultural traditions about exemplary behavior.30 Often overlooked is the degree to which the cult of saintly figures is related to this desire to open up the way of holiness to a broader spectrum of followers. The cross-fertilization of models of holiness across religious traditions is another example of this phenomenon. For example, the religious influence of Gandhi on the doctrine of non-violence espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King is well documented but still has not received adequate attention.31

Reading and learning from the Torah bridges the gap between God and humanity, and this bridge makes the beauty of the Absolute a palpable reality in the daily lives of observant Jews.32 In a manner somewhat akin to the Christian understanding of the real presence in the Eucharist (but at the same time without a recognition of its central premise), this view of Torah learning is the doctrine of communion of the observant Jew. Rejecting the doctrine of the incarnation, a Jewish lover of the wisdom of the Torah nonetheless sees God’s embodiment in the people who read and heed the infinite mind of God found in the text. This aesthetic reflects a uniquely Jewish understanding of how the higher longs for and pines for the lower: “As the ancient sages stated, God himself studies Torah in the age to come, concerning himself with minutiae of human life brought under the sanctifying purposes of his commandments.”33 There is a new awareness of the meaning of the holiness of practical activities of religious followers that opens up a new view of the future:

God gave the Torah to his people, planting eternal life among us. The desert is made into an Eden as Jews return to the Torah, making it present in action and study. Israel communes with God’s infinite mind and lives in his eternity.34

To the non-believer, this may seem like an overly elevated way to describe the importance of mundane activities like reading a book, using the proper pots and pans in the kitchen, attending to the use of candles and wine at the Sabbath table, and the circumcising of a newborn male child.

These mundane activities nonetheless permeate and circumscribe the meaning of life. To see a shard of eternity in the midst of the everyday is a religious insight that cannot be lost if we earnestly seek to find the beauty of the Other. Serious problems occur when we relegate the beauty of such seemingly minute holiness to a domain outside the realm of reason and dialogue. Placing the beauty of the everyday at the center of a respectful and mutually enriching dialogue has great utility in many aspects of contemporary life. Greater understanding of the beauty of everyday holiness across religious traditions can break down the barriers that lead to intolerance and even violence.

It is beyond the scope of this introduction to develop a theory of how the beautiful and the holy relate to one another. But a brief comment on their distinction and relation is still warranted. Since the path of beauty cannot be fully disassociated from the search for pleasure, believers have been typically skeptical about the degree to which the path of beauty and the path of holiness could be equated with one another. Many great philosophers, not the least of whom is the enigmatic Søren Kierkegaard, have sharply distinguished between mere aestheticism, which continually rotates the insatiable search for a quenching of desire for constant novelty and transient material beauty with no higher end in mind, with true devotion to God.35 One need not adhere to strict iconoclasm to see that there is a problem with identifying holiness too closely with beauty.

Can aesthetics be redeemed, or must it be relegated to the way of sensualism and sin? Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik defends the aesthetics of prayer and, in the process, offers a modern notion of the redemption of beauty by religious belief.36 Soloveitchik starts with a notion of prayer that recognizes the paradox inherent in looking at prayer as both anthropocentric and theurgic. His breakthrough lies in seeing that prayer as dialogue is an end in itself rather than a means to change or affect the Divine: “The basic function of prayer is not its practical consequences but the metaphysical formation of a fellowship consisting of God and man [sic].”37 Prayer is not undertaken just to satisfy a human need. It arises out of a desire to serve God with one’s entire heart. Prayer is a form of direct contact with the Creator.38

Building upon Kantian categories, Soloveitchik identifies four modes of relating to the divine: (1) intellectual, (2) emotional, (3) volitional, and (4) dialogical. All of these modes come into play when he speaks about the beauty of God. Particularly interesting is the way in which he explains the dialogical mode as an actual interplay between prophecy and prayer: “In prophecy God is the speaker and the prophet is the listener. In prayer, the roles are reversed and the person standing in prayer becomes the speaker.”39

Soloveitchik is very careful to show that prayer grows out of an existential need basic to the human condition as such. He thus considers mystical interpretations of prayer as verging on elitism. He is particularly trenchant in noting that prayer is not an activity reserved for leisure time. Prayer is a call to God “out of the depths.” He also recognizes how in a scientific age the person who answers the call to prayer has the experience of God as numen absens (“a power that is absent”).40 Like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Rabbi knows that the feeling of “a grisly emptiness and chilling cruelty pervading the uncharted lanes of the universe” is no excuse for abandoning prayer.41 On the contrary, persisting in prayer in the midst of the experience of boredom or divine absence is a basic element in the religious experience of the modern believer.

Where does aesthetics fit in? Like many post-Kantian religious thinkers before him, Soloveitchik observes that prayers of thanksgiving (as opposed to petitionary prayers) converge in a certain way with the aesthetic impulse to revel in the grandeur of God in creation. Petitionary prayers are equally necessary, but they arise as a response to the experience of God’s absence. Prayers or hymns of thanksgiving, by contrast, are a response to having had direct contact with God.

The beauty of God is experienced as holiness, as the mysterium magnum, the ineffable and unattainable, awesome and holy (nora ve-kadosh), as something that transcends everything comprehensible and speakable, which makes one tremble and experience bliss. Beauty and paradox merge—He is both remote and so near; awesome and lovely, fascinating and daunting, majestic and tender, comforting and frightening, familiar and alien, the beyond of creation and its very essence. …42

The genius and also the limitation of the Rabbi’s insights into the aesthetic consciousness come to the fore here. He assumes, as Kant does in his Critique of Judgment, that the differentiating point between the aesthetic and ethical consciousness is the issue of nonpurposiveness.43 The aesthetic consciousness is oriented to the flux of reality as experienced through sensory perception. Whereas ethical reflection on good and evil is by its very nature linked to a final end, the aesthetic consciousness by itself cannot bring teleology into view. The aesthete must therefore be redeemed by the purposiveness of ethical consciousness and the critical discernment that is not only allowed but encouraged by the religious use of pure reason. This dynamic interaction between a surge in the heart of a prayer of thanksgiving, ethical normativity, and a healthy dose of skepticism is what happens in genuine religion. “The experience of beauty is redeemed by turning it into a religious experience.”44

Soloveitchik thus outlines a theory of finding beauty in the Other based upon the intrinsic connection between beauty and prayer. One need not be an Orthodox Jew to recognize this path to beauty. He underscores the communion that bridges the gap between the finite and the infinite without ignoring the dialectical difference between God’s initiative to reach out to humanity and the human need to give thanks to God. He also allows for a theory of divine affectivity. Part of the beauty of holiness is the recognition that God is affected by the prayers of the faithful. Soloveitchik does not ignore the anthropocentrism of this claim but goes through and beyond both anthropocentrism and theocentrism in developing his idea that the beauty of the Absolute is best affirmed for the modern believer by the religious transformation of humanity’s sensory gaze at the evanescent beauty of the world. This is no deus ex machina but a dialectical movement that brings God and humanity into a communion that includes—in fact necessitates—radical difference.

Soloveitchik speaks for Jewish monotheism and provides a model for thinking about beauty and holiness for all religions that maintain that there is something beautiful and holy in the cleaving of the human heart to one God. What about non-monotheistic faiths or systems of belief that fail to acknowledge the deeply personalist dialogue with God that the Rabbi highlights? Even in the cases where belief in the divinity does not involve an all-powerful divine “You,” Soloveitchik’s path to holiness contains exemplary reflections. In particular, he struggled with the problem of belief in the modern era. He did not ignore the modern Western condition of alienation and certainly did not ignore the Kantian turn to the subject or the post-Kantian account of religious experience as founded upon a divorce between ethical teleology and sensualist non-teleology. Above all, he answered these formidable challenges from within the contours of his own system and practice of belief. Jewish prayers received a modern form of validity and normativity even as their content remained firmly within the Orthodox way of life and belief. In this sense, walking with Rabbi Soloveitchik on his path to faith in the contemporary era can teach people of multiple faiths what it means to find beauty in the Other.

Does the recognition of the beauty of holiness abandon the anarchic view delineated above? Perhaps. But the two questions are also quite separable. One can be an an-archic defender of nomos, the virtue of following the law as espoused in religious texts. The reader of the Torah becomes immersed in the wisdom of God’s presence in a quasi-mystical manner. Levinas was no mystic, but he was quite insistent that the sincerity necessary for being responsible to the Other also involves a profound sense of obligation:

Election traverses the concept of the ego to summon me as me through the inordinateness of the Other. It extracts me from the concept in which I continually take refuge, for I find in it the measure of an obligation which is not defined in the election. Obligation calls for a unique response not inscribed in universal thought, the unforeseeable response of the chosen one.45

For Levinas, obligation to another has a force that comes from beyond. It is not all based upon social utility. The anarchic sense of obligation to another may be unique to the worldview of the postmodern Talmudist, Emmanuel Levinas. On the other hand, it shows that surprising convergences can arise between the religious experience of avodat Hashem (“service of God”) and the religious experience of metaphysical anarchism. In the essays that follow, one can encounter traces of both hypernomianism and antinomianism. This paradox is actually welcome, for it is undoubtedly part and parcel of the adventure that we have undertaken in convening this conference.

Significance of This Volume

In addition to exploring in this volume the different ways in which we can talk about and find beauty, broadly construed, in other religious traditions and cultures, we intended to foster interreligious conversations by way of addressing the very inner aspect of humanity. This is in line with Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, in which he encourages Christians to foster “a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart.” Convinced that beauty is indeed a means for touching the human heart, and recognizing the rich role of beauty in the history of Christian theological thought, this volume is an attempt to offer an alternative approach to looking at beauty as a framework for relating to one another, as well as a guiding principle for social interactions.

In times when misunderstanding, suspicion, prejudice, and violence are more commonplace than ever, openness to beauty can be seen as the way to escape narrowness and bigotry on the one hand, and, on the other, to embrace the Other and develop a theology of community. As such, the everlasting beauty of God will have a profound impact on the everyday lives of peoples of diverse backgrounds. In the Christian tradition, “the beauty of God has been shown to us in a supreme way in Jesus Christ, the ‘epiphany of God’s loving kindness’ (Titus 3:4).”46 As God created human beings in his own image (Genesis 1:27), a theology of beauty can open up to ecumenical dialogue among all mankind. In Islam, it is said in the Qur’ān that “to God belong the most beautiful names” (Q 59:24). The beauty of God’s face, the Qur’ān asserts, will forever remain (Q 55:27). The Muslim prophet, Muhammad, is reported to have said, “God is beautiful and he loves beauty.” The saving of souls through beauty is also a major theme in the Buddhist tradition.

Despite its importance in our religious traditions, beauty has not been at the center of contemporary theologizing. As Edward Farley puts it, “throughout the period of the modern, beauty rapidly disappeared as an important motif in itself and as a way in which Western peoples experience and interpret the world.”47 Farley traces this marginalization of beauty to “the postmodern turn [which] brought with it new forms of cultural alienation from beauty,” which is typical of industrialized societies with their new economics, politics, modes of warfare, population growth, and urban cultures that show a low sensibility to beauty. We may disagree with Farley’s characterization of postmodern societies’ approach to beauty, yet we cannot overlook the need to bring beauty back to the center stage of any attempts to “humanize” our postmodern societies. How can beauty be a strategy for humanizing society? To borrow from David Bentley Hart: “How can one plausibly argue that ‘beauty’ does not serve the very strategy of power to which it supposedly constitutes an alternative?”48

There is no question that beauty thus has a profound impact on human life. “The more human beings fall captive to beauty,” Hearne argues, “the more they are falling into the hands of God, and the more they become agents of liberation and protest.”49 It is hardly surprising that much of liberation theology takes the form of poetry and art. As the bearer of liberation, beauty becomes a new way of expressing the truth of and great ecumenical guide and inspiration for human relationships, friendship, and love. This volume takes a step further by critically examining the deep, even though not always obvious, contributions of the Catholic theology of beauty, as well as reflecting on the idea of beauty in other religious traditions. The latter involves Christian theological reflections on finding beauty in non-Christian religions and cultures with responses from scholars from those religions/cultures.

Growing out of a conference that took place at the University of Notre Dame over the period September 10–12, 2015, this volume is not only intended to address how beauty can be found in religions and cultures, but also how the beauty of the self and the Other have been and are still communicated in different religious and cultural settings. The conference itself was unique because it inaugurated Notre Dame’s World Religions and World Church (WRWC) doctoral concentration. The WRWC area of study at the Department of Theology aims to explore new ways of thinking theologically about the study of world religions, cultural diversity in the Church, and the history of interactions between the Church and the religions of the world. As the place where the Catholic theological tradition and rigorous academic study of the religions and cultures of the world meet, WRWC is exceptionally important to the department and the university. In his opening remarks to the conference, in which he drew upon the inter-religious thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Notre Dame’s president, Fr. John Jenkins, CSC, underscored that WRWC is vital to the university. It is also important to the academy generally, as the way in which the study of religions and culture are put in conversation with the discipline of Christian theology, an approach that distinguishes WRWC from those at many peer universities. The inaugural WRWC conference reflects the kind of theological engagements that are scholarly and address broader audiences. The conference was truly collaborative in that scholars of different perspectives and backgrounds were in conversation with one another, and various approaches to beauty were critically discussed.

The chapters in this volume are grouped into five parts. The first deals with the question of beauty within the framework of Catholic theology of religions. Catherine Cornille begins her discussion by reminding us how little attention has been paid to the search for beauty in the Other among Catholic theologians, despite their awareness of its centrality in the realm of interreligious relations. Professor Cornille offers an analysis of recent developments that reflect a greater attention to the presence of truth and beauty in other religions as a result of a deeper understanding of those religions. Maria Clara Bingemer discusses an example of Christian-Muslim encounters in which beauty has been found and contemplated by embracing the otherness of Others. This part also includes important contributions by two Notre Dame professors: Peter Casarella and Lawrence E. Sullivan. The former addresses crucial questions of inter- and cross-cultural aspects of finding beauty in the Other by examining what he calls “tragic beauty” in the context of Latino/a theology. Casarella’s critical engagements with Latino/a theological aesthetics can certainly be put in conversation with other modes of theological aesthetics in different settings. The latter, on the other hand, examines different ways through which the beauty of the Other can be discovered, including a process of eliminating the repulsive aspect from the beauty, perceiving the otherness as a form of beauty, and transmuting the ugly into beauty. Such transformation can and should be made possible by way of love and forgiveness.

In the second part, the authors focus on Islam and beauty. Gabriel Said Reynolds addresses beautiful names of God, especially those that reflect His mercy. After carefully examining those passages in the Qur’ān that deal with the nature of God’s mercy and Muslim debates on this issue, he concludes that God’s compassion and mercy are offered only to those who follow the right path. As for unbelievers and those who go astray, “the God of the Qur’ān is wrathful, even vengeful.” Nayla Tabbara reflects on the phrase from Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate, “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions,” and asks if such recognition of the divine in the Other can be justified from an Islamic perspective. She explores several passages of the Qur’ān that can be understood as scriptural resources for the Islamic recognition of what is true and holy in other religious traditions. How have those positive assessments of the Other in the Qur’ān been understood by Muslims through the centuries? Mun’im Sirry discusses this question by examining Muslim commentaries on Q 2:62, which is repeated almost verbatim in Q 5:69. This verse has often been interpreted as a Qur’ānic manifesto of religious pluralism and tolerance, yet most Qur’ān commentators have understood it to mean the opposite. For Sirry, “the lack of seeing the beauty in the other has led some Muslim scholars to obscure the peaceful message of the Qur’ān to such an extent that they strive to find ways to understand the inclusivist passages differently.”

The third part, on beauty and Hinduism, includes contributions by Francis X. Clooney, Bradley Malkovsky, and Anant Rambachan. Professor Clooney elucidates in detail what he calls “travel the way of beauty” and offers possibilities of not only the search for beauty in the other, but also two-way traffic as how the beauty of other religions may find its way into our own religious experiences. For his part, Professor Malkovsky begins his paper with the most complex and, for outsiders, confusing notion of monotheism and polytheism in the Hindu faith, and he focuses his analysis on the Hindu teaching of non-duality (Advaita Vedanta). Despite subtle differences between the Hindu non-dualistic teaching and Christian doctrine and spirituality, Malkovsky contends that deeper reflection on this non-duality may enrich Christian theology and spirituality. This suggestion for possible theological conversations between Hinduism and Christianity is welcomed by Professor Rambachan, who further explores the different ways in which the non-duality teaching can be understood.

In the fourth part, which focuses on beauty and Buddhism, Donald Mitchell closely examines the use of the term “beauty” in the early Buddhist text (Nikāyas), where it has both negative and positive meanings, and explains the negative moral effects of the perception of beauty (subha) and ugliness and how Buddha lived beyond this duality. According to Mitchell, the positive reference to the “beautiful” (subha) can be understood as indicating (1) a subtle experience of beauty through mediation on a kasina that is the third of the eight forms of liberation, (2) the beauty of virtues lived through thought, word, and deed, and (3) the subtle beauty (sugato) of the Buddha’s body, speech, and action expressing his attainment of Nirvāna. After explaining the notion of Tathāgata-garbha (womb/embryo of the Buddha), which is the source and reality of the subtle beauty of Buddhahood with oneself and the other, Professor Mitchell discusses the beauty of Buddha-nature as found in the teachings of Keiji Nishitani, the famous Buddhist philosopher and leader of the Kyoto School, and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the great Zen Master of the early Kyoto School. The second contribution in this part is written by Gene Reeves, the only practicing Buddhist to attend the conference. Reflecting upon Mitchell’s contribution as well as a second paper by a scholar of Buddhism that could not be included in this volume, Reeves highlights the universalist dimensions of the Lotus Sutra tradition of Buddhism. He finds beauty not in a true self separated from the rest of reality but in the ordinary manifestation of reality, like the flowering of a whole plant, including its muddy roots.

The last part of this volume treats beauty in the African context. Teresia Hinga explores the diversity of African culture and the ways in which this reality of palpable difference(s) has been dealt with. She offers several examples to show that embracing the beauty and dignity of the Other is a moral imperative for a continent seeking a livable future. Conversely, Professor Hinga argues, the failure to adequately see, engage, and even embrace the beauty and dignity of the racially, ethnically, and religiously “Other” has too often led to (violent) conflicts that have radically compromised human and other forms of flourishing in Africa. The last—but certainly not least—contribution is presented by Paulinus Ikechukwu Odozor, C.S.Sp, and focuses on virtues and beauty in the Igbo community of Nigeria. Christianity constitutes the religion of the vast majority of the Igbo community, yet the nature of inculturation between Christianity and African Traditional Religion (ATR) is ongoing. It is oftentimes mutually enriching. Drawing from Thomas Aquinas’s insights into beauty, Professor Odozor contends that “Traditional Igbo religion and Christianity share an important insight, namely, that it is all grace. Beauty in all or any of its forms, moral or physical, is grace.”

Given the variety of issues and approaches herein discussed, the present volume is a unique contribution to the theological aesthetics across the different religious traditions and cultures. Looking at beauty as a point of departure, this book joins together questions concerned with Christian theology and cultural diversity with questions of Christian theology and religious diversity. At the heart of the mission of the World Religions and World Church (WRWC) initiative at the Notre Dame Theology Department is a conviction that these two areas of theological reflection are best studied together. The WRWC inaugural conference on “Finding Beauty in the Other,” as reflected in this volume, has shown that the university’s commitment to Catholic theology is in harmony with an interest in engaging in other religions. This interreligious engagement is possible because of Notre Dame’s Catholic identity, and not despite that identity. This volume has embodied that commitment to foster academic reflection on religious diversity among Christians and non-Christians. Our authors have engaged and learned from one another to illuminate the possibility of finding beauty in the self and the other. Not only is the present volume designed to integrate the Catholic theological tradition and rigorous academic study of the religions and cultures of the world; it also provides a framework for discernment in rigorous engagement and dialogue among people of various backgrounds and disciplines.

Notes

1.As a result, this introduction highlights the insights of Jewish authors. In our area, Judaism is by no means excluded from discussion. But the two doctoral areas, World Religions and World Church (WRWC) and Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity (CJA), were conceived separately. As a result, it is up to the members of the two areas to seek to leap over these bureaucratic hurdles. This introduction represents one such leap.

2.“Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” John Keats, Endymion, and Other Poems (New York: The Cassell Publishing Company, 1887), 184.

3.On this latter point, we consider the beauty of holiness below.

4.Cf. Paul Guyer, “18th Century German Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/>.

5.Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 1–53.

6.Cf. Peter Casarella, “‘A Healthy Shock’: Tradition and the Epiphany of Beauty,” in Tradition as the Future of Innovation, ed. Elisa Grimi (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), 220–41.

7.What follows was aided greatly by the reflections of Bradley Malkovsky in his comprehensive essay herein, but the authors nonetheless take full responsibility for any distortions of advaitic doctrine that they have introduced in this section.

8.This approach is taken up by the late Stratford Caldecott in a rather apologetic fashion in his essay “‘Face to Face’: The Difference between Hindu and Christian Non-Dualism,” Communio: International Catholic Review