Abstract
Scholars of religion are increasingly asking the reflexive question about how the category of “religion,” developed in the West, distorts our understanding of forms of life practiced in times and places where that category was not known. The editors of this book point out that for the most part, those in the modern West have distinguished the category of “religion” from that of “philosophy” by putting it on one side of a faith/reason binary, and they argue that Asian traditions “do not fit these boxes” (4). The individual chapters then provide nuanced and historically informed accounts of the ways that faith and reason have been understood in Indian Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, Jainism, Advaita Vedanta, Ruism/“Confucianism,” and Zhuangzi’s Daoism. The title of this book is misleading, however – in fact, doubly so. In the first place, the title contrasts Asian philosophies with the idea of religion, and the editor’s introduction asks whether “Asian philosophical traditions…are rightly understood through the category of religion at all” (3, 2). But the authors of the individual chapters generally take it as uncontroversial that these Asian forms of life are religions; in fact, some of them pursue the opposite question, namely, why the ontological and epistemological texts of these religious teachings are not recognized under the banner of “philosophy.” The title is misleading, in the second place, because half of the chapters in the book do not concern Asian forms of life at all. They instead analyze Socrates’s personal religion, Plotinus’s spiritual exercises, aesthetic discourse, those who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” contemplative practices, and environmental activism as forms of life that push against the boundaries of the category of “religion.” A title for this collection that reflects this breadth of topics might be something like Faith, Reason, and the Limits of Categories or Blurring the Faith/Reason Binary.
Whatever the title, this edited collection would be tremendously valuable for anyone who seeks to practice philosophy of religion (or the academic study of religions in general) in a decolonial way. The editors are right that “philosophy of religion cannot be made more inclusive simply by inserting a wider number of ‘religions’ into the category slots of the subject as currently constituted. The shapes of the slots themselves need to be altered to fit varieties of beliefs and practices configured differently than Christianity” (2). So, how should we proceed?
Many of the examples that are labelled “religion” in the academic study of religions – perhaps most of them – are made up of people who did not have the concept and never understood themselves as “having a religion.” Given this fact, there are some “abolitionist” scholars who argue that the claim that religions operated in cultures outside the modern West does conceptual violence to those cultures, and these scholars therefore propose that we should stop imposing the category where it does not belong. This book shows that the abolitionist–retentionist debate about whether the category of “religion” should be dropped is too simple. The crucial question is not “what fits in the religion box?” but rather, “how is the religion box shaped?” The editors argue that, in the modern West, the religion box is widely shaped in terms of the concept of faith. We therefore need to drill down another level: how is the concept of “faith” understood? If “faith” refers to believing without evidence, then the category “religion” fits the Asian and non-Asian cases poorly. If these paths are not based on faith, then it is not accurate to call them “religion,” and the editors raise the question whether we need a different label for “worldviews and methods of self-transformation” or “forms of reflection and practice” like these (8, 9).
But here is the interesting thing: when one looks at most of the paths studied in this book, they are absolutely pervaded by faith. William Edelglass shows that Indian Buddhists have insisted that faith is necessary both to start and to make progress on the Buddhist path. As Śāntideva analyzed in great detail, a Buddhist ought to be “constantly practicing faith” (26). Bret Davis shows that for some Japanese Buddhists, faith is a necessary spur on the path to enlightenment but, for others, faith simply “is enlightenment” (53, emphasis in the original). Anne Vallely opens her chapter with the clear statement: “Faith is at the heart of the Jain tradition” (65). Jains conceive of faith in generative terms, so that having faith is the very source of true knowledge and ethical conduct (73). Ashwani Kumar Peetush shows that in Advaita Vedanta, faith is instrumental to the realization of Brahman precisely because the divine reality is not accessible to ordinary sensory perception (95). Julianne Chung says that the Daoist teacher Zhuangzi makes “the need for submission to faith the virtually exclusive focus of his religious vision” (130). In all these cases, “faith” is understood not (to use Mark Twain’s quip) as “believing what you know ain’t so,” but instead in line with its etymological origin as fidelity or confidence. “Faith” in these traditions is understood as trust or as holding true to a commitment. As Vallely puts it, this is “faith in” rather than “faith that” (99). These traditions praise faith as the attitude of an accepting person, including the person’s affective and behavioral dispositions and not opposed to that person’s search for evidence. This richer account of trusting “faith in” in these Asian traditions is not one half of the faith/reason binary that is widespread in the modern West, but it is in no way unusual in English and it is common in the history of Western religions. Given this richer account, then, these Asian practices are all “faith-based.” If one defines “religion” in terms of faith, it follows that these paths would be rightly categorized as religions.
The same is true in the chapters that analyze non-Asian examples. Anna Lännström argues that because Socrates lived his life in obedience to the divine voice he heard, he should be seen as “a man of faith” and “a religious man” (179), and she identifies strategies that anxious non-religious philosophers have used to resist this conclusion. Catherine Collobert shows that, for Plotinus, faith is understood as an attitude of trust that operates at cognitive, affective, and behavioral levels, and it is necessary to spiritual progress: “if faith does not accompany reason and intuition, the One will remain opaque to any true understanding” (205). Erin McCarthy notes that faith is not absent from contemplative practices generally and it would not be absent from a wider use of contemplative pedagogy in education. And Lori Beaman argues, citing William Connolly, that even when an environmental activist rejects the transcendent, they still confess a contestable faith in radically immanent values (248).
The central concept in the academic study of religion is problematic. But this situation is not uncommon in other academic fields. As Paul Carelli and Sarah Mattice argue in their smart chapter on Ruism, “Any category, applied outside of its context, across geographical, temporal, or cultural boundaries, is bound to have problems of fit” (119). In my judgement, we are past the point at which it is helpful merely to “put the category in question,” to “problematize” it, or to “raise questions” about it; those who study history or society across cultures want to know what to do next. This book shows that a decolonial approach in the academy need not abandon the term “religion” (or the term “philosophy,” for that matter). This book shows that scholars who use the term “religion” cannot assume that a particular meaning is universally fitting. They therefore should drill down to the next level, so to speak, and spell out how they understand the content of the term. When scholars take that reflexive step, the term becomes useful, able to illuminate a sense in which those who call themselves “not religious” might still be so, artistic creativity is religious, and ancient religious practices (both in Asia and the West) differ from what people today often assume religion is.