Religions Reviewed

This article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (volume 73, number 4) was first presented at a conference on “Contesting Religion and Religions Contested: The Study of Religion in a Global Context,” sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Emory University, and AAR. The article purports to center on a methodological question of dubious value: “How to speak for religion in the academy?” I think that it is more important to ask how to speak about religion, since I don’t think that it is the job of the secular academy per se to speak for religion.

The evident content of the article, however, centers on a contrast between “the Indian traditions” of spirituality on one hand, and the Abrahamic monotheisms on the other. For context, Balagangadhara makes an observation or two about the classical Aristotelian notion of ethics and the goal of eudaimonia, which I found valuable and interesting. (This brief part of the article resonated well with Gananath Obeyesekere’s comparisons of ancient Greek and Indian ideas in Imagining Karma.)

But then Balagangadhara goes on to set up two opposing exemplars in order to illustrate the supposed contrast between Western and Indian spirituality. The first exemplar is “a medieval monk.” While he claims that “there are quite a few works dealing with medieval religiosity … that can be used in this context,” (994) he doesn’t bother to cite any of them. (In fact, this entire 35-page article lists only two references: a book by the author of the article, and The Complete Works of Aristotle!) The picture that he paints is in no sense a generically representative ideal of medieval monasticism, let alone Christianity as a whole (or Western monotheisms as a category!), but he insists vaguely that “one can extend such a sketch to the modern-day world as well.” For his counterpoint, he depicts an even more nebulously-characterized “middle-aged man” navigating the options offered by the Indian traditions (997). While he claims that a parallel set of stresses act on the Christian and Indian aspirants alike, Balagangadhara insists that the “traditionally Indian” resolution of “enlightenment” (998) is fundamentally dissimilar from the Christian resolution of “healing grace.” (996) I am entirely unconvinced on an empirical level by these featureless caricatures. Certainly, there have been Christian mystics (medieval monks, even!) whose spirtual tensions resolved in a “revelation” of the sort that Balagangadhara calls “enlightenment” (998). It is also my impression that the “Indian traditions,” even prior to colonial contact with the West in the last few centuries, included examples of “healing grace.”

Balagangadhara insists that the Indian traditions value “experiential insights” in the place occupied by “doctrines” in Western religions (1002). He goes on to claim that “We need to coneptualize the difference between [Indian and similar] traditions in a different way than we do that with respect to philosophies or religions.” (1006) I found none of the arguments in this section of the article very compelling. Finally, he introduces a key metaphor, in which “religions” (which the Indian “traditions” are not) are “route descriptions” of an absolute type, grounded arbitrarily in a single context, whereas “traditions” offer themselves to be relativized to the individual. But then he observes that these (originally, properly?) relative and mutually negotiable “traditions” have hardened ito “religious” forms after contact with “religions” from the west (1011-1012).

I could care less about Balagangadhara’s desire to exclude “his” “traditions” from the category of “religion” (an agenda adopted at one time or another by partisans of anything that might be called “religion”–excepting only the Roman Catholic Church). His effort to categorically convict Western “religions” of a psychologically coercive absolutism will tend in the long run only to promote that sort of “religion.” In general, I found this article sloppily argued. Its subtitle “an agenda for the future” went unfulfilled, as far as I could tell. His final appeal that religious studies should “develop novel ways of understanding religious and cultural diversity” is not a innovative suggestion. The efforts to develop more useful distinctions and more accurate categories are the meat and potatoes of secular religious studies already, in those cases where there is any amount of methodological reflection.