Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9781409409052, 9781315600475, 1409409058

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Piety and responsibility This book analyzes the writings of Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika to disclose how each construes “piety” and “responsibility” as integral to each other. Each theologian expresses a fundamental unity of love of God and love of neighbour. Sheveland explores this unity in ecumenical and interreligious frameworks, showing how these authors privilege theology as practice, enactment, or simply as ethical. He uses the Renaissance genre of musical polyphony as a methodological tool by which to explore the aesthetic quality and the similarityin-difference of the theological voices being compared. Polyphony’s application to comparative theology includes the avoidance of caricature, domestication, and antagonism. In place of these is offered a fundamentally aesthetic paradigm by which to hear theological voices in terms of their unity-in-distinction.

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board of acclaimed scholars spanning the breadth of religious studies, theology and biblical studies, this openended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Other Recently Published Titles in the Series: Spirit and Sonship Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity and the Holy Spirit David A. Höhne Dalit Theology and Dalit Liberation Problems, Paradigms and Possibilities Peniel Rajkumar Beyond Evangelicalism The Theological Methodology of Stanley J. Grenz Steven Knowles Concepts of Power in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche J. Keith Hyde Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness Christopher B. Barnett The Trinity and Theodicy The Trinitarian Theology of von Balthasar and the Problem of Evil Jacob H. Friesenhahn Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities Sustenance and Sustainability Pankaj Jain

Piety and Responsibility

Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika

John N. Sheveland Gonzaga University, USA

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © John N. Sheveland 2011 John N. Sheveland has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sheveland, John N. Piety and responsibility : patterns of unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika. – (Ashgate new critical thinking in religion, theology and biblical studies) 1. Rahner, Karl, 1904-1984. 2. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. 3. Venkatanatha, 1268-1369. 4. Theology, Practical– Comparative studies. 5. God–Worship and love– Comparative studies. 6. Love–Religious aspects– Comparative studies. 7. Piety. 8. Responsibility– Religious aspects–Comparative studies. 9. Responsibility–Philosophy. I. Title II. Series 204-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sheveland, John N., 1973Piety and responsibility : patterns of unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika / John N. Sheveland. p. cm. – (New critical thinking in religion, theology, and biblical studies) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0905-2 (hardcover) 1. Piety. 2. Responsibility. 3. Rahner, Karl, 1904-1984. 4. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. 5. Venkatanatha, 1268-1369. 6. Christianity and other religions–Sri Vaishnava (Sect) 7. Sri Vaishnava (Sect)–Relations–Christianity. I. Title. BV4647.P5S48 2010 205–dc22 2010049592 ISBN 9781409409052 (hbk) ISBN 9781315600475 (ebk)

Contents 1

Introduction   1.1  The Title   1.2  The Thesis   1.3  The Method of Dialogue   1.4  Control of Sources and Content   1.5  Theological Significance  

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Melody: Piety and Responsibility in Karl Rahner   2.1  Hearer of the Word   2.2 Freedom   2.3  The Unity of Love of God and Love of Neighbor  

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Harmony: Piety and Responsibility in Karl Barth   3.1 Context   3.2  Doer of the Word   3.3  The Unity of Loving and Praising God  

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Polyphony: Piety and Responsibility in Vedanta Desika   4.1 Context   4.2  Three Mantras: Srivaisnava Anthropology   4.3  Piety: The Sesa–Sesin Dynamic Applied Vertically   4.4  Responsibility: The Sesa–Sesin Relationship Applied Horizontally  

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Postlude   5.1  Freedom, Sin, Grace   5.2  Piety and Responsibility are Integral   5.3  Polyphony is a Useful Theological Method  

Bibliography    Index   

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205 215

Magistris Meis Francis X. Clooney, SJ Michael J. Dodds, OP Roger O. Doyle Roger D. Haight, SJ Thomas E. Hosinski, CSC David H. Kelsey Ronald F. Thiemann

Chapter 1

Introduction 1.1  The Title In “The Freedom of a Christian,” Martin Luther emphasized not merely the sola gratia credo, according to which justification occurs not through one’s own merits or works but through God’s grace, he also gave voice to the central Christian conviction that, rather than being asymmetrically related, faith is a sort of precondition for good works, and that, indeed, good works naturally flow forth from the one who has faith.1 This book explores the constellation of theological issues associated with these two theological assertions, with the caveat that the grammar I mean to employ is not “faith” and “works” but “piety” and “responsibility.” These terms—“piety” and “responsibility”—comport with major motifs or structures in the writings of Karl Barth, Karl Rahner and Vedanta Desika.2 The terms are a sort of formal structure I impose on the authors for the purposes of ecumenical and interreligious learning. The structure helps to interpret the authors but does not function as a heavy-handed meta-framework through which the three theologians are read and appropriated. “Piety” and “responsibility” do not function here as terms whose meanings are pre-determined, for this would result in an imposition upon the integrities of the three discrete theological systems. I suggest that each author brings important content and nuance to what are commonly understood as piety and responsibility, and that the terms are sufficiently formal to be used as place-holders for what will be given specific content by the three theologians. An ecumenical and interreligious comparison of three theologians stands in need of formal and flexible terms with which to begin the process of comparing what Robert Neville calls “deliberately vague categories.”3 This project does so not to   Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in John Dillenberger (ed.), Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York, 1962). 2   See “piety” in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (New York, 2004), p. 392, and “responsibility” in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 173ff. 3   “Vagueness in a category allows all the potential specifications to be brought under one head with the proviso that specific relations among them remain to be determined” (Robert Cummings Neville and Wesley J. Wildman, “On Comparing Religious Ideas,” in Robert Cummings Neville [ed.], Ultimate Realities: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project [Albany, 2001], p. 198). 1

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thin out the complexities and nuances associated with each figure but to paint these nuances more sharply by way of reflexive comparison and contrast. Without defining the terms exhaustively, it is helpful at this point to give “piety” and “responsibility” some flesh. In a formal way, I suggest that “piety” be understood in two manners. First, it is the human subjective response, as a “Yes,” to the religious experiences of finitude, vulnerability and being threatened. These traits of finitude mark the lives of human beings in the world.4 Second, because it suggests much more than acceptance of the conditions of finitude, “piety” should also be understood in more theologically normative categories as a religious response to sin, guilt and inauthenticity (Rahner), or to covenant infidelity, self-contradiction and “impossibility” (Barth), or to the consciousness of mis-knowing one’s fundamental relationship to God consisting in absolute dependence and service (Desika). What makes this second construal of “piety” more theologically normative than the first is that it underscores the reality of sin affecting the human person and consequently the same person’s absolute dependence on the grace that heals and restores her to proper relationality, in both the vertical and horizontal senses of that word. Rahner, Barth and Desika each give expression to this pattern in their own nuanced ways. To know oneself as the creature standing before God in radical dependence gives birth to a related disposition: gratitude for the gift that is grace. Piety is thus a disposition born from the consciousness of oneself as finite, sinful and receptive, a disposition which gives particular shape to one’s self-consciousness before God as vulnerable, dependent and grateful. These dispositions underscore the human creature as it should be. Likewise, in a formal way, I suggest that “responsibility” be understood as the practical, active and relational component of living before God under the determination of these same religious experiences of vulnerability, dependence and gratitude. The consciousness of sin and its attending consciousness of absolute dependence underscore the radical dependency on a power and form of life that is neither one’s own nor possible by recourse to one’s own resources, capacities, talents or discipline. Authentic responsibility presupposes grace and empowerment as the condition of its possibility. This precise connection between, on the one hand, a life lived in responsibility and, on the other, its grammar of grace and the many layers of theological articulation this grammar takes on, is the subject of this book. Many other words approach “piety” in 4

  Rahner lends to finitude the following characterization: “The new becomes old, the days pass by, mere knowledge is cold and empty, life goes along, wealth escapes us, popularity is just a whim, senses age, the world is in flux, friends die. And all that is the lot of normal life, is what people don’t quite count as suffering and pain. In addition is all the pain and bitterness that can fill a human being, all the tears, all the necessities of body and soul. But it is grace when this realization of the finiteness and transitoriness of all things really seizes man” (On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, trans. Bruce W. Gillette [Collegeville, 1997], p. 33).

Introduction

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meaning, but replacing “piety” with some other formal term risks losing a rather particular valence the word supplies. That is, “piety” denotes a doxological accent surfacing in the writings of Rahner, Barth and Desika. By “doxology” I mean acknowledgment, gratitude and praise. This disposition appears quite clearly in the writings of the three authors. It surfaces in Karl Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith (Grundkurs des Glaubens, 1976) in connection with the injunction to trust the incomprehensible holy mystery of God, with Rahner’s own spiritual appropriation of Jesus Christ, with the motif of acceptance of life and the world, with the manner in which love of neighbor expresses and contains love and praise of God and with the pattern of prayer in many of his articles, particularly in his post-war sermons published as On the Need and Blessing of Prayer. The doxological accent surfaces throughout all the loci of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1932–67) in connection with any and all discourses on prevenient grace. It surfaces again in connection with these loci to the extent that they reveal a pattern of divine action followed by human response and correspondence, of divine initiative followed by human permission and then command. It also surfaces in Barth’s tenet that the primary motivation for the Christian loving his neighbor is the praise of God. And a doxological accent surfaces strikingly in Vedanta Desika’s Srimad Rahasyatrayasara (fourteenth century) in numerous passages of praise and litany, in the theocentric orientation of the Srimad Rahasyatrayasara and its governance of theological loci and in connection with the discussion of the human being’s identity as one who exists for Lord Narayana and who consequently is to live a multi-layered life of service (kainkarya) to the Lord. One cannot read the theological positions of these authors without attending to the doxological impulse that not only enlivens their discourses but also prioritizes what gets said theologically. Doxology shapes both form and content of theological assertions. For these two reasons, then, I intend to employ the term “piety” to denote one pole of this book’s subject matter. My intent, however, is to use the term formally, so that its content will be supplied in via by the theologians. 1.2  The Thesis The Christian life is constituted by two mutually inclusive dynamics, one vertical and the other horizontal: a response in piety to God in God’s revelation, and a responsibility to render that response consistent with life in the world with others. The response and the responsibility are mutually inclusive and co-definitive, and so the life lived as “Christian” incarnates this unity. This is the major thesis. Rahner, Barth and Desika are case studies in this claim and have been chosen to test it ecumenically and interreligiously. Each of the three affirms this unity and articulate it according to their respective theological commitments and traditions. The major thesis asserts an organic unity between the response of piety to God’s revelation and the response’s attending responsibility to body forth a

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life in the world transparent to its ground. It is not possible to have either piety or responsibility without the other. This book speaks to this singular claim in three analogous ways and places these same ways into dialogue with each other. The major thesis is presented and framed in an ecumenical and interreligious fashion, constituting a minor thesis concerning the need for Christian theology to be practiced ecumenically and interreligiously if it is to be (i) viable for the churches, (ii) intelligible within the academy today and (iii) faithful to the Second Vatican Council’s recommendation to seek out and appreciate the “rays” of truth apparent in other religious traditions and thereby to build up unity in the human family.5 1.3  The Method of Dialogue The theological subject matter surrounding piety and responsibility unfolds progressively as the chapters progress, and so a “polyphony model” should be kept in mind from the first. The relevant material from Rahner will be discussed, after which relevant material from Barth will be discussed, but not alongside Rahner but in conversation with him. So too the material from Desika will first be located in its own religious context and then be interpreted in conversation and interdependence with Rahner and Barth. This results in a process of mutual clarification. In this way, as the chapters progress, the book establishes a conversation marked by polyphony: a “melody” will be introduced (Rahner) and given texture by another melody line (Barth) and then another (Desika), all of which are at once like and unlike each other. In a somewhat more basic image, the book intends a snowballing effect, becoming thicker and weightier as the reader moves through the sections. The polyphony of voices crescendos progressively throughout the text as the voices are constantly played off each other, creating the conditions for their consonance. The ecumenical force of the book will be present in Chapter 3, as Barth is discussed in view of the previous discussion of Rahner. The interreligious force will appear toward the end, in Chapter 4, once the Desika material is sounded and then heard together with analogous constructs in Rahner and Barth.6 5   Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate: Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 1965, nos. 1–2. See also the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church (2000), which, despite its suggestions that other Christian churches and non-Christian religions are defective, nonetheless repeats the commitment of Nostra aetate 2 when it asserts the value of other religions insofar as they contain and express truth. Cf. Dominus Iesus, no. 2, and Stephen J. Pope and Charles C. Hefling (eds), Sic et Non: Encountering Dominus Iesus (Maryknoll, 2002). 6   For a longer discussion of polyphony and its bearing on comparative method, see John N. Sheveland, “Solidarity through Polyphony,” in Francis X. Clooney, SJ (ed.), Comparative Theology: Thinking Interreligiously in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2010).

Introduction

5

Because the polyphony model privileges each voice as an independent melody in its own right, Karl Rahner’s theology will not be privileged normatively above the other two simply because it occupies the melody line. The notion of polyphony is used here as conceptual device to produce a stylistic effect in the text, one which turns the reader away from polemics and toward aesthetics. Karl Rahner’s theological genre is different from Barth’s. Some have suggested that Rahner’s transcendental theological method resists concreteness and particularity; this is especially true in his ethical writings on the love commandments, writings about which much will be said below, especially compared to Barth’s comments on the love commandments in Church Dogmatics I/2 §18 and IV/2 §68. While I am inclined to agree with this characterization, it is not a characterization I should like to convert into large-scale criticism or polemic, since there is no reason to think Rahner’s open system cannot accommodate Barth’s “thick” description of the Christian life. This characterization, moreover, when viewed from other loci (the doctrine of creation and theological anthropology) can be seen to hold advantages over Barth’s theology. Barth’s theology, in contrast to Rahner’s, is intensely descriptive and particular, especially in Church Dogmatics III/2, and receives its content from knowledge of Jesus Christ. That is, the anthropology is Christological in determination. For this reason—at least with respect to this particular issue—Barth holds something of an advantage over Rahner, because at issue is not only the theoretical backdrop of the Christian life, but the Christian life itself: that is, what the Christian life looks like. With respect to this question, it seems that Barth’s methodological preference holds distinct advantages, with respect to theological content, over Rahner’s transcendentally mediated theology. The tensions of theological genre between a transcendental method and an epistemology of the Word of God will be brought to the surface. That the two theologians disagree on Christian theology’s means and method comes as no surprise: their assumptions lead them into disagreement.7 Yet this does not mean 7   Consider the following: “Theology is not the presentation of the reality of the Word of God addressed to man and also the presentation of the reality of man to whom God’s Word is addressed. … Theology knows the reality of the Word of God only as that of the Word of God addressed to man and it cannot for a moment abstract itself away from this determination of its theme. One may thus say that not just dogmatics but theology in general includes from the very first and at every point the problem of ethics. But the man to whom God’s Word is directed can never become the theme or subject of theology. He is not in any sense a subject of theology which must be approached with a shift of focus” (Karl Barth, Ethics, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley [New York, 1981], p. 13). And: “This question which man is and not only has, must be regarded as the condition which makes hearing the Christian answer possible … we must reflect upon the fundamental assertion of Christianity as the answer to the question which man is, and hence we must do theology. … The question creates the condition for really hearing, and only the answer brings the question to its reflexive self-presence. This circle is essential and is not supposed to be resolved in the foundational course, but to be reflected upon as such” (Karl Rahner,

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that they and their theological heirs cannot speak to and learn from each other. The present task does not include pronouncing judgment on which theologian is more adequate and according to which criteria such a judgment would be made. Those two judgments are outside the scope of the thesis, and do not comport well with the aesthetic intentions of the polyphony metaphor. Indeed, the polyphony model seeks to privilege the possibility of encountering consonance in the theological voices compared. Tension is not the sole rubric by which this distinction in theological genre should be gauged, for the introduction of a harmony line complementing and contrasting with the base melody line will have the effect of enriching the overall chord of what is heard. The musical metaphor works quite well here, for harmony, by definition, enriches and complexifies a chord, lending it a depth which, aesthetically speaking, can edify. Barth’s stylistically descriptive theology, introduced subsequent to Rahner’s transcendental theology, exercises just this effect. Such a procedure should be possible without succumbing to a kind of theological indecision or schizophrenia. Indeed, one argument on behalf of ecumenism will be to suggest that Christian theology is best taken as a whole, indeed as a pluralistic whole, rather than in a sectarian or piece-by-piece fashion. Reading Rahner and Barth in a self-consciously non-sectarian manner opens the reader to learning more and better from both. Reading them in this way also renders theologians in the mold of Rahner more open and hospitable to possible emendations from Barth, and theologians in the mold of Barth more open and hospitable to emendations from Rahner. That both constituencies stand to learn from each other is an insight and assertion scarcely in need of a protracted defense. A hermeneutical justification for the book’s interreligious comparisons can be found in David Tracy’s theology of religious classics, according to which a religious classic, if it is a classic, will confront the reader because of and in spite of the particularity (historical, cultural, religious) marking its production. Tracy’s hermeneutical strategies, including “analogy” understood as similarityin-difference, apply to ecumenical theological research but also guide my reading of classic Hindu texts like those of Desika as well as the earlier sources from scripture and tradition informing his own theological construction. Tracy’s hermeneutics can be seen as a theoretical justification of this book’s interreligious aspirations. In addition to Tracy’s hermeneutics of religious classics, Francis X. Clooney, SJ, espouses a compatible but more detail-oriented comparative methodology in several writings, most notably Theology After Vedanta (esp. ch. 1), Seeing Through Texts (esp. ch. 5), Hindu God, Christian God and Divine Mother, Blessed Mother (esp. ch. 5), as well as The Truth, the Way, and the Life (esp. ch. 5) and Beyond Compare. This comparative strategy can be seen as a practical and concrete Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych [New York, 1978], p. 11).

Introduction

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justification of the book’s interreligious aspiration. The method simultaneously engages familiar and foreign texts and allows questions generated in the text of the religious “other” to be considered under the rubric of the text(s) of the writer and reader’s home tradition. This method turns not on the commensurability of the texts or theologies compared but on the potential for theological cross-fertilization, learning from both similarities and differences, and reciprocal illumination. These goals point to a far more subtle and difficult task than merely observing thematic correspondences. Tracy’s hermeneutical method provides the reader with a theoretical strategy; Clooney’s provides the same reader an applied strategy followed closely by the a posteriori fruits of the comparisons themselves, fruits which then can be marshaled to defend and augment Tracy’s more theoretically oriented assertions. The polyphony of Chapter 4 proceeds on the basis of both strategies. 1.4  Control of Sources and Content A single book analyzing three figures of great importance and massive literary output requires a tightly controlled field of topics and questions. For Karl Rahner, I take Foundations of Christian Faith as the foundational text and supplement it with numerous articles from Theological Investigations and Sacramentum mundi. The relevant anthropological themes in Rahner receive a Christological determination and valence—as they do in Barth—but coinciding with and elaborating these is an ontology, or “metaphysical anthropology” as he prefers to call it, reflecting on God’s constitution of the human being in terms of obediential potency (potentia oboedientialis) and freedom for God. Rahner first gives expression to this anthropological feature in his Hearer of the Word, where he suggests humans are creatures constituted by God to be receptive to a possible divine self-communication. Human beings “are forever the infinite openness of the finite for God.”8 They are created as “hearers,” but as hearers have no right or claim to God’s revelation. Their duty rather is to accept it. The content of God’s “speaking” is love, and so too the content of the human “hearing” is love. Human freedom, for Rahner, is the middle term between the divine act of speaking and the human response of hearing. In freedom the human being constitutes herself before God, so that she does not simply perform this or that mundane action. She becomes what she does. Her self-constitution is not simply an individual affair, but truly involves her before God and neighbor. Who she is and who she becomes is determined by who she is before God, and who she is before God is mediated by who she is before her neighbor. Rahner’s insistence in various articles and books on the unity of love of God and neighbor, moreover, exemplifies the inherent connection—or principle 8   Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York, 1994), p. 53; cf. pp. 72, 81.

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of non-contradiction—between piety and responsibility. He suggests that all genuine moments of love of neighbor are conscious acts of love of God (caritas) and have God as their “reflexive motive.”9 Love of neighbor is the basic moral act that integrates one’s total response to God. “This potentia oboedientialis is precisely the transcendentality towards the other who is to be loved and who first of all is one’s fellow [hu]man.”10 The unity of the love commandments (e.g. Mk 12:31; Mt. 22:39) will be a major theme of ecumenical comparison and contrast with Barth. Both men give it sustained attention, each parsing it differently. The conversation they initiate will invite the contributions of Vedanta Desika, who espouses a theology wherein bhagavatas (those who love and surrender to the Lord) embrace their identity as dasas (servants) to one another, a horizontal model of communal behavior and ethics Desika models after the vertical relationship of the dasa serving—existing for, being disposed toward, praising—their Lord. Karl Barth’s voice on the Christian life and its theological backdrop can be heard in Church Dogmatics I/2 and III/2. The latter volume contains Barth’s most elaborate presentation of his Christological anthropology and offers a descriptive account of what Barth labeled in Church Dogmatics I/2 an anthropology of the Word of God. The contents of Church Dogmatics III/2 are best understood within the context of sections from other volumes of the Church Dogmatics. For this reason I read across other volumes of Church Dogmatics selectively, in pursuit of the same vital themes in I/2 and III/2 expressed under the vocabulary of different loci. A sub-question will then be raised, exploring the theological consequences of a methodological decision that distinguishes Barth from Rahner, the former opting for an anthropology of the Word of God while the latter adheres to a metaphysical anthropology. Do these methodological decisions produce concrete theological differences on the content of the life lived responsibly before God, such as, for example, reliance on prevenient grace? Do these methodological decisions limit or expand the scope of what each theologian is able to affirm about the Christian life? This sub-question takes shape, at least in part, as an ecumenical discussion, since the decisions and warrants for these differing theological methods can be clarified with reference to the theologians’ ecclesial traditions and commitments. In Church Dogmatics I/2, Barth agrees with Rahner on the basic unity of the commandments to love God and neighbor. But he disagrees with Rahner on the theological commitments one is bound to observe in working out this unity. Both theologians agree on the unity of the two commandments, but Rahner’s approach as at least partially “from below” in that love of neighbor can be construed 9   Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of God and Love of Neighbor,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York, 1982), p. 238. 10   Ibid., p. 243.

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as unthematic or anonymous love for God. In loving my neighbor, I love God whether or not I grasp this consequence. This results, in part, from the aim of Rahner’s overall theological program to address and be heard by the human being of modern society. Barth, on the other hand, rejects this approach “from below” and suggests that love of neighbor is the fruit of one’s acceptance of being justified by God in Jesus Christ; the desire of the Christian to acknowledge, love and praise God is the critical motivation to love the neighbor. The two commandments indubitably belong together, Barth insists, but love of neighbor follows justification and has a derived value. Its value is derived because it is performed for the sake of God, not on account of considerations of the inherent worth and dignity of neighbors. Love of others is routed in the first instance toward the praise of God. In other words, responsibility expresses piety. The similarities and differences between Rahner and Barth on this particular issue are interesting and suggestive by themselves, but they also serve as an example of how “responsibility” can be expressed according to the theological commitments and ordering principles (“piety”) informing it.11 For Vedanta Desika, inquiring after the responsible life and its theological backdrop requires investigation of his most systematic theological text, the Srimad Rahasyatrayasara. Several shorter texts of his are available in translation and have been marshaled to supplement the Srimad Rahasyatrayasara. Desika’s writings are embedded within the Srivaisnava traditions and are indebted particularly to Desika’s tenth-century predecessor, Ramanuja. I have for the most part resisted the temptation to turn to Ramanuja and other key acaryas (revered teachers) in the Srivaisnava tradition to supply his context and worldpicture. Desika remains the central figure of interreligious comparison, even as he himself, to a considerable extent, is best understood in connection with his interlocutors, teachers and adversaries. This judgment follows my decision with Rahner and Barth not to delve deeply into their respective theological contexts 11

  Consider the following two representative comments of Rahner and Barth on the love commandments: “The tradition of the schools in Catholic theology has already held fast to the fact that the specific Christian love of neighbor is both in potency and in act a moment of the infused supernatural theological virtue of caritas by which we love God in his Spirit for his own sake and in direct community with him. This means therefore that the love of neighbor is not merely the preparation, effect, fruit and touchstone of the love of God but is itself an act of this love of God” (Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and Love of God,” p. 236). Whereas Barth suggests: “The whole meaning and content of the commandment to love our neighbor is that as God’s children, and therefore as those who love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, we are summoned and claimed for the praise of God as the activity and work of thankfulness which, by reason of our being as those who love, we cannot avoid. The ‘second commandment’ has no other meaning and content apart from and in addition to: ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name’. And vice versa, it is by the ‘second’ commandment that we experience point by point and exhaustively what is the praise of God” (Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, p. 401).

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and sources. Desika compares well with the two Germans on account of the distinct linkages he forges between piety and responsibility. His notion of divine bhoga or “delight,” according to which the deity delights not only in service rendered to himself (i.e. “piety”) but in service rendered to and among other devotees or bhagavatas (“responsibility”), is an example of the unity of piety and responsibility this book traces. Desika adopted Ramanuja’s framework of piety and expanded it to include a distinctive communal ethic resting on doxological commitments and the life of prayer. An analogical relationship or comparison can thus be drawn between the unity of piety and responsibility in Desika’s theology and in the theologies of Rahner and Barth. The aural musical metaphors of melody and polyphony give textual form and aesthetic texture to the progression of chapters. The unity of the Christian life is seen first in Karl Rahner. Barth’s rendition of the unity of the Christian life will be voiced in the presence of Rahner, whilst paying attention to ecumenical rapprochement and methodological difference. Then we hear Vedanta Desika’s voice not in isolation but in the company of the others, the three voices joining together while retaining their distinction in a polyphonic chord. What had first been a monologue and then a dialogue now develops into a three-way conversation—or polyphony—marked by distinct but consonant soundings of the unity of the responsible life lived before God. 1.5  Theological Significance The significance of this experiment in theological polyphony results from three principal contributions. Two pertain to material theological issues, the third to theological method and how the polyphony model structures comparison. First, the major thesis reasserts the unity in the Christian life of the vertical response to God and the horizontal manner in which that response is expressed and authenticated. I frame this unity by deploying the deliberately vague categories of “piety” and “responsibility.” It is not possible to interpret adequately either Rahner’s or Barth’s position in any theological locus while giving short shrift to the Christian life. This is a direct consequence of the systematic manner in which the two conceived and wrote their theologies, attending to the connection between and mutual dependence among the loci of Christian faith. Nor is it possible to gain a satisfactory understanding of what Rahner or Barth meant by Trinity, incarnation, grace or church without also observing how that same locus functions within the framework of other loci. This is no less true of the Christian life than the other loci of Christian faith. For this reason, the book recalls and restores the locus of the Christian life within systematic theology. As the first contribution overcomes the juxtaposition between piety and responsibility, the second contribution overcomes two more unnecessary juxtapositions, first between so-called Word-of-God theologies and philosophically mediated theologies on the question of how the Christian life is

Introduction

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conceived and, second, between Christian theology generally and the theological subject matter of other religious traditions, Desika’s Visistadvaita in this case. Barth and Rahner are major representatives of this unnecessary polarization in the Christian theological community. Addressing the two of them is an isolated case study meant to address the broader problem of which they and some of their heirs are a part. We cannot pretend to dissolve all the conflicts that have arisen and may yet arise in the future. But greater understanding through close textual attention to what the authors assert is a realistic expectation. To that end, the book operates with a hermeneutic that privileges the unity of the universal church over its divisions and so reads Rahner and Barth in a manner that underscores their common assertions and material theological claims as the broader canopy under which their distinction and disagreement reside. The third contribution is related to the second. This book is a case study of the broader and more inclusive theological method necessary for Christian theology to be credible in today’s academic and ecclesial communities. A credible theological method empowers Christian faith and life, and in the present global, ecclesial and academic milieus this includes commitment to ecumenical rapprochement and to interreligious consciousness, learning and, where possible, appreciation. The consonance produced by the voices of Rahner, Barth and Desika serves as a case study of how Christian theology can benefit from an inclusive theological method. One stands to learn more about one’s own religious narrative and about the religious life in general when faced with the narratives of neighbors. This holds true in both ecumenical and interreligious learning. Reading Rahner after having read Barth allows one to learn more from Rahner and to perceive his theology in a deeper manner than would have been possible without Barth, and vice versa. Likewise, re-reading Rahner and Barth after having read Vedanta Desika opens the reader to a broader hermeneutical field and to greater fecundity in theological interpretation and wisdom. In bringing the three theologians into intentional conversation on a controlled set of issues and in re-reading them in light of each other, one inevitably gains a deeper appreciation of nuances and of what is said and unsaid, both of which become clearer when the text in question is read alongside others, when voices are permitted to sound together in the same aural space. Finally, it is neither possible nor desirable in the present global, ecclesial and academic milieus for a Christian theologian to be influenced solely by, or to write exclusively for, his or her own community. The empirical phenomenon of multiple belonging in a globalized and interdependent world can be proffered as a justification for this judgment.12 Yet this judgment should not be lamented. In a globalized and interdependent world community, members of religious communities bear an urgent moral responsibility to be informed, intelligent and compassionate vis-à-vis one another. It is scarcely feasible to envision a 12   Catherine Cornille (ed.), Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Maryknoll, 2002).

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scenario wherein the concerns of some are not the concerns of all.13 The burden is especially great on theologians belonging to traditions marked by histories of inflicting suffering on others. Members of all religious communities stand in need of an increased sensitivity and attunement to the moral implications of religious thought and expression. The fruit of this project is offered to the academy and churches in this spirit, as an example and possibly as a practical guide of how to do theology in view of the concerns of ecumenical rapprochement and interreligious sensitivity.

13   National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (Washington, D.C., 1997).

Chapter 2

Melody: Piety and Responsibility in Karl Rahner 2.1  Hearer of the Word Karl Rahner’s metaphysical anthropology took shape first in his early volume Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion (Hörer des Wortes, 1941). The volume’s subject matter is largely anthropological and specifically epistemological in its treatment of revelation primarily from below, considering human nature, subjectivity and self-consciousness under the impact of divine self-communication. In what follows I do not attempt to present Rahner’s metaphysical anthropology in its entirety, but rather highlight the theological use to which Rahner put his metaphysical outlook.1 In particular, this will mean understanding the human person as receptive and responsive—graced—and as one whose response, as a hearer of the word, is love. It will also mean highlighting the way in which Rahner’s metaphysical anthropology culminates in and is rendered coherent by his Christology. Rahner’s anthropology designates the human being—all humans, not just Christians—as spirit, matter, knower and historically embedded. The anthropology is shaped metaphysically in that these themes are treated within the parameters of Rahner’s philosophy of being—his ontology, an ontology that remarks on humanity as a whole, not simply those who embrace the gospel, discipleship and commitment to an ecclesial existence. Indeed, such “thematic” or “explicit” Christians are subsequently “plugged into” the ontological framework that characterizes humanity as a whole. This framework can be observed in Hearer of the Word, where the explicit ecclesial Christian is the framework’s exemplar and 1   Recently it has been argued that Rahner’s fundamental theology in Hearer of the Word should be interpreted in close connection with the more obvious pastoral aims of later theological writing such as Foundations of Christian Faith: “There is a kind of interpenetration of fundamental theology and dogmatics, an interior link in the process of strengthening the credibility of the Christian dynamic with the content of faith” (Winfried Werner, Fundamentaltheologie bei Karl Rahner: Denkwege und Paradigmen [Tubingen, 2003], p. 453; cited in Thomas O’Meara, OP, in his review of Werner’s volume, Theological Studies, 65/3 [2004]: 652–4). Consonant with this judgment, the present chapter underscores the contribution Rahner’s metaphysical outlook makes to his construal of the theological and pastoral components of the Christian life, a task distinct from exploring his metaphysical foundation and first principles as such.

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telos, and thus the definitive “human” is the exemplification of what Rahner labels “hearer of the word.” The ontology, in other words, functions as a kind of template to describe the Christian life; it contributes a scheme by which the Christian life is parsed and described. What I call a framework or template of meaning by which Rahner describes the Christian life is what Karl Barth might have labeled, in the form of an accusation, a Weltanschauung or “worldview.” The subtitle of Hearer of the Word informs the reader of the general method informing this work: the author means to lay a foundation for a philosophy of religion. The volume is thus a kind of philosophical key to the material in chapter 1 of Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith, “Hearer of the Message.” Rahner’s discussion of human spirit—especially this spirit’s “openness,” “transcendence” and “obediential potency”—is frequently misunderstood. In the view of some, his understanding of the human person as “hearer of the word” is thought to compromise key Christian tenets. These objections commonly turn on an understanding of created reality—of spirit—that Rahner himself did not espouse, and which is said to threaten a prevenient understanding of grace.2 Rahner’s response will be discussed in comparison to Karl Barth below in §3.2.1. For now it is enough to note that Rahner’s view of persons as “spirit” cannot be considered abstractly in isolation from other theological loci, such that one might erroneously conclude that the essence of human nature is a “hearing” that autonomously reaches out and grasps what it hears. That sort of hearing is “always already” knowledge, purely creative and autonomous. Rahner rejects this rather self-sufficient view of human spirit, chastising it in language that underscores human reception and dependence. In Hearer of the Word Rahner is much occupied with circumscribing human transcendence within the rubric of receptivity. He writes: Human openness for being as such does not derive from a previous, albeit narrower openness, which would come to us with our very nature, making known to us some objects, such as our essence itself. Rather transcendence opens up for us when we receive an object from without, showing itself by itself.3

Here Rahner sides with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom maintained that human knowing is conditioned by constant receptivity. For the latter two, all ideas derive from contact between the senses and the world, so that there can be no in-born or native knowledge, nor intuition.4 Rather than created by God as autonomous, intuitive and self-sufficient knowers, human persons are created as receptive and so dependent knowers. 2   Cf. David H. Kelsey, “Two Theologies of Death: Anthropological Gleanings,” Modern Theology, 13/3 (1997): 347–70. 3   Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York, 1994), pp. 119, 122. 4  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, pp. 113, 122.

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Persons’ receptivity is a feature of the mediated quality of sensate knowing. It is instructive to observe that, in Rahner’s ontology, “matter” is not described in reductively physical terms. Indeed matter is matter precisely in that it transcends itself in and toward “spirit.” So too, human sensing and sensate knowledge is not sensing and knowledge of reductively physical phenomena. Human sensibility ultimately gets annexed by “spirit,” so that matter and the human sensing of matter possess an openness toward transcendence, toward “being,” toward spirit. Spirit is the telos of matter and of human sensibility. Human sensibility is not to be understood as a power existing mainly for itself, but from the start as a power of the spirit for its own purpose. It follows that the spirit possesses its own openness, its stance before being as such, hence also before pure being, only because and insofar as, through its entrance into matter, it acquires an openness for, a stance before the material things in space and time.5

Indeed, Rahner’s contention that human sensibility is not to be understood as a power existing for itself ineluctably raises a notion that has much vexed scholars of Karl Rahner, namely, what he meant by the German word Vorgriff, a word which carries much freight in Rahner’s epistemology and theologies of revelation and human personhood. Rahner used the word as a technical ontological term to mean “pre-grasp” or “anticipation.” For him it denotes what takes place when persons grasp or sense material in the world that make up what he refers to as “appearance” and “historicity.” It refers not only to the idea that matter is never simply matter—for it is also the vehicle of transcendence—but also to the idea that human spirit, as receptive, bumps into data in the world, and this data becomes the occasion of finite spirit surpassing that data and reaching out transcendentally toward being as such. In Hearer of the Word, Rahner describes Vorgriff in this way: By Vorgriff we meant the a priori power, given with the very nature of the spirit, to represent to oneself the single quiddities brought up by the receptive sense knowledge in a dynamic a priori reaching out of the spirit for the absolute range of its possible objects. The single object is grasped as a stage in the reaching out of the spirit for the complete fulfillment of its capacity. … Vorgriff is the transcendence of the spirit, the surpassing of the spirit, in which we grasp the single object because, in a certain sense, we already look beyond it into the absolute range of our possible objects as such. We have also shown that this transcendence is not simply a transcendence toward a finite circle of possible objects, nor originally a transcendence toward nothingness, but that it is a transcendence toward pure being that has no intrinsic limits in itself. … It is not a self-subsisting grasp of being as such, but the anticipation [Vorgriff] of being, which is possible only in grasping the appearance.6 5

  Ibid., p. 120   Ibid., pp. 121–2.

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Human persons as spirit thus reach beyond sense and matter to what matter mediates, namely, “pure being”—the “whither” of persons’ transcendence, described as “self-presence, self-luminosity, self-affirmation, will and value.”7 In opening up human persons toward being as such, Vorgriff opens them to God. Rahner’s language describing this process takes on a more theological tone in Foundations of Christian Faith, so that customary terms in Hearer of the Word such as “pure being” and “being as such” are shown in Foundations of Christian Faith to be philosophical pseudonyms for God: Man is understood as the existent of transcendental necessity who in every categorical act of knowledge and of freedom always transcends himself and the categorical object towards the incomprehensible mystery by which the act and the object are opened and borne, the mystery which we call God.8

Rahner also indicates that Vorgriff is neither a conscious nor thematized moment of transcendental reflection, nor is it the experience of some object or thing alongside others. Not itself a kind of data, Vorgriff is rather an aspect inherent in the human experience of data, objects and things. Indeed, as Rahner notes below, persons’ transcendence is always in the background of the events constituting their thrownness (Geworfenheit) and historicity. In Foundations of Christian Faith, he writes that Vorgriff is a basic mode of being which is prior to and permeates every objective experience. We must emphasize again and again that the transcendence meant here is not the thematically conceptualized “concept” of transcendence in which transcendence is reflected upon objectively. It is rather the a priori openness of the subject to being as such, which is present precisely when a person experiences himself as involved in the multiplicity of cares and concerns and fears and hopes of his everyday world. Real transcendence is always in the background, so to speak, in those origins of human life and human knowledge over which we have no control.9

Human receptivity is underscored with respect to transcendent knowledge being neither native nor intuitive but something for which persons are created and into which persons are opened. In this case, a passive verb is critical in conveying Rahner’s epistemological and theological intent. Human persons, as spirit, do not open themselves up, but rather are created for transcendence and are opened up

7

  Ibid., p. 126.   Ibid., p. 209. 9  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych (New York, 1978), pp. 34–5 © 1978 Crossroad Publishing Company, reproduced with permission of the publisher. 8

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into transcendence.10 Human receptivity pertains not only in the way the world and senses mediate all knowledge, but also to persons’ transcendence having its origin outside of them, in God’s constitution of them. [A person’s openness] must be understood as due to the working of that to which man [sic] is open, namely, being in an absolute sense. But the movement of transcendence is not the subject creating its own unlimited space as though it had absolute power over being, but is the infinite horizon of being making itself manifest … he cannot understand himself as a subject in the sense of an absolute subject, but only in the sense of one who receives being, ultimately only in the sense of grace. In this context “grace” means the freedom of the ground of being which gives being to man, a freedom which man experiences in his finiteness and contingency, and means as well what we call “grace” in a more strictly theological sense.11

The epistemological distinction between in-born knowing and dependent knowing—or absolute subjectivity and receptive subjectivity—is critical for Rahner, because it distinguishes between (i) an autonomous human nature for whom knowledge is an essential, intuitive or self-derived characteristic12 and (ii) a dependent human nature for whom transcendent knowledge arises not on account of human nature itself but on account of the characteristic of the “object” of knowledge to communicate itself and on the dependent nature’s characteristic of being made able to “receive” such communication. Rahner intends the latter of these two. It is on this distinction that he pins a theological anthropology and theology of grace. Human spirit can be understood only if one appreciates Rahner’s insistence that it “hears” because the object that speaks is also the condition for the possibility of its hearing. Hearing is possible because what is heard gives itself to the finite spiritual hearer. Only as the object gives itself can the hearer be a hearer, and so only as the object gives itself can the hearer be opened up transcendentally into the communicator. The human spirit does not speak its own word, but is constituted to be able to hear what is spoken to it; and in hearing the human spirit does not achieve its hearing but rather, in freedom, is opened up into hearing. As 10

  In an article on grace and freedom Rahner deploys the grammatical strategy of combining active and passive verbs to designate persons’ experience of being acted on in grace and of acting in freedom: “One is only accepting what one undeniably is, both real and yet derivative, a creature which produced in freedom and is produced as grace as it acts” (Karl Rahner, “Grace and Freedom,” in Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi [New York, 1975], p. 601). 11  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 34. 12   Rahner distinguishes his own program from German Idealism and its proclivity toward pantheism and emphasis on humanity itself as the event of absolute Spirit. See Hearer of the Word, pp. 39ff., and “The Hiddenness of God,” Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland, OSB (New York, 1983), p. 236.

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Rahner’s theology of freedom will make clear (§2.2 below), the human spirit’s transcendence is genuinely its own, but only dependently and receptively, not essentially and unconditionally. Hearing presupposes speech, and speech makes possible hearing. The order is non-negotiable. This accounts for Rahner’s use of the term “empty” to describe the space of human being into which God’s free revelation is poured.13 The human being as spirit is not, by its own nature, full and able to grasp God, but filled and enabled by God to accept God’s communication. In the words of Rahner, humanity’s spiritual or transcendent “orientation does not imply that we have a right to this revelation, but only that we have a duty to accept it, should it freely and gratuitously be granted to us.”14 This emphasis on “acceptance” of one’s nature as created and given by God gestures toward what this book understands as “piety.” “Acceptance” or “piety” designates persons’ positive human response to God’s constitution of them, including the reception and dependence this constitution entails. It is also acceptance of God’s subsequent communication to persons who freely listen to the “Word” within the confines and variegated multiplicity of a daily life continually opening them up into transcendence. In this way, prevenient grace is presupposed and emphasized as the condition for the possibility of human freedom operating and flourishing. The two primary characterizations of the human person with which Rahner is concerned in Hearer of the Word are “spirit” and “freedom.” Freedom will be discussed in detail below. For now let us remain on the topic of the human being as “spirit.” The term designates the transcendental quality of persons standing before the unknown God open to a possible free revelation.15 To be “spirit” is nothing less than to be that at which “Word” aims and intends. Spirit here is understood as a kind of finite receptor for revelation, a receptor that can hear and accept the Word only by virtue of the fact that it was made able to hear and accept. In other words, for Rahner, grace superintends both the divine act of revealing and the human capacity to hear and accept. He insists again in Foundations of Christian Faith on the priority  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 134. Rahner balances the idea of human nature having, on the one hand, an unlimited orientation to “the mystery of fullness” with a contrasting statement concerning human nature as the “emptiness” (Leere) into which God speaks. I suggest the latter qualification is meant to insist that the capacity in human nature to hear is fundamentally a claim about grace, and that human nature’s orientation to the mystery of fullness is conceptually “from above” rather than below. The orientation toward transcendence in no way removes the human subject’s existential poverty and dependence. These simultaneous orientations toward transcendence and emptiness coexist peacefully in the human subject and are a dual affirmation surfacing repeatedly in Rahner’s writings (cf. Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 217, 223 [Ger., pp. 216, 221]). Rahner uses the terms “mere void” and “desert of nothingness,” in “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 111, 120. 14  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 14. 15   Ibid., pp. 9, 134. 13

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of grace in human transcendence, where he describes “spirit” in two key related ways. Spirit is “the single person insofar as he becomes conscious of himself in an absolute presence to himself, and indeed does this by the fact that he is always oriented towards the absoluteness of reality as such, and toward its one ground whom we call God.”16 These two movements of the self—absolute closeness or return to the self, and in such a way that the self is also oriented to reality as such— fundamentally belong to the operation of grace. [This orientation] has rather the character of being taken possession of, and of being drawn into the infinite mystery. It is only in loving acceptance of this mystery and in its unpredictable disposal of us that we can genuinely undergo this process, and undergo it in that freedom which is necessarily given in transcendence of every individual thing and of one’s own self.17

The passive verb in the first sentence of that quotation is critical to appreciating Rahner’s understanding of grace. Rahner and Barth agree with this formal statement, namely, that grace superintends the divine act of revealing and the human capacity to hear and accept. But they differ on material claims concerning how this is the case theologically (cf. §3.2 below). That is, both agree on the receptive quality of human persons as spirit. But Rahner supplements this receptive quality with a transcendental quality, seen above with respect to Vorgriff, in which persons live their lives “while reaching ceaselessly for the absolute, in openness toward God. …We are forever the infinite openness of the finite for God.”18 In Rahner’s designation of human persons as “spirit” there should be no suspicion that he construes his metaphysical anthropology in a lopsided monophysitist fashion. Monophysitism in any theological locus—Christology, anthropology, ecclesiology—is a shortcoming Rahner took great pains to avoid. With respect to his anthropology, which is fundamentally integral, the designation of persons as “spirit” does not suggest they are spirit alone, disembodied from the particularities of biological and historical existence. In Hearer of the Word he is scarcely able to discuss persons’ spiritual constitution without also observing historicity as the necessary scene or “appearance” of spirit’s transcendence; indeed “appearance” or historical embodiment is the “first starting point, and hence also the lasting foundation of all our knowledge.”19 “Appearance” functions as a technical term to designate the context of revelation, namely, what we meet in our history: everything existing within the world, not only the objects which can immediately be known through the senses, but we ourselves  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 183.   Ibid., p. 183. 18  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 53. 19   Ibid., p. 125. 16 17

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too in our whole being and activity, as, through our knowledge of and dealing with the things of the world, we arrive at grasping our being.20

Appearance is thus a constitutive feature of spirit, even if logically distinct. This theme anticipates and parallels his subsequent writings in Theological Investigations where he treats the integration of matter and spirit at great length.21 But earlier in Hearer of the Word, he founded his doctrine of revelation and epistemology on the claim that “even as spirit and precisely as spirit the human person is a historical being.”22 Because they are spirit, human persons are oriented to a possible revelation. A revelation from God, should it come, can be received only in “word” and “history” and in history’s particularity and uniqueness. As history and finitude mediate divine communication, they also mediate human hearing vis-à-vis acceptance or rejection. So Rahner’s preoccupation in Hearer of the Word is the human being who in history listens to a possible revelation of God and who both hears and accepts the message contextually. To hear and accept such revelation contextually simply underscores that revelation comes in the domain of what Rahner calls “appearance,” which in epistemological terms is “natural knowledge, i.e., through human concepts and words.”23 In a critical passage from Hearer of the Word, Rahner writes: Hence for us finite and receptive spirits there exists a luminosity of being as such only in the luminosity of material realities; we turn toward being as such only when turning toward material being; we go out toward God [Ausgang zu Gott] only by entering into the world [Eingang in die Welt]. And insofar as the access to God is given to us only in our a priori structure as spirit, only in the transcendence belonging properly to us, hence in our return into ourselves, we may also say: only by stepping out [Auskehr] into the world can we so enter into [Einkehr] ourselves that we encounter being and God.24

Elsewhere Rahner notes that this dynamic—stepping out into world and history and appearance in order to more fully become and enter into oneself “as one Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 133; cf. Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 210.   Cf. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 178–202; “The Resurrection of the Body,” Theological Investigations, vol. 2, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore, 1963); “On the Theology of the Incarnation”; “Christianity and the New Man,” Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl- H. Kruger (London, 1975); “Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World,” Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl- H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (London, 1974); “Immanent and Transcendent Consummation of the World,” Theological Investigations, vol. 10, trans. David Bourke (New York, 1977); “The Body in the Order of Salvation,” Theological Investigations, vol. 17, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York, 1981). 22  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 9. 23   Ibid., p. 16. 24  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 120 (German interpolations are from the translator, Joseph Donceel); cf. Mk 8:34–38; Mt. 16:24–26; Lk 9:23–25. 20 21

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who-exists”—transforms both persons and their world. What was previously mere “physical” time is now “his” time; what previously was mere “environment” is now a “real world” and “the now of responsible decision.”25 Human integration here becomes comprehensive and extends to include the cosmos as a whole as the history of spirit and of dialogue. The structure of human knowledge combines “both spiritual transcendence and sense experience,” and the latter is critical to understanding revelation as being comprehended in a human word.26 The stipulation that revelation always has a concrete historical “appearance” in which it is heard and accepted or rejected is critical for Rahner in that it is by one’s whole being, not a fragment of it, that one is a hearer of the word. It is by one’s whole being, not despite it, that one is a hearer of the word. This motif is made clear in the systematic cohesion of his anthropology and epistemology. What Rahner labels “appearance” and “natural knowledge” certainly point to the irreducibly mediated—even “earthy”—character of revelation. Perhaps more bold, however, is Rahner’s insistence that mediation in no way undermines the divine will or capacity to communicate divine life and grace, nor the ability to communicate all that is to be communicated. Indeed, God’s revelation is grasped in the form of a human “word” embedded in the particularity of history and subjectivity, yet this particularity does not restrict what may be revealed.27 Mediation is not dissolution. Revelation is not data or information transmitted and catalogued; it is divine self-donation, God’s gift of God’s own reality ad extra in grace. God gives not information, but Godself, and the gift is without limit, just as human transcendence is without limit, its receptive and dependent qualities notwithstanding. This chapter began with the claim that Rahner’s epistemology and the theologically cognate loci of revelation and grace are, despite common misunderstandings of the role of ontology in Rahner’s system, best characterized by reception and dependency. This point is corroborated a second time by reference to another key ingredient of Rahner’s metaphysical understanding of human person, namely, the potentia obedientialis or obediential potency. The above paragraphs have noted how for Rahner human persons are “spirit” and characterized by a capacity for transcendence, a capacity that, it is important to note, is not confined by history and finitude. Rather than inhibit transcendence, “world,” “history” and “appearance” open or mediate persons transcendentally. In other words, the spiritual transcendence of human persons, along with their receptivity to God’s self-communication, cannot be imparted to a creature whose nature is confined to purely “mundane” levels of existence. Here Rahner’s Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of potency is key.

25   Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler (eds), Dictionary of Theology (New York, 1981), p. 209. 26  Rahner, Hearer of the Word, p. 132. 27   Ibid., p. 132.

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Potentia is a capacity; it is not act. It denotes not an abstract, neutral capacity, but a disposition toward obedience. Potentia is “the disposition of a thing to be determined and perfected by an accession of being that is distinct from it and yet possessed as its own, so that the two (the subject as potency—the determination as act) are really one (the determined subject as actuated potency) without being absolutely identical.”28 In a move that preserves the order of grace as distinct from (yet related to) the natural, Rahner uses “potency” to designate not what humans are, nor what they are owed, but what they might become in view of the divine commitment to communicate. There is no necessity here, neither in the divine selfcommunication nor in the human spirit’s becoming. Grace is indeed grace, which is to say, unnecessary and gratuitous; and freedom is the subject’s open potency for self-determination toward authenticity or contradiction. Rather than necessity, there is instead potency for hearing, should the divine life in fact communicate. A helpful analogy can be drawn from the dynamics of human love, and Rahner himself draws it. When one person loves another, the love is spontaneous, unowed and unexacted. The one who is loved can neither claim nor coerce the lover’s love. It comes to the beloved as new, creative and transformative. The lover loves freely, and the beloved’s most appropriate response can only be grateful acceptance of the love as a gratuitous gift lending depth and fulfillment to their existence, a gift that need not have been, yet is.29 This distinct possibility in the spiritual creature to receive a nature not its own is actualized irrevocably and maximally in Jesus Christ, the hypostatic union of God and humanity whom Rahner calls “the fullness of time.”30 Jesus Christ fully actualizes the radical self-expression of God in human nature that is potentia obedientialis. In the obedience of this one human subject in history, human hearing is assumed and assumes the mutually inclusive dynamisms of love for God in response to the love constitutive of divine self-communication, and love for neighbor, which is the symptom, emblem, and mediation of love for God.31 Jesus Christ is that person in history and human nature in whom God became radically expressed, so that the divine offer of self-communication and its human acceptance in freedom are one. The humanity of Jesus Christ is thus definitively human, “man in the most radical way”—what Chalcedon in 451 labeled verus homo.32 The dynamic pattern in Rahner’s epistemology, noted above, of stepping out (Auskehr) into the world so as to enter into (Einkehr) oneself, is given a   Rahner and Vorgrimler (eds), Dictionary of Theology, p. 399.   Karl Rahner, “Potentia Oboedientialis,” Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, vol. 5 (New York, 1970), pp. 65–7. 30  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 194. 31   To use this verb in its passive and active forms—“is assumed” and “assumes”— reflects my intent to be faithful to Rahner’s Chalcedonian discipline, reflected in his preference to think through the incarnation as an event “from above” and “from below,” an event that can be described as “dialogue”; cf. ibid., pp. 250–51. 32   Ibid., p. 226. 28 29

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Christological determination in Foundations of Christian Faith that cuts to the heart of the meaning of potentia obedientialis. Jesus Christ is the exemplar of obediential potency in human nature because he surrenders his human nature—in activities Rahner labels “dispossession” and “existential self-dedication”—to “the mystery of the fullness.”33 He existentially dedicates himself in such a way that his nature belongs so little to himself that it becomes the nature of God. The meaning of Rahner’s obediential potency is made especially clear in his discussion of it in relation to Christology. It is not a neutral potency alongside any number of possibilities available to persons. It is the potency for hypostatic union, a potency which “is objectively identical with the essence of man.”34 A further stipulation is necessary. The obediential potency in human nature for hypostatic union need not be realized in every person. The goal of all persons, a goal that is coextensive with world history and the history of the cosmos, is selftranscendence directed toward the self-communication of God and its beatifying acceptance or justification.35 In Jesus Christ this potency is fully actualized; in him it is absolute and irrevocable. The full actualization of obediential potency—called hypostatic union—in Rahner’s view need occur just once for the world to enter its “final phase,” the divinization of the world as a whole, which is not necessarily its shortest stage.36 The incarnation of the Word of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ exposes all other persons. Its actuality in the person of Jesus shows the comprehensive way in which this potency in others is less than fully actual and even desecrated in the rejection of the divine self-communication that is sin. For Rahner, the difference between the humanity of Christ and that of other persons is not one of degree, so that other persons might very nearly or approximately actualize the potency in human nature for hypostatic union. Rather than a difference of degree, the difference between the humanity of Jesus Christ and the humanity of all other persons is qualitative, so that the latter participate in the former.37 This is why Jesus Christ is savior in an absolute sense. Both the hypostatic union in him and other persons’ acceptance of their transcendence are equally indebted to the operation of grace. The difference between them, Rahner suggests, is that in Jesus Christ God’s offer and human acceptance are present irrevocably, and, very importantly, in a historically tangible way.

33

  Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” pp. 109–10.   Ibid., p. 110. 35   On the solidarity and the coextension of human, world and cosmic history, see Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 141–6. 36   Ibid., p. 181. 37   For examples of Rahner’s understanding of participation, see ibid., pp. 161, 211, 225–6. 34

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Grace in all of us and the hypostatic union in the one Jesus Christ can only be understood together, and as a unity they signify the one free decision of God for a supernatural order of salvation, for his self-communication. In Christ the self-communication of God takes place basically to all men. … This union is distinguished from our grace not by what has been offered in it, which in both instances, including that of Jesus, is grace. It is distinguished rather by the fact that Jesus is the offer for us, and we ourselves are not once again the offer, but the recipients of God’s offer to us.38

To label Jesus Christ the “absolute savior” is to claim that he epitomizes, consummates and signals the success of history as God’s free dialogue in grace with a free humanity. He is the very telos of God’s dialogue with humanity in history, exposing unambiguously to the world its very meaning in deification. However, the incarnation does not signal an end to history or to the drama of dialogue between God and spiritual creatures that history is.39 In the genuine history of dialogue in freedom between God and the human race, a point is conceivable at which God’s self-communication to the world is indeed not yet concluded, but nevertheless the fact of this self-communication is already given unambiguously, and the success, the victory and the irreversibility of this process has become manifest in and in spite of this ongoing dialogue of freedom. It is precisely this beginning of the irreversible and successful history of salvation which we are calling the absolute savior, and hence in this sense this beginning is the fullness of time, and it is the end of the previous history of salvation and revelation which was, as it were, still open.40 Rahner’s systematic concern with monophysitism—seen above in his concern that we not distort the human person as “spirit” by neglecting to acknowledge matter, body and history as spirit’s “appearance”—is made clear in the Christological context as well. For the absolute savior is, in the first instance, a historical moment of God’s salvific activity in the world. But this insistence on the priority of grace must be affirmed in a way that honors the unitive tension of divine and human agency affirmed by Chalcedon; the system must honor the dimensions “from above” and “from below” as equally decisive to reflection on christology. Rahner fends off Christological monophysitism in this way: He cannot simply be God himself acting in the world, but must be a part of the cosmos, a moment within its history, and indeed at its climax … Jesus is truly a man, truly a part of the earth, truly a moment in this world’s biological process of becoming, a moment in man’s natural history, for he was “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4). He is a man who just like us receives in his spiritual, human and finite subjectivity the self-communication of God in grace which we assert 38

  Ibid., pp. 201–2.   Ibid., p. 280. 40   Ibid., p. 194. 39

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of all men, and therefore of the cosmos, as the climax of the development in which the world comes to itself absolutely and comes to the immediacy of God absolutely.41

Freedom functions as a critical ingredient in this process of human subjectivity coming to itself and to God absolutely. We now turn to that ingredient, and to its frustration in sin and guilt. We make this turn having observed a critical feature of Rahner’s system, namely, that Christology is the conceptual lens through which the metaphysical anthropology is most adequately viewed, the lens through which it should be viewed. This holds true for the following sections detailing freedom, the unity of love of God and neighbor, and for the unitive pattern of piety and responsibility reflected in each. Christology, in other words, is Rahner’s preferred principle of coherence explaining and exemplifying the system. 2.2 Freedom Rahner’s conception of freedom, just like his conception of the obediential potency in human nature for hypostatic union, concerns the human person precisely as a transcendent spiritual creature. If the obediential potency in human nature belongs to the order of grace, as suggested above in §2.1, then freedom is its correlate from below as the transcendental faculty whereby the human person utters a “Yes” or “No” to herself, neighbor and God. Yet, just like the potentia obedientialis, freedom also and primarily belongs to the order of grace, since it is the characteristic of spirit and is therefore the “capacity for the eternal.”42 “The experience of freedom and responsibility illuminated by revelation experiences and knows this freedom precisely as a gift of God’s grace both in its basic condition and in its proper exercise.”43 Its grammar of grace notwithstanding, Rahner’s conception of freedom will now be shown to accent the human person’s capacity to make a final and definitive decision about herself—and therewith a decision for or against God—in and through the multiple ways in which she forms herself vis-à-vis the categorical objectifications in the world mediating and qualifying her person-forming freedom. This section takes up three specifications on freedom: (i) freedom as a response to oneself that is person-forming and final, (ii) freedom as response to God precisely in a person’s responsibility toward herself for final and definitive existential self-formation and (iii) certain tangible and material objectifications of freedom embedded in world history—original sin and incarnation—which co-determine freedom, conditioning it toward both abortive and authentic expressions. 41

  Ibid., p. 195.   Ibid., p. 96. 43   Karl Rahner, “Guilt—Responsibility—Punishment,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, 1969), p. 200. 42

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2.2.1  Freedom is Personal Responsibility: Self-mastery and Finality What should be noted first about Rahner’s conception of freedom is what it is not. While freedom in the theological sense involves the will and is not unrelated to choice, it involves far more than the elective capacity to choose between a variety of mundane options. Nor is freedom in the theological sense to be understood as an autonomy marked by non-interference or ‘freedom from’ imposition and determination by outside forces. Freedom, for Rahner, is not about autonomy or solitary interiority; indeed, the withdrawal into one’s “own unassailable interior being” becomes the “sheer negation” of hell.44 We observed in the previous section the ontological way in which human persons are dependent and receptive rather than autonomous. It will become clear below that a litmus test for whether one acts in freedom is found in the degree to which she has bound herself to and for others, the degree to which her exercise of freedom before God has resulted in an existential dispossession of herself that simultaneously achieves herself. This apparent paradox will be discussed later. At present, we consider freedom consisting in personal responsibility for final and definitive existential self-formation. Along with the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, and indeed Karl Barth, Karl Rahner holds that, with respect to freedom, ultimately one does not do something; one does oneself.45 Instead of designating a subject’s elective capacity to choose among a set of possibilities, and instead of designating a subject’s entitlement to non-interference, freedom refers in the first instance to the subject forming itself—“disposing” itself— as such and as a whole. “In real freedom, the subject always intends himself, understands and posits himself.”46 It is a transcendental mark of human existence and it has profound ontological connotations, for Rahner links it to the validity and finality of one’s being. Freedom in this theological sense is thus freedom of being; the freedom of a human subject “to determine and dispose of himself as a whole and finally.”47 This freedom of being has both ontological and eschatological connotations.

  Karl Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” Theological Investigations, vol. 2, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore, 1973), p. 93. 45   Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” in The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (New York, 2002), p. 129; Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (New York, 2004), p. 793; II/2: The Doctrine of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (New York, 2004), p. 516; Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 165. 46  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 94. 47   Karl Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York, 1982), p. 184. 44

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With respect to the former, the integral and holistic character of Rahner’s anthropology resurfaces in a consideration of freedom. His anthropology is thoroughly “holistic,” uniting matter with spirit; body with soul; nature with grace; history, world and appearance with revelation.48 The anthropology’s holism resurfaces under the heading of freedom because Rahner understands the “freedom of being” to refer not to a faculty existing behind the material, biological, external and historical realities of the human person. Freedom is not compartmentalized in the human subject. He rightly points to the theology of Origen as an example from the early church of a regrettable Gnostic conception of freedom. Origen’s anthropology, and so too his doctrine of creation, hung very much on Platonic and possibly Gnostic categories in a way Karl Barth, for example, with his acute suspicion against allying the Christian gospel with incompatible “worldviews” (Weltanschauung), could never have condoned. For Origen subscribed to the eternal pre-existence of souls with God and viewed their descent into material bodies as punishment for their misuse of freedom. Creation thus strongly coincided with Fall. Origen understood this freedom to operate pre-historically and pre-corporeally, and this, for Rahner, involves less than the whole, single totality of human personhood.49 The freedom Rahner has in mind situates humans as whole persons who shape themselves—Rahner occasionally uses the controversial terms “makes” and “achieves”—precisely as material, biological and historical subjects. Those aspects of personhood are key because they mediate freedom by serving as the categorical “stuff” within which freedom works. They are analogous to what Rahner called “appearance” in Hearer of the Word. Transcendent freedom as the capacity for existential self-formation works only categorically, through precisely the same categories mediating persons’ transcendental validity. For transcendence is always given only as the condition of the possibility of a knowledge in categories and not by itself alone. One can never go directly towards it. One can never reach out to it directly. It gives itself only in so far as it directs us silently to something else, to something finite as the object of direct vision.50 48

  Consider the following clear statement on integral holism: “When we consider that as spirit and as corporeal being, as both a transcendental being bounding on the absolute and as a being in time and space, man is an absolute unity which cannot simply be split up into body and soul, and when we consider that we know spirit only as corporeal and historical spirit, and that we experience and know our corporeality as the corporeality of a spiritual and free being, then it is also clear that eschatological statements about the fulfillment of the soul and the fulfillment of the body are not of such a nature that they could be completely separated form each other and assigned to different realities” (Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 435–6). 49   Origen, On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (Gloucester, 1973), esp. bk. I. 50   Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” p. 180.

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This conceptual framework lends metaphysical depth to the Ignatian commitment to “finding God in all things,” most especially in one’s neighbor, as will be shown below in §2.3.51 At this point the systematic quality of Rahner’s entire theology becomes prominent, requiring us to widen the discussion into another locus in order fully to appreciate freedom as person-forming and “final.” That locus is eschatology, since freedom is “final” in the eschatological sense of the term, and disposes persons in their entirety: body, soul, world, history. Freedom in Rahner’s theological sense can be appreciated fully when viewed from the particular concerns he expresses within the locus of eschatology. As Origen’s counterexample made clear, individual histories of spiritual creatures do not pre-exist their respective biological lives. Rahner insists a person’s life begins with his or her history and is identical and coterminous with biological life. Rejected here are all forms of dualism in which material or biological life is conceived as alien or nefarious or in which the personal spirit journeys according to a cyclical model of existence first as pure spirit, then spirit-in-world, then pure spirit again. The human person instead is spirit-in-world, and never was nor will be pure spirit. This accounts for the formal distinction between creature as spirit-in-world and God as pure Spirit. The mutual interrelation of spirit and matter in the human creature survives death and the radical break which death is. This interrelation of spirit and matter also obtains in postmortem resurrection of the flesh. The presupposition here is that matter and the physical world are not extrinsic but intrinsic to spirit’s reality.52 Indeed, matter seems to be the condition of the possibility of personal history, and personal history the condition of the possibility of freedom, and freedom of achievement and consummation. Spirit’s “world” remains constitutive of achieved and consummated spirit. What role does freedom play in this transformation? A notable consequence of Rahner’s contention that eschatology has concrete historical origins and referents—that it is future-oriented reflection on the experience of God’s communication in the present—is the decisive role human freedom occupies within the history of the world’s response to God’s speech. This one concrete existence in which we consummate our own spiritual, final liberty, is itself involved in a dynamic history which sometimes ends in transfiguration, a reality not only of the spiritual person, but of his common sphere of being. The question then arises: how do I accept the final condition of the sphere in which I necessarily am? Do I accept it as the transfigured world, or as what the Bible calls hell fire.53

51

  Rahner, “Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World,” p. 45.   Rahner, “Immanent and Transcendent Consummation of the World,” p. 285. 53   Rahner, “The Body in the Order of Salvation,” p. 88. 52

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An individual’s freedom works itself out in a situation of radical solidarity with one’s immediate community and, indeed, the whole of reality, cosmos, history, and world. It is because of persons’ freedom that they participate in eternity while remaining temporal and in time. Freedom is an attribute of spirit, and as spirit-inworld, human persons are said to create or achieve their own eternity. Decisions in time are not simply temporal but stand outside of time as well, and are not reducible to the “mere onward flow” or “mere momentariness” of time.54 Freedom is the freedom of being, transcendence and eternity. In their individual histories, persons have the capacity to determine their validity to the extent that these decisions reflect absolute faith, hope and love, and not their opposite.55 Rather than producing a series of “mere nothings,” a human person “achieves” in time “a validity which is ultimately incommensurable with the merely external experience of time.”56 Freedom for Rahner is always freedom to decide about oneself entirely, finally and eternally. We posit ourselves—who we are—through the exercise of freedom. “Ultimately he does not do something, but does himself.”57 Freedom is persons’ transcendental capacity for forming the eternity they are becoming. The process issues in concrete historical effects in the world that live on to influence and condition other persons’ free response to the divine self-communication (cf. below §2.2.3). Yet freedom as the freedom of being must be understood in terms of its ground. Rahner maintains “it is this God who by his free and absolute act of grace makes it possible for human beings to redeem themselves, so to speak.”58 The language Rahner uses here—humans “redeeming themselves”—if isolated from his comprehensive system easily suggests a thinly veiled form of works righteousness. The question now becomes whether human achievement and consummation come from within or from without, and whether an understanding of immanent consummation does violence to the sola gratia quality of God’s redemptive activity. Yet to place these two options in stark contrast and opposition would be to miss the nuance with which Rahner intends to navigate this issue. He maintains that salvation comes both from outside (is wrought by God in freedom) and from within (is achieved subjectively in freedom) and that these two assertions are not mutually exclusive when jointly maintained. That humans 54   Karl Rahner, “The Life of the Dead,” Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 350–501. 55   Ibid., p. 35. 56  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 440. “For each one of us, however, the life span apportioned to us is that brief moment in time which will be what constitutes our ultimate purpose and meaning” (Karl Rahner, “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” trans. Declan Marmion, SM and Gesa Thiessen, Theological Studies, 61 [2000], p. 15). 57  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 94. 58   Karl Rahner, “The Christian Understanding of Redemption,” Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. Hugh M. Riley (New York, 1988), p. 241.

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may collaborate to achieve their redemption, that they are enabled to participate in history’s drama of dialogue, in Rahner’s view, does not compromise the sola gratia quality of God’s relating as redeemer and consummator. It is enough here to note that Rahner’s entire theology presupposes that prevenient grace functions as the prior condition of freedom enabling persons to achieve their validity before God.59 Redemption is never imposed, for salvation history itself is a dialogue marked by freedom on both sides; redemption “is not something that happens without [persons’] collaboration.”60 Rahner preserves the sola gratia quality of redemption by insisting that human participation in this dialogue is itself enabled by grace, which is to say God himself functions as the immanent momentum in human persons by which they achieve themselves. Any talk, therefore, of persons “achieving” or “redeeming” themselves in transcendental freedom must be accompanied by the prior claim of prevenient grace concerning God being at once the giver, the gift and the ground of the acceptance of the gift.61 This conditioning of transcendental freedom by grace will concern us again below in §2.2.3 in a discussion of the bondage which also circumscribes and conditions freedom, and of the liberation of freedom by the divine pneuma or sanctifying grace. The total project of a human existence culminates in death, yet death, while representing absolute change from what preceded it, is not the human person’s “entry” into eternity. One’s personal history of freedom, lived before God as a fundamental option, shapes personhood and becomes immortal in time. It is only because we have already become immortal in our lives that death and its threatening and impenetrable appearance of annihilation is so deathly for us. … These experiences take place in moral decisions in which a subject affirms himself in his unity and affirms his final and definitive validity. In these decisions a subject is immediately present who both in his essence and in his action is incommensurable with transitory time … wherever a free and lonely act of decision has taken place in absolute obedience to a higher law, or in radical affirmation of love for another person, something eternal has taken place, and man is experienced immediately as having transcended the difference of time in its mere temporal duration.62

In death, a person’s history of free dialogue with God’s free communication is concretized and made final. In summary of the radical change that is death, one commentator writes:

 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 441; cf. “The Life of the Dead,” p.

59

351.

60

  Rahner, “The Christian Understanding of Redemption,” p. 241.  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 125; cf. pp. 128, 146, 171–2. 62   Ibid., pp. 438–9. 61

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Because death is axiologically present throughout the one long project of my life, it is a change that embraces the whole of my life as something genuinely new. The change of my death amounts to my transformation into a new creature in contrast to the creature bound in sin whose reality was self-contradictory and self-destructive and whose death had become a curse.63

This perceptive remark anticipates a critical issue not yet addressed in these pages, namely, that the creature who in grace is created with a potentia obedientialis for divine communication and freedom to hear and accept is also “the creature bound in sin whose reality was self-contradictory and self-destructive and whose death had become a curse.” It is important to recall that this statement is no less true of freedom than Rahner’s statements concerning freedom opening a person up into transcendence and finality before God. This critical issue of freedom’s frustration will be addressed more fully below in §2.2.3. For now, we note how freedom is person forming and is the capacity for the eternal. It is also the way in which one utters a “Yes” to God, or, in self-contradiction and sin, a “No.” This comes as no surprise, for by now we have become familiar with the pattern of mediation in Rahner’s theology: the categorical mediates the transcendental. A circle exists between categorical and transcendental experience. We now turn to freedom as a categorical activity mediating a person’s piety toward God: that is, transcendence or lack thereof. 2.2.2  Transcendental Freedom Affirms or Denies God We have been considering freedom as personal responsibility for final and definitive existential self-formation. Now we do so with a view toward appreciating the vertical response contained within personal responsibility, or what these pages mean by “piety,” which Rahner believes is constitutive of such personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is the human person’s responsibility toward herself, her responsibility to be existentially authentic as a creature of God. In Rahner’s system, this means, first, acceptance of one’s constitution by God as a hearer of the word and acceptance of the dependency on God this constitution entails. Secondly, existential authenticity means free hearing and acceptance of the divine speech spoken to the creature empowered to hear such communication. Christianity affirms “God has given himself to man in direct proximity.”64 We might think of the first form of existential authenticity as a kind of mediated piety. It is mediated piety for the reason that a response to God comes first in the form of an affirmation or denial of oneself as constituted by God, as the creature to whom God gives the divine self and empowers reception. Freedom thus represents 63

  Kelsey, “Two Theologies of Death,” p. 354.   Karl Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, 1969), p. 394. 64

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an affirmation or denial of creation. Rahner suggests as much in a discussion of his well-known and controversial “anonymous Christianity,” in which he suggests “[man] already accepts this revelation whenever he really accepts himself completely.”65 This hints at the anonymity entailed in a genuine response to God by way of a mediated response to oneself that remains unthematic, non-explicit and thus not fully conscious of its real transcendent object. Moreover, conscience plays a critical role in the self-disposal of such persons, so that recognizing and heeding the moral demands of conscience disposes an individual toward authenticity. “The person who accepts a moral demand from his conscience as absolutely valid for him and embraces it as such in a free act of affirmation—no matter how unreflected—asserts the absolute being of God.”66 In a more confessional and homiletic context, Rahner maintains that whenever persons carry out the act of their own hearts in good conscience, they perform acts of personal responsibility or are “consecrating” themselves.67 In the context of atheism in the modern period, which Rahner believes is often an “innocent atheism,” he suggests that not every instance of concrete atheism is an expression of personal sin. Atheism is not always culpably induced. Moreover, ethical conduct—“free acts elevated by grace”—marked by the feature of selfless concern for others indicates a kind of knowledge and affirmation of God. If an atheist “is really acquainted with unconditional faithfulness, absolute honesty, selfless surrender to the good of others and other fundamental human dispositions, then he knows something of God, even if this knowledge is not present to his conscious reflection.”68 The reasoning here is quite simple: God is the very ground of an absolute ethical demand. Affirming the ethical demand in one’s conscience is thus a mediated way of saying “Yes” to what grounds and makes possible the demand. This anonymous Christianity is also called “categorical theism,” because a spiritual subject is permanently related to the world, and her free acts in the world mediate her standing before God. This permanent categorical relation and mediation obtain independent of one’s recognition or lack thereof. The human person’s “transcendental rootedness” preserves a fundamental relationship with God in the context of innocent atheism.69 If a person explicitly were to reject her fundamental dependence on God and so reject the divine life itself, such an act would be culpable and bear with it the potential for human life to end in the absolute loss of “ultimate loneliness,” or “hell.”70 Preference for a false autonomy is one of freedom’s possibilities, but 65

  Ibid.   Karl Rahner, “Atheism and Implicit Christianity,” Theological Investigations, vol. 9, trans. Graham Harrison (New York, 1972), p. 153. 67  Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, trans Bruce Gillette (Collegeville, 1997), p. 60. 68   Rahner, “Atheism and Implicit Christianity,” p. 159. 69   Ibid., p. 157. 70  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 104. 66

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Rahner does not grant this denial equality of stature with the affirmation of God that surrenders oneself unconditionally to the “ineffaceable and holy mystery.”71 The two are not equal, he says, because the “No” lives by the same ground by which the “Yes” lives. Both responses are made in transcendental freedom, which always has God as its object. Because God is the ground or condition for the possibility of there being freedom at all—and certainly the ground too of sanctifying grace re-enabling a freedom impaired by original sin—the “No” to God necessarily lives by the one to whom the “No” is uttered. Rahner’s commitment to the universality both of election and the obediential potency requires him to take seriously the possibility of anonymous Christianity. For, as we have seen, God’s commitment to spiritual creatures is universal and without limit—it endures even in the free creature’s contradiction of itself in sin— and all creatures are accordingly made able to hear such communication. That man is the event of God’s absolute self-communication does not refer to a statement which is valid only for this or that group of people as distinguished from others, for example, only for the baptized or the justified as distinguished from pagans or sinners. … [It] is a statement which refers to absolutely all men, and which expresses an existential of every person. Such an existential does not become merited and in this sense “natural” by the fact that it is present in all men as an existential of their concrete existence, and is present prior to their freedom, their self-understanding and their experience. The gratuity of a reality has nothing to do with whether it is present in many or only in a few people.72

If Rahner conceives election to be unambiguously universal in scope, it will require him to make some allowance within the system to show how grace operates in a world that is ostensibly non-Christian and secular.73 A professed and explicitly named ecclesial Christian faith in Jesus Christ characterizes a relatively small minority of persons today, not to mention persons for whom such explicit faith is impossible because of historical and cultural environments. The relative contingency and chance of “favorable” historical and cultural environments is precisely that: contingency and chance. Contingency does not frustrate the divine commitment to communicate universally and without limit and to enable hearers both to hear and respond to the communication. In other words, the universality of election is not frustrated by the particularity and plurality that mark human 71

  Ibid., p. 102.   Ibid., p. 127. 73   “In the Constitution on the Church, in the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity and in Gaudium et Spes, a salvific will of God—even after the Fall—is proclaimed as so universal and effective that it can be restricted only by a person’s decision made with a bad conscience and at no other point” Karl Rahner, “Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council,” Theological Investigations, vol. 20, trans. Edward Quinn (New York, 1981), p. 82. 72

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life. Rahner makes room for those who radically accept themselves in their “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and accept themselves in whatever degree possible in light of the contingent factors conditioning their capacity to hear and accept. For example, his understanding of prayer reflects a strongly analogous pattern of the categorical mediating the transcendental, or of an unthematic response nonetheless assuming the form of a valid response. In a sermon entitled “Prayer in the Everyday,” he advocates a notion of prayer that lends a distinct quality of piety to this discussion of freedom. The sermon affirms that freedom for self-disposal is more than an existential feature; it is also a vertical response of piety. For it is precisely within one’s daily categorical interactions that persons demonstrate either an egoism (Ichhaftigkeit)74 in the form of a “walled in ourselfness,” or its opposite, namely, a categorically and transcendentally directed love arising “from the grave of our own I.”75 This is a kind of “wordless prayer” wherein one’s daily life becomes “the breathing of love, breathing of longing, of loyalty, of faith, of readiness, of devotion to God; the everyday really becomes itself: wordless prayer.76 Everyday life can educate persons toward piety; actions, decisions, commitments, and relationships in the everyday can be “prayer” depending on how they are conducted. This is yet one more gestation of the perennial Rahnerian theme of the categorical mediating the transcendental, a theme Rahner himself confesses when he writes “all theology is eternally anthropology” and “the circle between transcendental and categorical experience is operative everywhere.”77 In truth, Rahner performs a balancing act with the concept of anonymous Christianity. The concept supplies at least two results: to affirm on the one hand the value and integrity of such anonymous responses where and when they occur as person-forming and God-affirming actualizations of human transcendence; and on the other hand to suggest that anonymity by its nature strives for explicit knowledge and expression and is therefore incomplete despite being substantial and real. Both count as piety. With respect to the former, he clarifies why Christians should consider granting to non-believers a status like anonymous Christianity. The term “anonymous” might be problematic, and to that extent Rahner acknowledges that the term is unimportant to him. But the commitment it reveals should appear on the radar screen of all Christians, for it underscores both a theological conviction and its ethical implication. It maintains that one cannot think of one’s own salvation in a non-solidaristic fashion; that one can hope for oneself only in the context of a universal hope for all that corresponds to the universality of grace and the free dialogue between God and all spiritual creatures.

74   Bruce W. Gillette offers the word “egoticity” to translate Ichhaftigkeit, which literally means “I-ish-ness,” in Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 45. 75   Ibid., pp. 45–6. 76   Ibid., p. 46. 77  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 225, 269.

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Concerning the second result of the concept of anonymous Christianity, Rahner writes: “this name [anonymous Christian] implicitly signifies that this fundamental actuation of a man, like all actuations, cannot and does not want to stop in its anonymous state but strives towards an explicit expression, towards its full name.”78 What is anonymous and unthematic seeks a name, conscious home and what Rahner calls “spatio-temporal explicitness.”79 He borrows powerful language from liturgy and the theology of worship to describe this drive. The “liturgy of the world” is precisely what has been described thus far: the free dialogue between God and spiritual creatures that is history. Rather than being confined to sacramental distribution, grace in fact occurs “wherever a person accepts and realizes in freedom his existence as it is, as radically and immediately dependent on God.”80 What relevance have ecclesial identity and thematic worship if what occurs in them occurs everywhere and always in a “world liturgy” that is broader, unthematic and unconscious? The “spatiotemporal explicitness” of ecclesial belonging and worship are important not because in them a “magical procedure” or “old fashioned ritual” take place— again, Rahner rejects an extrinsic and interventionist conception of grace as something that comes from without or can be caused. Rather, while what happens in formal worship basically occurs everywhere in the world, worship explicitly states, celebrates and appropriates both dependence on and conscious faith in the one God. Moreover, explicit liturgical worship acknowledges and celebrates the unsurpassable high point of history: hypostatic union of human and divine natures in Jesus of Nazareth. Ecclesial worship is important and significant, not because something happens in it that does not happen elsewhere, but because there is present and explicit in it that which makes the world important, since it is everywhere blessed by grace, by faith, hope, and love, and in it there occurred the cross of Christ, which is the culmination of its engraced history and the culmination of the historical explicitness of this history of grace.81

This second form of existential authenticity is more immediately recognizable as piety, for it is a conscious response to the content of God’s communication and donation of self, a response that can be genuine in any number of formats but which fully attains the character of response—of faith—in the explicit and thematic affirmation of God in Jesus Christ. The content of this affirmation is nothing other than a totalizing love of God that simultaneously integrates and

78

  Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” p. 395.   Karl Rahner, “On the Theology of Worship,” Theological Investigations, vol. 19, trans. Edward Quinn (New York, 1983), p. 147. 80   Ibid., p. 144. 81   Ibid., p. 147. 79

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fulfills the person loving.82 Only in God does the spiritual creature’s transcendence encounter its complete fulfillment, because only within the divine life does the multiplicity of finite creaturely existence encounter synthesis and unity. It is important to recall that Rahner prefers an apophatic rendering of the object of liturgical worship and piety. The idolatry of categorizing God confidently as other than holy mystery is an abiding concern in Rahner’s mind. Faith is not confidence or trust in something, as if the object of faith is one object alongside others available to categorical reflection. Mystery is the indelible stamp of knowledge of God. To know God as holy mystery is really to know God, and not simply a negative knowing but one that is positive and substantive. The experience of God as mystery is not the sort of experience one has upon deciding explicitly to engage in some religious activity or pattern of life, such as being a thematic ecclesial Christian professing faith in God in Jesus Christ through liturgical and sacramental participation. No, genuine responses to the content of God’s self-communication are intimate, personal and prior to the exoteric activity of religious celebration. The experience of God as mystery is born out wherever persons live out the depth and breadth of their existence; their response is marked by “peace,” “trust” and by “repose in being” precisely in abandoning themselves into the mystery of God.83 Rahner offers these eloquent words to characterize the response of piety, a characterization that also depicts real humanity: A person who opens himself to his transcendental experience of the holy mystery at all has the experience that this mystery is not only an infinitely distant horizon, a remote judgment which judges from a distance his consciousness and his world of persons and things, it is not only something mysterious which frightens him away and back into the narrow confines of his everyday world. He experiences rather that this holy mystery is also a hidden closeness, a forgiving intimacy, his real home, that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life. It is the person who in forlornness of his guilt still turns in trust to the mystery of his existence which is quietly present, and surrenders himself as one who even in his guilt no longer wants to understand himself in a self-centered and self-sufficient way, it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven, and he experiences this forgiveness which he receives as the hidden, forgiving and liberating love of God himself, who forgives in that he gives himself, because only in this way can there really be forgiveness once and for all.84

82  Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, pp. 68–70, see also 28–33; cf. Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 209. 83   Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” p. 395. 84  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 131.

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2.2.3  Freedom is Conditioned: Original Sin, Incarnation, Sanctifying Grace The experience of the holy mystery as “a forgiving intimacy,” “a real home” and a gift whose very presence is forgiveness, is to speak of the human person from the perspective of being redeemed and made whole. It is to speak of the human person first from the perspective of having experienced contradiction at the core of one’s life, of being less than authentic, less than whole and surrendered and in solidarity, and then of being loved and having these existential wounds salved. Sin must be taken seriously. For while there is no life that cannot in principle achieve its own eternal validity, and while the hypostatic union in Jesus Christ assures the success of the dialogue in history between God and spiritual creatures and thus the participation of humanity in the divine life, so too no life is exempt from the possibility of ending in absolute loss.85 Sin holds a “somewhat secondary” status relative to grace, and later pages will show how Rahner’s inclination in this regard corresponds with the Karl Barth’s Augustinian prioritization of grace over sin.86 Rahner believes a theologian is quite justified in speaking first of God’s grace and of “a God who bestows God’s very self and who turns such a love into an adventure that is God’s own history.”87 This self-communication is prior to, and is the condition for the possibility of both human freedom’s actualization toward authenticity in love of God and neighbor and the alternative “abortive” movement of stubborn egoism, autonomy and an independence insensitive to freedom’s true movement toward surrender.88 In the system, grace is logically and ontologically prior to freedom and so sin. We now consider the overall context of the operation of human freedom, namely, that which conditions freedom. We now turn to original sin, its history of inheritance, to the incarnation, and to sanctifying grace, or what Rahner calls “the freedom of freedom.” Finite spiritual freedom is always a freedom arising out of a given situation. There can be no unconditioned, unmediated or pure exercise of freedom. We have just seen how the freedom of non-Christian persons arises out of a particular situation that conditions their response. Such conditioning can take the shape of a historical and cultural situation or religious belonging which drastically reduces or eliminates the possibility of explicit Christian faith and life. Persons’ “situation” can thus delimit and circumscribe freedom’s operation and impose 85

  Ibid., p. 443.   Rahner, “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” p. 9. 87   Ibid. Rahner changes his tone on the next page of this essay, where he suggests that all theology is performed subjectively and is born out of the theologian’s experience, and that his own theology is no different. If sin and the forgiveness of sin are less prominent in his theology than they might be, signaling a limitation he and others would lament, then he suggests, in the form of a rejoinder, that all theological programs suffer under an unavoidably subjective construction, including those of his critics. 88  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 102. 86

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limits on the range of options one encounters, perceives, and decides upon, but Rahner clearly interprets this fact benignly. Persons’ situations or thrownness do not a priori disadvantage them with respect to the history of grace and divine selfcommunication. The theory of anonymous Christianity demonstrates this very clearly. Yet in a fundamental and irremovable way, all persons are in certain respects disadvantaged; all experience freedom as in some way crippled, lame, confused and less than it otherwise might be. Original sin accounts for that. Rahner understands it as the explicit rejection of the divine self-communication at the beginning of the history of the human race, which neither completely destroys freedom nor leaves it unscathed. The content of original sin is “guilt” (Schuld): the closing of oneself to the loving self-communication in such a blinding way that it is only in the process of forgiveness that one sees what is being forgiven.89 This rejection at the origin of history “profoundly wounds” the entire subsequent history of persons’ freedom, rendering them in particular need of grace and empowerment.90 Without this empowerment, freedom remains in bondage and succeeds only in choosing bondage in every choice it makes. Original sin places human freedom in an unavoidable and permanent situation of guilt. The adjective “original” means three things for Rahner: it means that the conditioning or co-determination of free decisions by guilt is embedded in the origin of human history, that this determination cannot be eradicated and that this determination is universal in scope, a determination from which no single human subjectivity or society is immune. All persons are subjected to—even bound within—their situation, so that original sin acts as a decaying influence on every ‘free’ exercise of freedom. That decaying influence amounts to an environment composed of the sum total of intersubjective relations. Rahner calls this “the community of situation” (Gemeinsamkeit der Freiheitssituation), an environment “pre-given and imposed” on all persons as the presupposition of their freedom.91 Under this rubric, freedom is now considerably qualified as that which a person does in a situation always co-determined by history and by other persons, so that the community of situation circumscribes freedom and sets boundaries antecedent to its operation. In other words: [Finite freedom] is a choice, imposed without choice, which can itself be the least free of all if the scope given to it, and within which it is exercised, is itself already a prison of bondage in the wrong place—somewhat as if one were to say to someone sitting in a prison cell that he is free, because he can choose in which corner of his dungeon he wishes to sit.92 89

  Ibid., p. 93 (Ger., p. 100).   Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” p. 195. 91   Karl Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” p. 94 (Ger., p. 101); cf. “Theology of Freedom,” p. 194. 92   Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” p. 92. 90

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This situation of pre-given and imposed intersubjectivity—a choice imposed without choice—avers once again to Rahner’s adoption of Heidegger’s conception of persons experiencing themselves as “thrown” into an historical concreteness that radically conditions them and over which they have no control. This situation of thrownness literally circumscribes the perception, execution and interpretation of every free act, conditioning and coloring not only a person’s ontological finality but also that same person’s deposit or residue in the world resulting from her decisions and formation. One’s good act now obtains a quality of ambiguity because it was performed under the inexorable influence of the guilt of others and of oneself, and that ambiguity is transmitted into the community of situation to condition the exercise of others’ freedom. What appears subjectively as a good intention is in fact burdened by exterior influences and by consequences it did not intend and about which it is unconscious, effectively disguising the good intention and rendering the character of the act itself ambiguous.93 The operation of freedom is also an immediately self-alienating occurrence, for “insofar as freedom must always objectify itself in an alien material in order to find itself, it becomes alienated from itself.”94 Rahner uses in that quotation the term “alien material,” and elsewhere he uses the terms “corporeality” and “objectifications” to label what I am calling residue or deposit.95 Their effect is substantial and real. These objectifications become the “material” in the world augmenting the community of situation in which all persons find themselves. They are formed by a combination of a person’s inheritance of others’ histories of guilt and by the singular uniqueness of her own actualization of freedom. Rahner uses the terms “material” and “corporeality” to characterize these objectifications precisely as pervasive and real: one’s own and others’ guilt become objectified in the world. Rather than reading Rahner as Manichean or Neoplatonic here—dangerously aligning matter with evil or giving evil corporeality and being and thus maligning an orthodox doctrine of creation—it is more accurate to understand that his language in this context means to convey human persons’ radical solidarity with and mutual conditioning of each other, as well as the real 93  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 109. Elsewhere, Rahner nods to the Pauline theology of sin in Romans 7 concerning the will being unable to do what it wants in his suggestion that concupiscentia (Konkupiszenz) “resists the spiritual free decision of man’s will.” It is important to note Rahner’s insistence that concupiscentia does not simply attack the lower, physical parts of human nature, but affects persons in their entirety— what Rahner calls “their whole cognitive and appetitive powers.” This keeps with Paul’s theology of sin and its designation of “flesh” (sarx) as neither a fragment of persons nor their exterior physical reality but the whole person “in so far as for lack of the holy Pneuma he is subject to sin and to God’s wrath” (Rahner, “The Theological Concept of Concupiscentia,” Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst [Baltimore, 1961], pp. 350, 359, 354). 94   Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” p. 194. 95  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 107.

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and unavoidable presence in the world of a condition that a priori and universally wounds the use of freedom. His comments on matter elsewhere, attested in many essays in Theological Investigations, should assuage any concern over a latent Manicheism, especially since he offers a rather high view of matter as the material of spirit and as that which can (and should) transcend itself into spirit. “We know matter only as the seedbed of spirit and of subjectivity and of freedom.”96 So too, in his discussion of eschatology, Rahner suggests that matter and the world are with spirit in eschatological consummation as spirit’s “connatural surrounding.” For Rahner, matter clearly has a positive—not negative—ontological valence.97 In other words, freedom is a circular process involving oneself with the past and contributing to one’s own and other persons’ future situation or Gemeinsamkeit der Freiheitssituation. It threatens all decisions, has a seductive effect on them, makes them painful and conceals from the agent a clear appreciation of what it is in itself, whether it is a “Yes” to God and to itself as creature, or a self-contradictory “No.”98 This view of freedom in bondage, and others like it, have given rise to a Christian realism highly suspicious of any expectation, now or in the future, of humanity rising out of this situation into a more utopian world marked by the unobstructed operation of freedom.99 A neutral freedom cannot be attained. “It will never be possible—right to the end of history—to eliminate completely this mortgage of guilt that is objectified in the situation of freedom.”100 This historical pessimism also rules out and reprimands any celebration of human achievement when such achievement is perceived as self-referential in origin and accomplishment. For this “mortgage of guilt” suggests, if nothing else, that human achievement of any sort cannot be attributed so facilely to ones so thoroughly wounded by their bonds. This realism of the Christian life is grounded in Christology itself, for the narrative of the cross anticipates the implications and consequences a life lived authentically can entail. Christians are free from any form of ideology or idolatry that would remove from their consciousness a sober appreciation of the cross of Jesus and of the analogia crucis that discipleship can entail: Christianity is a religion which recognizes a man who was nailed to a cross and on it died a violent death as a sign of victory and as a realistic expression of human life, and it has made this its own sign. … Christianity forbids us to reach for an analgesic in such a way that we are no longer willing to drink the chalice of the death of this existence with Jesus Christ. And to this extent there is no doubt that in living out its Christian existence Christianity is required to say in an absolute and sober realism: yes, this existence is incomprehensible, for it 96   Ibid., pp. 445, see also 87; cf. “The Theological Concept of Concupiscentia,” p. 372. 97   Rahner, “The Resurrection of the Body,” p. 213. 98  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 109; cf. “Theology of Freedom,” p. 194. 99  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 109. 100   Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” p. 194.

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passes through something incomprehensible in which all our comprehending is taken from us. It passes through death. And it is only when this is not only said in pious platitudes, but rather is accepted in the hardness of real life … and it is only when we live out this pessimistic realism and renounce every ideology which absolutizes a particular sector of human existence and makes it an idol, it is only then that it is possible for us to allow God to give us the hope which really makes us free.101

Indeed, Christology is prominent in and governs each of Rahner’s theological loci. The sin of others is not the sole material embedded in the world influencing the community of situation for all. Rahner suggests in a discussion on resurrection that direct post-mortem communion with God need not be interpreted as growing in inverse proportion with belonging to the material world. While death signals the possibility of entering into the “blessed completion” of personal spirit symbolized as “heaven,” the deceased remain permanently related to finite reality in a “continuing-belonging-to-the-world.”102 Jesus Christ is the pre-eminent example. He belongs to the world in which he is corporealized and objectified. His life and death altered history irrevocably, guaranteeing its success in deification even as the dialogue between a free God and free spiritual creatures continues and even as this dialogue is marked by the alienation and pain original sin entails. We observed in §2.1 how the obediential potency in human nature for hypostatic union should be linked to the operation of grace rather than a property of human nature as such. We likewise observed previously in this section how Rahner conceives of freedom in much the same way. It is the capacity for personal self-formation, and in such a way that persons really “achieve” their eternity, but only insofar as this capacity is gifted, insofar as human nature is graced prior to the experience of freedom. Grace is thus the condition for the possibility of being a hearer of the word in the first place. Grace is also the condition for the possibility of freedom’s free exercise and achievement. These represent at least two ways to interpret Rahner’s frequent claim that “God makes himself a constitutive principle of the created existent.”103 Sanctifying grace, or what Rahner calls the “freedom of freedom,” is another example of grace functioning as the condition for the possibility of freedom, viewed now through the lens of original sin, which a priori wounds and confuses freedom and renders it in need of liberation. The following discussion anticipates how sanctification enables the concrete love of God and neighbor. Freedom is captive freedom if it remains delivered up to “the finite as such” with its attending Gemeinsamkeit der Freiheitssituation conditioned by the decision of Adam to be without grace.104 Such freedom is bound freedom, and  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 404.   Rahner, “The Resurrection of the Body,” p. 211. 103  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 120. 104   Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” p. 93. 101 102

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hence no freedom at all. Or it is freedom trivialized and reduced to a condition Rahner captures in the analogy above concerning a prisoner being ostensibly free if he is able to determine which corner of his cell to sit in. Of itself, freedom does not possess its own liberating function. The holy mystery whom human persons need is the object of freedom. God is the object of freedom insofar as persons dispose themselves—in a fundamental option—before God in freedom. “[Selfrealization] is always either a self-realization in the direction of God or a radical self-refusal towards God.”105 But God is the object of freedom in another sense too, for freedom itself, even though it needs the finite and is always referred to the finite, that is, the tangible and historical, for its actualization is essentially empty if referred strictly to the finite. It runs the risk of “consuming itself infernally in its own emptiness” and becoming enslaved by the finite if solely referred to and achieved in the finite and categorical. In other words, the categorical mediates freedom; it is not freedom’s telos. God is the object of freedom in this second sense insofar as in grace the divine self-communication—named the grace of justification under this rubric—“is what is most radical and most deep in the existential situation of human freedom. As divine grace it lies prior to freedom as the condition of possibility for freedom’s concrete action.”106 Rahner employs a distinct vocabulary to speak of the redemption of freedom from the slavery of guilt. The divine pneuma frees freedom, and Rahner takes great pains to indicate that only God and not oneself no matter how determined and prepared, in the justifying grace of the divine pneuma, can free freedom. One cannot unbind oneself; one must be unbound. Self-justification achieves the opposite of its intent, namely, a worsened and more desperate form of enslavement to the finite, because the self, when referred to the finite alone and as such, is impotent. And so, in as far as the pneuma of God, which makes freedom free, is offered gratuitously to this man of the Adamite community of guilt (which by this fact has become the Christian community of redemption), the freedom of freedom given gratuitously through the pneuma is now properly speaking a redemptive freedom from the slavery of guilt. This is all the more so the case if, and in so far as, the individual human being, who has been robbed of the freedom of God by original sin, has willed himself by personal guilt to be in this state without pneuma, and if he has tried to remain free while remaining without grace.107

But the impotence resulting from trying to remain free while remaining without grace is not the worst of possible outcomes resulting from enslavement to the finite. Indeed, the impotence now is shown to be malignant. When freedom refers to and is achieved in the finite alone, the latter can occasion what Rahner calls “diabolic” influences and effects. 105

  Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” p. 185.  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 113. 107   Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” p. 95. 106

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This attempt to achieve freedom in the finite, either by laying hold of it or withdrawing from it, will to a greater or lesser degree become slavery to the finite. In so far as it does, and to the extent in which the objects of such an enslaved freedom are in their respective orders under the power of personal agencies (called angels, or, if evil, devils), this particular kind of slavery is objectively slavery under diabolic powers.108

Sanctifying grace is thus the redemption from conclusive determination by such powers “insofar as these strive to be the confining boundary of the situation of man’s freedom.”109 Sanctification does not mean that human persons by grace live free and accept the divine self-communication as a matter of course. But it does mean persons experience the opening up of their freedom prior to their decisions, that they are enabled to live by grace more freely than if their freedom was determined solely by the decaying influences of the Gemeinsamkeit der Freiheitssituation, an environment and intersubjectivity marked by the attempt to remain free while remaining without grace and which, when taken on its own, can be only a “hell.” In other words, what is sinful about sin is the life pattern, manifested in countless ways, of self-assertion in oneself and in the world without openness to the love of God; the life pattern of reliance on the “law” which despite being the will of God can in this context become the thorn of self-assertion and a “godlessness” positing a futile and impotent reliance on the self in place of the God to whom alone glory is to be given. Rahner thinks of this sanctification not as “an abstract theory or ideological postulate,” but as a historical and tangible reality that is given, applied and appropriated concretely.110 Sanctification has its source, and it is by this same source that sanctification is applied to persons. He is very much Pauline in this sense, for the fact that the world is offered sanctifying grace is a fact available for explanation only in Jesus Christ, who is the sign of God’s opening out toward the world in self-communication and the “tangible and visible fact of the free opening out of the world into God.”111 Sanctification, the redemptive freedom of human freedom in history, is applied to humans in Christ. One appropriates the sanctifying grace of Jesus Christ by “obeying the call to freedom and by submitting in faith and in its tangible sign, that is, baptism, to the event which breaks open the prison of this world, viz., the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son.”112 In connection with sanctification, Rahner suggests the church is the continuation of the presence of Christ in the world as the visible and socially composed communion of persons with Jesus. In its words and liturgical actions, the body of Christ is the community testifying and signifying to the world that the divine pneuma is actually present to it and that persons have freedom from 108

    110   111   112   109

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 97.

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God. The church’s sacramental life renders freedom present by proclaiming it. And the life of the church is a sign of this freedom insofar as its sanctified members live out the love of God and neighbor, a love that by definition forgets itself, relinquishes self-assertion and serves others.113 “Hence,” writes Rahner, “the Church is the indispensable, existential place of this freedom, insofar as and because this pneuma can be had only in the Church, since it is her inner reality and she its external sign.”114 It is thus a perennial Christian conviction that original sin with its devastating effects and histories is, theologically speaking, viewed most accurately through the lens of the divine pneuma or sanctifying grace. In other words, original sin is best viewed through the lens of Christology. Rahner lends to this discussion not only a concreteness that focuses on Jesus as the tangible and visible offer of God’s redemptive self-communication and the one by whom it is applied to others, but also a systematic cohesion of the Christology discussion with a discussion of the church and its function in the world. We now turn to what Rahner identifies as the life of the church, namely, the love of God and neighbor, and specifically to how these loves form an indissoluble unity characterizing the Christian life, the unity of piety and responsibility. 2.3  The Unity of Love of God and Love of Neighbor 2.3.1  “Systematic” Theology By proposing “polyphony” as a theological method capable of prizing plurality and dialogue, this book hopes to impress upon the reader a stylistic effect in the text. That effect is drawn from dynamics of music itself, namely, crescendo and polyphony. By first treating Karl Rahner on the unity of piety and responsibility, then Karl Barth on the same and in dialogue with Rahner, and finally Vedanta Desika on the same and in dialogue with both, the reader discovers a sense of movement and crescendo, a thickening plot with more details, multiple attestation and warrants for the one theme. The material thesis of the book concerns the unity of piety and responsibility. The methodological thesis concerns the usefulness of arguing this theological claim by way of deploying distinct but analogous voices in reciprocal dialogue with each other to attest that claim, so that ecumenical

113

  Ibid., p. 98.   Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” p. 98. In later pages Rahner tempers this statement with a dose of realism that acknowledges the prevalence of sin even in a body sanctified in and by Jesus Christ, when he writes concerning individual moral decisions in relation to universal moral norms, “the ecclesiastical and the concrete ecclesiastical reality, on the one hand, and what is Christian and what is justified before God, the Creator of the universal and the individual, on the other hand, never coincide completely” (ibid., p. 103). 114

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and interreligious polyphony is for the reader the bearer of the unity of piety and responsibility. These are the book’s twin goals. Yet movement and crescendo should be detected even in this first chapter on Karl Rahner, notwithstanding its focus on just one voice. This movement is a product of the specifically systematic character of his theological perspective. That is, the material discussed in §2.1 concerning the human person as a hearer of the word contains—even if in seed-like form—the groundwork and much of the content of Rahner’s theologies of freedom and love, even though these latter two are not explicit topics of discussion. In short, Rahner is a systematic theologian par excellence, demonstrating in his own system the unity, coherence and mutual conditioning of all theological loci. The present discussion on the unity of loves will build on the previous two interrelated discussions of metaphysical anthropology and freedom. Moreover, the terms remain the same, and the previous two discussions will receive in this treatment elaboration and a degree of fulfillment that would be lacking were we not to address the role of the unity of the love commandments in the system. With respect to the Christian life, then, the ensuing discussion of the unity of loves is, for Rahner, the point and concrete telos of his metaphysical anthropology and theology of freedom. Indeed, Rahner’s own “Brief Anthropological Creed” at the conclusion of Foundations of Christian Faith reveals the critical importance the unity of love of God and neighbor holds in his system. There he provides a strong hint concerning the role of love in his own system and for the identity and task of the church itself. He identifies the “ground and essence of the Church” as the love in which self-realization is achieved only in a self-abandoning risk [Wegwagt] of oneself radically for another, for in this precise experience one also has an experience of God “at least implicitly.”115 Rahner’s vision of normative anthropology, then, is inextricably linked to the function of the church, especially his understanding of the post-Vatican II church with its new awareness of the modern world as context for ecclesial life and as bearer of both opportunity and concern. This will cause us to build on themes from the previous section, namely, the way in which the categorical always mediates the transcendental, and anonymous or implicit theism. A second key claim in the “Brief Anthropological Creed” revisits a topic from the previous section, namely, sanctification. It is only through the divine self-communication antecedent to and embedded within interpersonal relationships that interpersonal love is even possible. The condition for the possibility of love between persons is the love of the divine self-communication grounding and sanctifying them, so that this ground is the “realm” wherein interpersonal love occurs. 115  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 456 (Ger., p. 460). Elsewhere Rahner claims that one experiences God only when one abandons oneself in love of God and neighbor, and does so in such a way that the abandonment represents a genuine, unknown, and even foolish risk to one’s subjectivity (cf. Karl Rahner, “Who are your Brother and Sister?” The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, trans. Robert Barr [New York, 1983], p. 103).

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Rahner gives expression to the unity of love commandments in several ways, embracing both scriptural and speculative moods. He embeds the theme within his theological system as a whole. He makes use of key scriptural themes and exegesis, especially Matthew 25, the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, and Johannine literature. He offers a speculative theological construal of the unity to mediate conceptually what is known through scripture. In addition, he redeploys set patterns and methods from his own system concerning, for instance, the categorical mediation of the transcendental and the nature of love consisting in self-achievement through self-abandonment. Because the biblical witness and subsequent scholarship in the areas of biblical, ethical and theological studies on the unity of love commandments are pluralistic and often contentious, it is important to alert the reader to the limited scope of the present discussion. It cannot recapitulate the breadth of scholarly opinion on Rahner’s position, nor advancements from his position. Nor can it even interpret Rahner’s position exhaustively in its entirety or adjudicate the adequacy of his biblical scholarship.116 Our concern more narrowly and specifically is to argue that Rahner’s position on the unity of love commandments functions as the telos of his system, with particular attention to the way key theological claims in the areas of anthropology, epistemology, nature and grace, and Christology remain less than fully illumined if not drawn into connection with the Christian life. Our task is to observe the role Rahner allots to the love commandments within the system, and to suggest that one example of Christology being translated into a normative anthropology is the unity Rahner assigns to piety and responsibility in the Christian life. Before turning to this position itself, it is useful to consider briefly his systematic redeployment of certain patterns or methodological strategies that by now are familiar to us. The Christological locus in particular demonstrates how Rahner redeploys key patterns from his system in his discussion of the unity of loves. Several of his Christological claims anticipate how he articulates the unity of loves. This is appropriate since Rahner sides with Karl Barth in acknowledging Christology to be the beginning and end of anthropology.117 For instance, Rahner’s Chalcedonian sensibility leads him to suggest that the God whom Christians profess in Christ is “exactly where we are, and only there is he to be found.”118 One need not stretch this statement to read its implications for the Christian life and for the unity of loves. Its obvious and immediate concern is to immunize Christology from the threat of Docetism. Nevertheless, this Christological statement can be opened up into the Christian life as well as the following remark pertaining to Christology suggests: 116

  For some of these debates and discussions, cf. Gerald J. Beyer, “Karl Rahner on the Radical Unity of the Love of God and Neighbor,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 68 (2003): 251–80. 117  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 225; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 17ff. 118  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 226.

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The finite is no longer in opposition to the infinite, but is that which the infinite himself has become, that in which he expresses himself as the question which he himself answers. He does this in order to open for the whole of the finite of which he himself has become a part a passage into the infinite—not I should say in order to make himself the portal and the passage.119

This statement is highly suggestive for the meaning Rahner conveys when writing on the unity of the commandments to love God and neighbor, for in such love the distinction between finite and infinite—inasmuch as this distinction might signify incommensurability or disparity in worth and value—is shown to be suspect and, indeed, collapses. The neighbor as “finite” and God as “infinite” are not oppositional terms, nor are they options between which a choice must be made, the one good being merely relative and the other absolute. Indeed, for Rahner the one activity— love of neighbor—expresses love for God, even if the lover does not fully intend this consequence and implication. Ultimately Rahner’s Chalcedonian Christology, with its insistence on the reconciliation of two natures in the one person Jesus Christ, is the basis for his comment that the finite and infinite are no longer in opposition. Rahner will marshal this Christological commitment as one warrant defending the claim that neighbor love includes love of God, and vice versa. With respect to Rahner’s Chalcedonian Christology, what makes the humanity of Jesus Christ verus homo is the fact that “he forgot himself for the sake of God and his fellow man who was in need of salvation, and existed only in this process of forgetting.”120 This process of forgetting oneself was treated above in §2.1 under the rubric of a metaphysical anthropology that was laid bare once its Christological exemplification was demonstrated.121 Rahner claims in his metaphysical 119

  Ibid., p. 226. Indeed, his contention that the finite is not in opposition to the infinite is a basic principle from which Rahner begins to explicate the unity of loves. It is not an “abstract” or extra-biblical notion on account of a theme in Matthew’s Gospel attributed to Jesus, announcing “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Mt. 25), an identification Rahner presupposes and means to take with absolute seriousness. He suggests it is in one’s neighbor that one meets the incarnate Word of God (cf. Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger [New York, 1982], p. 234; “The New, Single Precept of Love,” Everyday Faith, trans. W.J. O’Hara [New York, 1968], p. 114). 120  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 250–51 (the verb is vergessen: Ger., p. 248). 121   “In the incarnation, the Logos creates by taking on, and takes on by emptying himself. Hence we can verify here, in the most radical and specifically unique way the axiom of all relationship between God and creature, namely that the closeness and the distance, the submissiveness and the independence of the creature do not grow in inverse but in like proportion. Thus Christ is most radically human, and his humanity is the freest and most independent, not in spite of, but because of its being taken up, by being constituted as the self-utterance of God” (Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” p. 117).

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anthropology that human persons “go out toward God” only by “entering into the world,” since transcendental experience depends on categorical mediation. He then claims in his Christology that Jesus is the exemplar of the potentia obedientialis in human nature because he surrenders or dispossesses his human nature in an act of “existential self-dedication.”122 The loci “human being” and “Christ” are not treated discretely, but as mutually informing and mutually explanatory. To say of Jesus Christ that he is most human because of his surrendering and dispossessing of himself in an act that gains his real self is thus also a comment on anthropology, indeed on normative anthropology. The process wherein one forgets, or surrenders, or dispossesses or existentially dedicates oneself, arises pre-eminently in Rahner’s Christology detailing the obedient function of Jesus’ humanity in hypostatic union. That motif extends into an epistemology and conception of the Christian life as love of neighbor and God and is critical to an appreciation of what he thinks occurs in love. The initial quotation at the top of this paragraph reveals not only the precondition of love, which is the forgetting or surrendering or dispossessing of self, but also the object of love, the one to whom it is addressed. The object of love is God and one’s “fellow man.” While the groundwork for this pattern is established in Hearer of the Word, the pattern itself becomes fully clear only in view of the role Rahner assigns to Christology in his system. For, perhaps more than the other loci, Christology provides form and content to love of God and neighbor, wedding together piety and responsibility as “the single and allencompassing actualization of existence.”123 Jesus mediates the abiding immediacy of God to humanity. The humanity of Jesus renders the mystery and self-communication of God concrete even if no less mysterious. Because the humanity of Jesus holds this abiding soteriological significance, the Christian, in Rahner’s view, is one who recognizes that “a personal relationship to Jesus Christ in personal and intimate love is an essential part of Christian existence.”124 Moreover, Rahner is convinced that the genuine love of God persons express in their love of neighbor should become conscious and explicitly named.125 This precise insistence is where Rahner begins to turn back critics accusing his position of a kind of “cheap” piety, a piety wherein thematic and explicit love of God in the form of a personal relationship with Jesus is unnecessary, existentially and soteriologically. Rahner believes personal piety and acknowledgment of God is critical to love of neighbor, and that a personal love of Jesus is “the existentially most real actualization and foundation of the love of neighbor which is our mediation to God.”126 In other words, for Rahner, love of neighbor is not cheap piety, not merely an unthematic mode of responding to God for those lacking love of God and an explicit personal relationship with God. 122

  Ibid., pp. 109–10.  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 309. 124   Ibid., p. 308. 125   Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” p. 112. 126  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 308. 123

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Love of neighbor is made whole and existentially most real when it is born with conscious intent from one’s personal and intimate love of Jesus. Rahner’s parsing and explication of the love commandments, then, is not simply and exclusively “from below,” since Christian existence is actualized fully when the aspect from below is deepened and intensified from above by one’s personal relationship with God in Christ. Rahner accents the unity “from above” in a sermon on Matthew 23:34–40 where he writes: “the first commandment is love of God, love for him with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind. A ‘decent life’ is no substitute for this love, nor is love of the neighbor, philanthropy, or social justice.”127 So too, Rahner will claim that love of neighbor is already love of God because the former “was already encompassed by the grace of God.”128 A person’s “Yes” to her neighbor is born and sustained by grace: it is not an act deriving strictly from persons’ subjective freedom unconditioned by the divine self-communication in grace. One never simply loves or fails to love a neighbor without this commenting on one’s relationship with God. 2.3.2  The Unity of Loves: Perspectives from Above and Below Nowhere in Rahner’s theological corpus does he perform sustained biblical exegesis. His theology rarely if ever takes the form of exegesis, yet it would be wrong to declare it unbiblical, abstract or speculative in the pejorative, ungrounded sense of the term. Both Rahner’s personal spiritual life and theology were profoundly informed by scripture and by his church’s history of interpretation. His theological program is more speculative—in the sense of employing a metaphysical vision to explain Christian doctrine—than narrative in orientation. This methodological preference does not mean scripture and particular biblical themes exercise no control over which issues appear on his agenda and how they are parsed. Indeed, nowhere is the influence of scripture on Rahner’s theology more apparent than in his much discussed literature on the unity of love commandments. The Synoptic Gospels and Johannine corpus figure prominently. Theologians frequently acknowledge his position to be “from below”—usually as either a compliment or accusation—in its emphasis on the critical importance of love of neighbor as an act that both actualizes the subjectivity of the lover and contains within it love of God. While much of his reflection on this topic reveals a method 127   Karl Rahner, “The First Commandment,” Everyday Faith, p. 101. This entire sermon should eschew any suspicion that Rahner underscores love of neighbor and this love’s mediation of “piety” at the expense of an explicit and thematic love of God manifested in prayer and personal relationship. The sermon prioritizes “the first commandment.” It is true, however, that Rahner regards neighbor love as the “starting-point for the whole of Christianity.” What follows will demonstrate Rahner’s thesis concerning the two loves being reciprocally contained in the other (ibid., p. 117). 128   Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” p. 112.

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from below, we demonstrated above that Rahner also emphasizes the importance of coming to a thematic, explicit and personal love of God. He thus reflects, in his own formulation, the pluralistic spectrum of the New Testament witness. The dual love command in Matthew 22 suggests distinction between the commandments, assigning to love of God a superlative adjective, as the greatest commandment, or at least as the necessary foundation on which neighbor love must work. When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and prophets. (Mt. 22:34–40)

One way Rahner expresses the importance of the greatest commandment consisting of love of God is to say that “interpersonal communication in love among men cannot reach its own radical depths and final definitive validity” without one accepting the ground and mysterious partner of such love, namely, God.129 Without piety, then, responsibility cannot reach its proper and natural depth. If, as Rahner insists, it is true that love is measured by the object of one’s love, then a relationship to God in the form of prayer, trust and love occupies a higher dignity than an act of love toward one’s neighbor, and he asserts this while maintaining that God is loved in the transcendental depth of interhuman love.130 Persons come to their “single and all-encompassing actualization of existence” or “Christian existence in an absolute sense” only as these two activities—love of neighbor and acceptance of God as the ground of all love—are achieved together and reciprocally related one to another.131 Love for God becomes the necessary antecedent for love of neighbor to reach its depths: “love for neighbor can and should actually grow through a love for Jesus, for it is only in a loving relationship with Jesus that we conceive the possibilities of love for neighbor that otherwise we should simply not hold to be feasible.”132 In this way, Rahner’s position is quite distinct from a conception of love of neighbor as cheap piety, for he argues that the God-relation is the condition for the possibility of love of neighbor coming to completion. We will see below in §3.2 that Karl Barth is in agreement with Rahner on the priority assigned to  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 309.   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,”

129 130

238.

 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 309.   Karl Rahner, “What Does It Mean to Love Jesus?” The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, pp. 23–4. 131 132

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love of God in Matthew 22, and that Barth’s reasons are noticeably different from Rahner’s, especially in his relating of the second love commandment to the first. Rahner observes a more intimate linkage between the two love commandments in Matthew 25, a Son of Man pericope on eschatological judgment. This pericope underscores the critical role of love of neighbor in establishing one’s relationship to the Son of Man coming in glory and judgment. Like a shepherd separating sheep from goats, the passage explains the Son of Man will separate all nations into two groups consisting of those at his right hand who inherit the kingdom and those at his left who do not. The sole criterion for inheritance of the kingdom is: For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. (Mt. 25:35–37)

To clear away any uncertainty about the connection between one’s God-relation and love of neighbor, Matthew’s Jesus then states his union with the needy neighbor positively and negatively: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least who are members of my family, you did it to me” (v. 40), and “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (v. 45). With respect to moral action and its implications for eschatological judgment, there is no difference between the neighbor and Jesus with respect to the moral quality of the action itself; indeed the evangelist posits the union of Jesus with those most in need. Rahner does not think the linkage Matthew’s Jesus teaches in this passage can be explained simply by a casual or rhetorical identification of the Son of Man with those in need. The passage is not hyperbolic. It cannot be explained by “an arbitrary altruistic identification which according to many commentators Jesus himself undertakes as it were merely morally and juridically in a mere ‘as if’.”133 The attention to be paid the neighbor is not in Rahner’s judgment “a pious exaggeration.”134 Matthew’s Jesus here intends to impress upon his audience a unity of the Son of Man with all persons. So too Rahner when he writes: 133

  Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 234. Elsewhere Rahner writes concerning Matthew 25: “How often have we heard this statement and used it in pious, edifying talk. But suppose we ask ourselves how Jesus could really say that. Is it not really just a juridical fiction: I give you credit for it, as though you had done it personally to me what you have done to the least of these other human beings? No, this saying of Jesus is not a legal fiction. … It is truly the case that we meet the incarnate Word of God in the other human being, because God himself really is in this other” (Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” p. 114). 134   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 234.

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The christological side, if I may so call it, of our brotherly love would have to be taken really seriously and really realized in life. Where the other human being confronts me, there Christ is, asking me whether I will love him, the incarnate Word of God, and if I say Yes, he replies that he is in the least of his brethren.135

Matthew 25 is thus a significant text leading Rahner to conclude, “there is a possible logical but not a real distinction between a moral act and a salvific act.”136 That is, the relationship between the two loves should be posited in terms other than identity, namely unity. One commentator rightly suggests that Rahner’s “underlying concern was to emphasize a perichoresis or mutual conditioning of the two elements.”137 The use of this descriptive metaphor borrowed from the theology of the Trinity is a particularly useful strategy in describing the unity of loves for the same reason that it vividly captures the trinity of divine Persons in the Godhead in their difference and unity. Perichoresis, in both applications, posits the most intimate of bonds between ‘others’ in both ontological and moral terms. Helping to explain this further is the fact that Rahner presupposes, but does not explain in detail, a Pauline participation of humanity in Jesus Christ. The participation of humanity in Christ suggests how love of neighbor is also love of God, through Christ who is “in” the neighbor: Anyone who accepts his own humanity in full—and how immeasurably hard that is, how doubtful we really do it!—has accepted the Son of Man, because God has accepted man in him. When we read in scripture that he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law, this is the ultimate truth, because God himself has become this neighbor. He who is at once the nearest to us and the farthest from us is always the one person who is accepted and loved in our nearest and dearest.138

There is in the above passage a chain of causality we do well to observe and which recalls for us once again the systematic quality of Rahner’s theological reflection. In the article from which this passage comes, Rahner explains the possibility of incarnation and what it suggests about the divine life. We noted earlier that incarnation means Jesus’ self-surrender and existential dispossession of his own humanity is such that it becomes the reality of God, specifically the Word of God or 135

  Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” p. 115.   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 239. 137   Declan Marmion, “Rahner and his Critics: Revisiting the Dialogue,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 68 (2003), p. 196. 138   Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” p. 119. See “Jesus Christ as the Meaning of Life,” The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, pp. 54–5, for more on God assuming human nature in its entirety in the incarnation. 136

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Logos, and therewith genuinely human. Self-surrender is primarily the act of God as Creator, but is mediated and shown to humanity in the person of Jesus.139 The activity of creating, wherein God surrenders the divine life in order to establish the possibility of a dialogue with free spiritual creatures in history, becomes a model for human persons to confront their own nature and “come to” themselves in selfrealization.140 Transcendental subjectivity and self-abandonment are coextensive, not oppositional.141 In other words, human beings are derived from the being of God in such a way that their nature, properly realized, receives its content from and is patterned after the divine life.142 The pre-eminent example or analogy is Jesus Christ, whose life of “substantial self-dedication” utters the final word about God and about human reality. This happens in two ways. First, and in relation to categories from above, the divine Logos empties itself and assumes flesh. This language supplements language of Jesus surrendering and giving up his humanity so completely that it can become the nature of God. Secondly, and from below, in Jesus Christ humanity achieves itself and successfully confronts its own nature, and consequently is accepted by God in view of and because of Jesus Christ. From below, Jesus’ surrender, ratified by God, makes possible the collective participation of all humanity in him.143 Rahner is thus able to say comprehensively that God has become the visible neighbor on account of, first, assuming human nature in Jesus Christ and, secondly, viewing all human reality “in” the person of Jesus Christ, the hypostatic union of logos and flesh, the God-man or the coincidence of divine self-emptying as offer and human self-emptying as acceptance. Another biblical resource figuring prominently for Rahner is the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke (10:25–37) and its parallel passages in Matthew (22:34– 40) and Mark (12:28–34; cf. Deut. 6:4–5). The three Synoptic Gospels include parallel accounts of Jesus confirming in front of a crowd the first commandment consisting in love of God with all one’s heart, soul and mind, and the second commandment consisting in love of neighbor as oneself. Both Mark and Luke use this occasion to include important details. In Mark’s version, a scribe asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest of all. Jesus responds, and the scribe confirms his response by saying love of God and neighbor indeed “is more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mk 12:33). Then, in a response in which 139

  Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” p. 109.   Ibid. 141   Ibid., p. 110. 142   “Humility and love, distance and closeness, being totally at God’s disposal and acting oneself—these grow not in inverse but in direct proportion” (Karl Rahner, “Meditations on Priestly Life,” Spiritual Writings, ed. Philip Endean [Maryknoll, 2004], p. 60). 143   While Rahner balances the dimensions from above and from below, the vertical dimension begins to control the dynamic when Rahner insists that the human nature of Jesus Christ is divinized in itself not on account of itself but through its union with the divine logos (cf. Rahner, “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” p. 112). 140

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Jesus pays the scribe the highest compliment given anyone in the Synoptic Gospels, he says approvingly, “you are not far from the kingdom of God” (v. 34). In Luke’s version, after these love commandments are given and confirmed, a lawyer presses for clarification by asking Jesus, “and who is my neighbor?” In response to this question, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, suggesting that even Priests and Levites, the ones in society ostensibly responsible for true knowledge concerning piety and worship, misunderstand worship if it causes them to misperceive the connection between God and neighbor and to neglect their neighbor in need (Lk. 10:32), whereas the Samaritan, a non-Jew and presumed idolater, exemplifies love of God from below by responding to the one in need. The parable can be read as an example of how one might construe the unity of love commandments from below. That is, one’s analysis may begin from below and move upward to discern the unity comprehensively. Rahner suggests as much in the following remark, in which he lends to love of neighbor an antecedent quality of grace transforming it into a comprehensive and robust unity of love of neighbor and God. Where man really abandons himself and loves his neighbor with absolute selflessness, he has already come to the silent, inexpressible mystery of God and that such an act is already based on that divine self-communication which we call grace and which gives the act of which it is the ground its saving meaning and importance for eternity.144

We now see how Rahner supplies positive content to the notion of freedom before God as the capacity for self-achievement. We recall from §2.2 that “man disposes over himself in radical freedom productive of eternal consequences.”145 If persons’ freedom is the graced capacity for achieving the eternity they are becoming, then the positive content of their response includes a dual movement of abandonment of the enclosed self and responsibility to the neighbor who is to be loved selflessly and not as a means to one’s self-assertion. Love is inherently “ecstatic” in that the one loving by definition stands outside herself in love for another, and in this sense is self-less. Rahner regards this precise self-transcendence as the content of achieving oneself in freedom before God, or of confronting one’s own nature successfully. Such love is not a particular moral act alongside others, nor is it a “regional” happening in a person, but is rather “the whole of himself in which alone he possesses himself completely and falls into the ultimate abyss of his nature”—indeed, it is “man himself in his total achievement.”146 The content of a distorted response is the “final self-closing in egoism, which throws man into

144

  Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” pp. 109–10.   Ibid., p. 111. 146   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” pp. 242–3. 145

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the damning, deadly isolation of the lost,” an isolation Rahner depicts as “hell.”147 Self-abandonment in love for another represents profound risk, yet riskier still, Rahner insists, would be the existence failing to risk. When we speak of love, let us think of that mysterious pouring out of one’s own being into the beloved thou. And then man notices that the daring risk of his love was not in vain, he senses how the answer comes from above, how he also is loved, how love and understanding accept and encompass reverently and tenderly his entire given-away being, how he is better protected in the love of the other than when he still belonged to himself.148

The First Letter of John repeats a critical motif discerned in the Gospel of John. In the Gospel, those who see in Jesus the Word of God and see the unity between the Word and the Father are born of God and in the “light.” Responding to Jesus is a kind of litmus test for whether one was a believing Jew in the first place. Those who do not recognize Jesus as the Word of God are in “darkness” and, as the Gospel occasionally suggests, are from the devil. The pattern resurfaces in the First Letter of John, but the terms have changed. There, the measure for knowing God and being from God is whether or not one loves. Love is the litmus test. God is love, and it is those who love who “know” God and are “from” God. The Johannine author is clear about the alternative: those who do not love abide in death (1 Jn 3:14). Three principal themes from the First Letter of John can be discerned in Rahner’s system. The first finds a happy home in the system, and is the notion that one loves the invisible God of absolute holy mystery, who one does not see, by loving the concrete and tangible neighbor one does see. The letter phrases it negatively: “those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love the God whom they have not seen” (1 Jn 4:20). This is strongly analogous to Rahner’s own metaphysical outlook wherein transcendental experience and openness cannot be experienced in a ‘pure’ form divorced from the world; they are mediated by the categorical world of things and persons. Rahner adopts this Johannine theme unambiguously: It is radically true, i.e. by an ontological and not merely “moral” or psychological necessity, that whoever does not love the brother whom he “sees”, also cannot love God whom he does not see, and that one can love God whom one does not see only by loving one’s visible brother lovingly.149

147   Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” p. 111; cf. “Who are your Brother and Sister?,” p. 71. 148   Karl Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 29. 149   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 247.

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The second Johannine theme Rahner makes use of is a theology of indwelling expressed in both the Gospel and letters to the effect that God “abides” in those who love (1 Jn 4:16). This is significant not only for a spirituality of indwelling and participation but also for moral action, since interpersonal love indicates the indwelling presence of God which, in turn, opens up an entire vertical dimension to the horizontal act of love itself. To love the neighbor is also to love God since God is “in” the neighbor: “we already love God if we really love our neighbor with absolutely genuine personal commitment.”150 The third theme Rahner embraces from the First Letter of John establishes a kind of tension with the earlier claim that Rahner’s conception of love of neighbor is not a form of “cheap” piety. The tension is deliberate. The earlier claim was that an explicit and personal relationship with God in and through Jesus Christ provides love of neighbor with its full and proper depth. That is set in tension, now, with the third theme from the Johannine literature, which is: We are loved by God (Jn 15:12) and by Christ so that we may love one another (Jn 13:34). … Thus for St. John the consequence of this is that the God who is Love (1 Jn 4:16) has loved us, not so that we may love him in return but so that we may love one another (1 Jn 4:7,11).151

Rahner finds it significant that the Johannine evangelist omits the love of God from the love commandment when the synoptic evangelists apply it to God and neighbor. He interprets the text to say that God’s love for the world in the first instance does not have as its goal the reciprocated love of the world for God. Rather, God’s love intends first to ground and empower persons’ love for each other. “Love for God’s sake—to be precise—does not mean love for God alone in the ‘material’ of our neighbor merely seen as an opportunity for pure love of God, but really means the love of our neighbor himself, a love empowered by God to attain its ultimate radicality and a love which really terminates and rests in our neighbor.”152 Elsewhere Rahner claims, “the reflected religious act as such is and remains secondary” to one’s love of neighbor in which one “attains the whole of reality given to us in categories.”153 Rahner is profoundly comfortable locating a genuine love for God within persons’ love for their neighbor because of his understanding of creation being a free dialogue between God and creatures played out in incalculably diverse ways, a dialogue wherein relations with what Rahner calls the “Thou of intramundane experience” (i.e. the neighbor) mediates either a

150

  Rahner, “The New, Single Precept of Love,” p. 108.   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 235; cf. Jn 13:1; 15:12–13. 152   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 244. 153   Ibid., p. 246. 151

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response or avoidance of the God mediated to transcendental subjectivity through categorical experience. To this effect, Rahner indicates: The primary basic act of man who is always already “in the world” is always an act of the love of his neighbor and in this the original love of God is realized in so far as in this basic act are also accepted the conditions of its possibility, one of which is the reference of man to God when supernaturally elevated by grace.154

Rahner’s reading of the First Letter of John, which tends to accent the anonymous theism of self-transcending moral action, thus representing his tackling of the issue from below, may at first glance suggest conflict with his previous comments on the importance of a personal relationship of love with God. Yet tension captures the dynamic better than conflict, for tension can be seen as a strategy meant to disclose the unity of loves itself, and to do so “from above” and “from below,” in order to convey as thoroughly as possible the unity itself through multiple angles and attestations. In this sense, Rahner’s theology of the unity of love commandments, like his Christology, weds the two methods and benefits from the advantages of both.

154   Ibid., p. 246. Rahner rephrases this point in the same article: “wherever a genuine love of man attains its proper nature and its moral absoluteness and proper depth, it is in addition always so underpinned and heightened by God’s saving grace that it is also love of God, whether it be explicitly considered to be such a love by the subject or not” (ibid., p. 237). In a sermon on love, Rahner attests once again the critical role of grace in the act of love: “The flame of the impulse to forget oneself, to devote oneself to the higher, burns always somewhere on the altar of the heart of every human being (even if it’s an avenging fire of the lost who can no longer love). But this flame is not yet love for God by itself, not even when it rises up to that one it calls its God. Such an impulse upwards only becomes Christian love when God redeems it in grace” (Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 31).

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Chapter 3

Harmony: Piety and Responsibility in Karl Barth 3.1 Context Before moving to interpret Karl Barth’s anthropology and to compare it with Rahner’s, some prefatory comments on the comparison itself in terms of its presuppositions, style and goal are appropriate. The ecumenical and interreligious methodology is designed to strengthen, clarify and supply multiple attestations to the material claim concerning the unity of piety and responsibility. The book’s organization and style convey and reinforce these commitments, treating each thinker in reciprocal relation to the others. I have borrowed basic metaphors from music as imaginative tools to frame these authors and their theological content. These metaphors are “melody,” “harmony” and “polyphony,” and they correspond to each of the three major chapters of the book. As the musical metaphors attest, neither the ecumenical nor the interreligious comparison is performed here in order to argue the identity or sameness of the theologians’ positions. Instead, the comparisons demonstrate analogical relations between Rahner, Barth and Desika. The comparisons also supply multiple and distinct attestations to the book’s material thesis concerning the unity of piety and responsibility. Demonstrating a unity-in-difference, or analogy, among the authors and their subject matter is not the same as erroneously positing their identity. The musical metaphors help us to express this distinction. The metaphors aid our understanding in the following way. A melody line in a score of music has integrity unto itself and does not stand in need of another to gain musical or aesthetic coherence. Yet, melody is conceived in terms of that to which it relates or that with which it is heard, other surrounding notes in a score of music. Melody is the mathematical and aesthetic foundation of other musical lines, functioning as a kind of foundation on which all subsequent lines are “built” or as that to which they are heard in relation. A melody line is deepened, intensified and heard in a different way when heard in the context of a harmonizing line positing both contrast and cooperation. A critical feature in the transposition of the polyphony metaphor into comparative theological method is the fact that in polyphony each voice functions as a melody line, each voice has its own integrity, which is not derived from the other voices. Each is independent, yet polyphony construes that independence as a relationship. Multiple voices, each with integrity, functioning to clarify and deepen each other in the same aural space: this is the promise of polyphony for comparative theological method.

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This is the stage in which we find ourselves, introducing Karl Barth to (re)attest the unity of piety and responsibility. Harmony in this sense does not mean identification, sameness, non-difference or even consistent agreement. The very possibility of harmony existing at all is predicated on the new voice representing alterity and novelty from what preceded it. Rather than facile identification and agreement, it means that the two together produce a more satisfying sound than does either of them discretely. Often the aesthetic success of a harmony line requires it to contrast strongly and unmistakably with the melody. Yet the aesthetic success of this dynamic is predicated on the two relating to each other not discontinuously as discord, but together precisely as harmony. Converting this analogy into theological currency invites us to acknowledge that ecumenical and interreligious comparison neither expects nor hopes to encounter seamless agreement between the authors’ material theological claims. Comparison need not be predicated on commensurability of claims at every turn. The comparisons in this book do not support a base or crass unity. The comparisons instead reveal nuanced patterns of distinction and compatibility, contrast and similarity. It expects, in short, to encounter analogical relations among the three theologians, relations that at any given time may lean more toward difference than similarity, and vice versa. This dynamic intensifies and clarifies the material claim itself. With respect to theological method, difference and contrast between Rahner, Barth and Desika should now be seen not as grounds for forcing in the reader a choice between positions, as if non-identical positions could not still be thought through in terms of their unity. Rather, the comparison presupposes the possibility that difference and contrast can function as carriers of meaning and understanding. In other words, the methodological claim here is that harmony and polyphony make a positive difference in conveying the theological subject matter to the reader, just as distinct lines in a score of music are heard differently, more intensely, and more satisfyingly when heard against and with each other as a unity. Indeed, theologians have long noted the marked contrasts in methodological styles between Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, evident in the approach and questions each theologian considers, the sources deployed, the consistency of the deployment and even the writing style borne out by such decisions. Heirs of the two Germans tend to do little to remove the impression that not only are the methodological strategies incommensurable and styled to cancel out each other, but incommensurable too are the material theological claims to which such methodologies give rise.1 The 1

  A recent example is Paul D. Molnar, “Love of God and Love of Neighbor in the Theology of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth,” Modern Theology, 20:4 (2004): 567–99, a sustained criticism of Rahner’s entire theological program in view of its impact on the love commands, a criticism that presumes the normativity of Barth’s approach to the love commands and displays several critical inadequacies in the interpretation of Rahner. Molnar was accused of performing “Barthian criticism” against the Rahner-inspired theology of David Coffey, an accusation with which Molnar in turn took issue (cf. David Coffey, “In Response to Paul Molnar,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 67 [2002]: 375–8, and

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final impression is one of an unbridged chasm separating the two in method and matter; often a theologian is in the mold of Barth or Rahner, but scarcely both. Many take for granted that it would be conceptually—and even confessionally— incoherent to think of one’s own theological commitments in terms of both. However, Rahner and Barth’s material claims concerning piety and responsibility are not as discontinuous as the stereotype suggests. Their considerable differences notwithstanding, the sounds Rahner and Barth create when writing on the Christian life need not be heard as dissonant. Their simultaneous distinction-inunity instead produces harmony: a “thicker,” complex and therefore more holistic and adequately developed sound. The following sections demonstrate and defend this claim. Barth’s ecclesial and historical contexts are relevant to an appreciation of the position on theological methodology at which he eventually arrived. In contrast to the work for which he is known, Barth in the initial stage of his career enthusiastically embraced the liberal Protestant agenda of his teachers, particularly Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Hermann and Martin Rade, who were themselves pupils of Albrecht Ritschl. Their methodology honored religious individualism, human transcendental subjectivity as disclosive of religious truth, an optimistic expectation of collective human moral progress, a Kantian tendency to reduce “religion” to “morality,” and historical relativism even to the point of seeing its own constructions and formulations as “a form of the appearance of the Gospel alongside others.”2 In particular, this style of theology worked in a bottom-up fashion by analyzing particularly impressive aspects of human experience and culture, and by speculating on the Gospels’ language concerning love and the kingdom of God with the assistance of moral and cultural programs exterior to the subject matter, such as those of Immanuel Kant and the philosophical categories of German Idealism. In the words of one commentator, “perhaps one must have drunk as deeply as Barth at the wells of modernity in order to reject it as fiercely as he did.”3 Paul Molnar, “Response to David Coffey,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 68 [2003]: 61–5). Molnar’s bias results in an interpretation of Rahner that is forced and unrecognizable to some theologians in the mold of Rahner. A notable contrast is David H. Kelsey, “Two Theologies of Death: Anthropological Gleanings,” Modern Theology, 13/3 (1997): 347–70, which compares Karl Rahner and Eberhard Jüngel as types representing the typical Roman Catholic/Protestant theological polarity, but with ecumenical sensitivity draws creatively from both to discern anthropological proposals faithful to the intent of both sides. Kelsey’s mode of interpretation is useful and taken up here. Rather than performing criticism or apologetics from a Barthian or Rahnerian perspective, a preferable approach will read the two in light of each other and probe where the articulation of one can be relevant to the articulation of the other. 2   Christoph Shwöbel, “Theology,” in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge, 2000), p. 18; cf. Nigel Biggar, “Barth’s Trinitarian Ethic,” in Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, pp. 212–13. 3   Shwöbel, “Theology,” p. 19.

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Liberal Protestantism or modern theology predominated the German theological scene until, ironically, Barth himself in the devastating wake of World War I lobbed into that same scene the bombshell that was his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Der Römerbrief (1st edn, 1919). This classic text became much less an exegetical commentary than a masterful piece of contextual theology attacking the modern theology he had previously recommended as the most helpful theological foundation for the service of church ministry. The publication of Der Römerbrief, which saw six editions, dealt a severe blow to the feasibility of liberal Protestant theology in the mode in which it was practiced, rooting theological reflection in the sovereignty of the Word of God over against individual human experience, culture, world and even theology itself when uprooted from its foundation in revelation. World War I imposed on Barth a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn from the perspective on theology he first held. German theologians had advocated the Kaiser’s war policies, and for Barth this critical flaw in their theology and ethics called into question both German academic theology and the possibility of doing theology at all. If both ecclesial and academic theological circles were exposed as being in conflict with God and, by extension, the world as a whole was exposed as being hostile toward God, then theology’s only possible methodological commencement must shift from the interpretation of religious experience to the supposition that the world is godless.4 Human experience—even those transcendentally elevated moments of experience or limit-experience on which modern theology focuses its attention—is thus a fundamentally unstable and misleading category of theological reflection. Theology cannot continue as if there were a way from the finite to the infinite, from the world to God, from unholy persons to the holy One, from human experience to revelation. The ontological separation, diastasis, or “frontier” between God and not-God cannot be crossed from the side of the world.5 His early words from Römerbrief are suggestive: The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly

4   Shwöbel “Theology,” pp. 17–21. It will be clarified below that godlessness is a comment referring not to human persons as creatures of God but to theological epistemology. In Barth’s view, all persons stand in relation to God through ontological participation in Jesus Christ; none are ontologically godless but rather all are ontologically good, a determination undeterred by sin. Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1960), p. 136; Church Dogmatics, IV/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1956), p. 480; Wolf Krötke, “The Humanity of the Human Person in Karl Barth’s Anthropology,” trans. Philip G. Ziegler, in Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. 5   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1956), p. 368; cf. Biggar, “Barth’s Trinitarian Ethic,” p. 215.

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distinct from men. Salvation comes to them from him, because they are, as men, incapable of knowing Him, and because they have no right to claim anything from Him.6

To be sure, the frontier is crossed, but only by God and from God’s side, only in revelation and so only in Jesus Christ. “All that I know of God and can know and should know and indeed ought to know, I know by an exercise of lordship of which I am the object.”7 This became an axiological premise for Barth’s subsequent writing such that his theological epistemology—and all subsequent doctrinal loci—became methodologically and materially Christocentric. Decades after the theological catastrophe Barth experienced resulting from World War I, he and his fellow clergymen associated with the Confessing Church, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, would attack the established Evangelische or Lutheran Church for colluding in the political and ecclesial policies of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. They attacked the church’s structures of sin and idolatry as well as the Nazi state’s interfering with ecclesial practice and governance.8 Barth criticized in both historical moments the temptation of theologians to import worldviews (Weltanschauung) into Christian theology to supply grammar for the explication of Christian doctrine when the content of such worldviews is fundamentally at odds with the gospel and when they exercise a totalizing and thus distorting influence, dulling if not annihilating the Word of God and the prophetic effects of the Holy Spirit in the Christian community such that “Christendom”—in Søren Kierkegaard’s sense of the term— depicted ecclesial life rather than proclamation of Jesus Christ. In such cases, the church became a crippled and misformed cultural artifact mirroring an historical and cultural moment (e.g. Völkische or racial theology) rather than its own subject matter: the preaching of reconciliation for all achieved in and by Jesus Christ, a task for which theology properly understood dedicates itself to the service of preaching. For preaching, along with scripture, mediates the reality of Jesus Christ and in some sense becomes the Word of God for the church. The prevailing and shifting winds of cultural capital cannot sustain the Word of God; worldviews have little to contribute 6   Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th edn, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskins (London, 1968), p. 28. 7  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 389. 8   In the critical period of the 1930s in Germany, the Confessing Church started stronger than it finished, and the group as a whole resisted Hitler’s Reich church with varied commitment and success. By 1938 the group was sufficiently torn internally that it was unable to produce a formal condemnation of Kristallnacht; see Ronald Thiemann, “Karl Barth and the Task of Constructing a Public Theology,” Constructing a Public Theology: The Church in a Pluralistic Culture (Louisville,1991), p. 77; Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel (eds), Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, 1999); Alejandro Zorzin, “Church versus State: Human Rights, the Church, and the Jewish Question (1933),” in John W. de Gruchy (ed.), Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition (Grand Rapids, 1977).

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toward its elucidation when they are embraced systematically. Culture may need to be exposed as godless in order for the church to engage faithfully its subject matter and mission in the world. It is critical to note that Barth’s position on method is nuanced. Rather than assuming an a-historical and a-cultural setting for any theologian, he presupposes the enduring presence of a worldview as the contextual background of human thought and so too of theological reflection. A worldview is always presupposed as a brute fact behind all human histories, but little should follow from it. The worldview should occupy a subdued or undetected role in the theologian’s unfolding of Christian doctrine. Barth does not advocate a rejection of secular learning as such, not even when worldviews supply such learning. He advocates instead the rejection of a worldview or a “system” used as a template into which the Word of God is placed as an interpretive schema by which theologians systematically spell out the grammar of Christian doctrine, shaping and coloring and binding that grammar with alien vocabulary.9 For the Word of God is intelligible “only in terms of itself”: The reality of the Word of God in all its three forms is grounded only in itself. So, too, the knowledge of it by men can consist only in its acknowledgement, and this acknowledgement can become real only through itself and can become intelligible only in terms of itself.10

Rejected then, is not systematic theology as such but “system” in the sense of a closed frame of reference and meaning that controls the interpretation of Christian doctrine, rather than one the deployment of which is controlled by the Christian narrative discerned in revelation. To state this discrimination positively is to say that theologians witnessing to and preaching the Word of God are free to employ the data of worldviews in a critical, eclectic, provisional and ad hoc manner, and with little self-assurance.11 Such data cannot corral the Word of God or set expectations and limits to how the Word is heard. Thinking otherwise would be to misconstrue 9   Ronald Thiemann labels Barth’s stance the repudiation of “an eternal covenant between Christian faith and modern culture” (Thiemann, “Karl Barth and the Task of Constructing a Public Theology,” p. 83). 10   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, 2nd edn, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 187. 11   Karl Barth, “The Proclamation of God’s Free Grace,” in God Here and Now, trans. Paul M. van Buren (London, 2003), p. 48. One of Barth’s concerns with worldviews is their temptation toward confidence and pride. For a statement emphasizing that Barth neither rejects the ad hoc Christian theological use of philosophy nor erects a sharp disjunction between the Word and the world, see Ronald Thiemann, “Karl Barth and the Task of Constructing a Public Theology,” pp. 79–87. For an example of Barth justifying and encouraging the use of non-theological subject matter in theological anthropology, see Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, pp. 200–202.

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the reality of revelation in relation to human creatures, mistaking its impact on them to be something other than Krisis. In the words of one commentator, [The Word of God] points to a Novum in human experience and human history which cannot be understood on the basis of what is generally the case, but only on the basis of itself. The Novum is so unique that (contrary to someone like Kierkegaard) it cannot be explained as an absurdity, for that would imply not only that the limits of our minds can circumscribe God’s rationality, but also that we are in a position to know in advance what is possible or impossible for God.12

Barth could not be clearer about this qualified rejection of worldviews. He restates it throughout the loci of Church Dogmatics, maintaining in I/2 that revelation alone reveals to the human person who she is as a Christian. Theological reflection cannot then attempt to know the human person abstractly, by which in the context of Church Dogmatics, I/2 §18 he means in systematic dependence on a psychological program. Theological reflection can know her as the object of divine justification and in the sanctified-sinner antithesis revelation reveals her to be.13 In Church Dogmatics, II/2 Barth uses the term “annexation” to describe the process by which theological ethics approaches philosophical and scientific material: these latter are to be used only if compatible with Christian theological presuppositions, particularly the acknowledgment and praise of grace.14 They are to be annexed, rather than the worldview annexing and distorting Christian theology, as was the case, in his judgment, with Roman Catholic natural law theory and Lutheran ethical naturalism.15

12   George Hunsinger, “Karl Barth’s Christology: Its Basic Chalcedonian Character,” in Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 131. The term novum captures the in-breaking character of revelation in the following comment of Barth: “none of the external and internal ‘urges’ of our existence, as creatures that we know of, can be taken by us in themselves and as they are as already the Creator’s Word” (Karl Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, trans. R. Birch Hoyle [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993], p. 9). Revelation as a novum aptly depicts one of Barth’s comments on grace to the effect that “there is a transvaluation of all values where the grace of God rules” (Karl Barth, The Call to Discipleship, trans. G.W. Bromiley [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], p. 54). 13  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 363. 14   Karl Barth, “Christian Ethics,” in God Here and Now, p. 110, where Barth himself demonstrates such annexation when he puts to Christian use Kant’s declaration that human persons ought not be used as means to ends of which they are not a part since, Barth explains, human nature possesses the dignity of which Kant speaks, a dignity however to be ascertained in the first instance by the assumption of human nature in the incarnation of the Word. 15   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2: The Doctrine of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (New York, 2004), p. 524; cited in Nigel Biggar, “Barth’s Trinitarian Ethic,”

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Once more, in Church Dogmatics, III/2, Barth recalls the extensive commingling of Christian doctrine and worldviews throughout the history of the churches and restates reasons why despite this history it can never be the duty of theologians to expound a “specific cosmology.” He notes that there is no revealed or biblical worldview because the world as such is incommensurable with the Word of God. The created world fails to present to faith the fullness of the latter’s subject matter.16 Faith, moreover, is committed to its own particular theme and can borrow from worldviews in a “supremely non-committal” fashion. Faith should never take them seriously, should easily tire of them, and refuse to be responsible for the maintenance of their content and cultural capital.17 Finally, he notes that insofar as the confession of faith is pure, it “will always bear the marks of a contradiction between the confession and the system’s principles with which it is conjoined.”18 For example, he suggests that Plato and Aristotle would scarcely have been satisfied with the theological turns their Weltanshauungen took in Augustine and Thomas, and that the Word of God makes itself felt even in harmful alliances.19 The knowledge communicated by the word of God is the knowledge of covenant. The word of God reveals the objective fellowship between God and human creatures which the latter are invited to make active; it reveals their selfcontradiction in sin and their reconciliation with God in the person of Jesus Christ, who is himself, as very God and very human, incarnate reconciliation. When viewed from this divine drama of history, the knowledge supplied by any given worldview is, at best, secondary to the knowledge of revelation and provisionally useful in its explication and, at worst, inimical to revelation. With respect to doctrine, a worldview can occupy no more than a secondary position, and it must not be deployed systematically in the explication of revelation due to its unsuitability in establishing theologically the content of doctrine. 3.2  Doer of the Word It should come as no surprise that Karl Barth’s anthropology is an anthropology of the Word of God and that its material claims come from the peculiar subject matter of the incarnate Word rather than from anthropologies of humanistic, scientific and philosophical–ethical bearing cultural capital. We now turn to the topic Barth raises in Church Dogmatics, I/2—revelation’s disclosure of the human person as a p. 225; cf. Katherine Sonderegger, “Barth and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, p. 267. 16  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 8. 17   Ibid., pp. 8–9. 18   Ibid., p. 10. 19   This may help to explain Barth’s sporadic remarks of approval of Thomas in the fine-print sections of Church Dogmatics, despite his harsh criticism of the Dominican in Church Dogmatics, I/1 concerning natural theology and foundationalism.

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“Doer of the word” (Der Mensch als Täter des Wortes)—as a general framework shaping his understanding of humanity responsive to revelation. We will then question whether the similarities and differences on the priority Barth and Rahner assign to prevenient grace can be heard in terms of the consonance associated with the polyphony model. Karl Barth’s early reflections in Church Dogmatics, I/2 on anthropology appear in a brief section entitled “Man as a Doer of the Word,” the first of three sections spanning 92 pages on the Christian life entitled “The Life of the Children of God.”20 He focuses in this first section on the Christian in concreto rather than the “lyricism” of an unstable and possibly misleading portrait of the Christian in abstracto. The difference between doing theology in a concrete (viz., revelatory, Christological) versus an abstract (viz., secular, speculative) manner is a recurring theme arising with reliable persistence throughout the voluminous Church Dogmatics, not only in those places where Barth announces his method to the reader but primarily in his treatment of individual themes. His reflections on the human person as a “doer of the Word” are thus controlled by the intersection of the divine circle of revelation with the circle of human existence. This intersection—a scene of Krisis—is marked by revelation creating recipients; it creates perception and belief. Barth’s claims concerning persons as doers of the word illuminate the implications of his commitment to the incarnation as the event whereby God deigns humans to become “partakers by grace of the divine sonship which is proper to [Jesus Christ] by nature,” and therefore to faithful covenant partnership.21 Their participation in divine sonship is contingent on both a self-determining human freedom and pre-determining divine grace. Moreover, no quarrel is to be found in this dynamic of human self-determination and divine pre-determination of the one human subject. “God’s freedom does not compete with man’s freedom … it is the grace of revelation that God exercises and maintains his freedom to free man.”22 The lack of conflict between the two should be traced to Barth’s understanding of human freedom, which proceeds conceptually from above in viewing freedom as known in and conditioned by divine revelation. Human freedom is viewed from above also in that, notwithstanding Barth’s insistence on human self-determination, revelation causes human existence to be “newly posited by God.”23 More specifically, he conceives of the word precisely as revelation, viz., a totally other and alien reality coming to persons and becoming “engrafted” in them.24 Because it is engrafted in them, believing persons experience the word as 20   Barth seems to have followed his own methodological advice to borrow critically from alien worldviews when he borrowed the title “The Life of the Children of God” from von Harnack; cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 367. 21  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, pp. 362–3. 22   Ibid., p. 365. 23  Ibid. 24  Ibid.

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something near to them. It is given to them and they receive it, and the reception of this genuinely new reality signals their turn from pride and self-righteousness toward humility and meekness. With respect to the operations of freedom and grace, it should be noted that, as we observed in Rahner’s parsing of the relation of grace to freedom, Barth too allots “precedence” to grace.25 That grace holds “precedence” over freedom nevertheless does not make freedom less free or, even, meaningless. “Precedence” points to the direction in which freedom ought to go and to the divine agency freeing it for correspondence. The precedence of grace with respect to freedom is not construed competitively; it points rather to the agency whereby freedom is opened, fulfilled and truly creaturely. To use a word Barth regularly employs throughout Church Dogmatics, freedom is “ordered” to grace as that to which it is meant to correspond in a creaturely mode. The act of receiving revelation points to persons’ absolute dependence on God, both for the grace of God’s movement toward the creature in revelation and for the grace that is the divine adoption of persons for participation in the truth of revelation.26 Such unambiguous dependence and reception, however, does not point to passivity in response. Receiving, or “hearing” the word, issues in a definite “doing” of the Word. Hearing must include doing in order for it to be true hearing, just as justification is incomplete unless it includes sanctification and faith is dead unless it issues forth in works. Barth pens a passage reflecting his intent to unify Paul and James by positing hearing and doing, faith and works, in light of each other: It is obvious for Paul that this work could as little be a rival of faith as it could of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit—or as little as in James the doing of the Word could be of the hearing. It is not additional to faith. It is the expression, the true and necessary expression of faith. In actual fact, faith is alone. But real faith—as opposed to what James calls a dead faith—is not an upward faith, as directed to Jesus Christ and therefore to justification. If it is to be faith at all, it is actually and necessarily a downward faith, as the faith of man, of man himself, of the whole man. We might also say that work is faith and faith is work, to the extent that it is the creation of the free God, and within those limits necessarily and totally the free decision and act of man.27 25   “Precedence” is a term Barth uses to convey the superintendence of grace over freedom, a term reminiscent of “correspondence” which he prefers to “lordship” and “subjection” (see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/4: Lecture Fragments, p. 178, cited in John W. Webster, “The Christian in Revolt: Some Reflections on The Christian Life,” in Nigel Biggar [ed.], Reckoning with Barth: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth [London, 1988], p. 132). 26   Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. Ian W. Robertson (London, 1960), p. 39; Church Dogmatics, II/1, p. 179. 27  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 367.

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True faith, that is, a “downward faith”, involves the whole person in response to God and so comprises both hearing and doing. Faith derives its obedient character not from itself but from the “outside,” from revelation and from the light into which faith is placed. Within these limits set by revelation, faith and work can become “necessarily and totally the free decision and act of man.” To this effect Barth writes: What is essentially “Christian” in this life and doing and not doing can only be the declaration: He and not I! He and not we! He, the Lord! He for us! He in our stead! The predominant determination of man by revelation, the basis of the life of the children of God, is the fact that this “He” avails for them, comforting, exhorting, ordering and limiting—and all with an unrivalled emphasis, because it is the reality of their own existence which is vindicated in it all, a reality which they can as little avoid as they can escape ourselves [sic].28

To be a doer of the word, which is true hearing, is to live an existence of dialectical subtlety. On the one hand, it signals a new existence posited by God—that is, “he is not merely newly qualified, but really new.”29 On the other hand, precisely this new creation posited by God is nothing less than the creature’s own reality in contrast to its distortion marked either by a refusal to hear altogether or by a nonperformative hearing lacking a doing, amounting to no hearing at all. The person who responds in faith to revelation responds integrally. She both hears and does, and the locus of these two actions constitute one whole response, a free human will which is genuinely free and self-determined precisely when ordered to the grace of God. For this reason, Barth attaches to the above quotation—“he is not merely newly qualified but really new”— the critical explanatory clause “because newly made in the relationship created between himself and God.”30 Later in the Church Dogmatics Barth will elaborate on the creaturely participant’s role in this relationship: Freedom is not an empty and formal concept. It is one which is filled out with positive meaning. It does not speak only of a capacity. It speaks concretely of the fact that man can be genuinely man as God who has given him this capacity in His freedom can be genuinely God. The free man is the man who can be genuinely man in fellowship with God. He exercises and has this freedom, therefore, not in an indefinite but in a definite choice in which he demonstrates this capacity.31

28

  Ibid., p. 368.   Ibid., p. 369. 30  Ibid. 31   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (New York, 2004), p. 494. 29

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Barth’s conception of freedom is thus quite similar to Rahner’s insofar as both regard freedom as neither psychological freedom of choice nor freedom from coercion but a freedom for God in that persons find themselves liberated and completed when in correspondence with grace. In other words, “as captive to the Word of God, he is free.”32 Barth employs some general phenomenological categories to designate the determination revelation has on human life. These categories correspond to his overall theme of hearing and doing the Word of God. They appear below on the left hand side of the column and are correlated with the theological terms on the right. being / doing → justification / sanctification inward / outward → faith / obedience isolation / fellowship → children of God / servants of God It is no coincidence that Barth describes the unity of these responses in much the same way he describes Chalcedonian Christology: they belong together, their separation is relative and not real, neither can exist without the other, they are distinct but not separate, the one is “indissolubly bound up” with the other.33 Barth’s thinking here unmistakably is from above. Each set of theological categories comprises a unity not least for the reason that the divine persons Christian doctrine holds responsible for each activity (Jesus Christ—justification, faith and becoming children of God; the Holy Spirit—sanctification, obedience and becoming servants of God) are, with the Father, a Trinitarian unity-in-distinction. Hearing and doing, justification and sanctification, are not two separate determinations of human life. They are but one unified determination from the one Trinitarian Godhead, and can be imagined as metaphorical lines constantly intersecting and forming themselves into a woven whole. “There can be no question of an antithesis between two quite different determinations of man; for He who determines, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, is only One.”34 Revelation determines the whole person, and that single determination is bivalent along the lines of a Chalcedonian and Nicean unity-indistinction.35 Toward the conclusion of his reflections on “Man as the Doer of the Word,” Barth announces two critical activities that organize the rest of §18 on “The Life of the Children of God”: loving and praising. The activities of loving and praising are modeled on the same unity just noted and supply theological content to Barth’s prefatory discussion concerning being and doing, inner and outer aspects of the Christian life. They are, first, seeking after God from the core of   Karl Barth, Ethics, trans. G.W. Bromiley (New York, 1981), p. 482.  Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 499. 34  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 369. 35   For an example of the Chalcedonian pattern playing itself out in the unity of justification and sanctification, see Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, pp. 501–5. 32

33

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one’s being, an inner “search” the biblical name for which is “love of God” and, second, proclaiming outwardly the fact that as a justus peccator one is found and saved by God in Christ, the biblical name for which is “praise of God.” These two activities—love and praise—occupy persons to whom God’s revelation comes. Love of God is the Christian attitude resulting from cognizance of being justified in Christ for participation in his new life despite the concrete reality of one’s enduring sin and evasion of grace. Those who seek and love God are new subjects born by the Holy Spirit set on a task only they themselves can do in their isolation as Christians: loving God. The bold-faced introductory paragraph paraphrases this well: “the revelation of God creates men who do not exist without seeking God in Jesus Christ.”36 Praise of God is the Christian acknowledgment, practiced socially in the fellowship of the church, of having been found in Christ such that, properly speaking, one knows oneself not as one who sought God but as one after whom God sought. Praise is the Christian attitude wherein one acknowledges the freedom of God to view humanity through the lens of the free obedience of Jesus Christ.37 “The praise of God is the action inescapably laid upon us when our freedom is transferred to another action under the sentence and judgment of God when we are dead with Christ.”38 In summation of both activities, “the love of God is our only necessary being, and the praise of God is our only doing.”39 We turn now to a comparison of Barth and Rahner on the human person’s creaturely ontology with respect to prevenient grace. This comparison will ground the next comparison of how Rahner and Barth parse the unity of love commandments. 3.2.1  Harmony: Creaturely Ontology vis-à-vis Prevenient Grace This comparison is not concerned with the question of whether grace grounds both anthropologies. We have already found grace to be indispensable in both cases. This comparison seeks to clarify any significant distinctions in the way grace meets Rahner’s “hearer of the word” and Barth’s “doer of the word.” We ask whether the “hearer of the word” ontology implicitly diminishes the role of grace in its claim that human nature features a transcendental quality rendering it receptive to revelation. Again, to ask whether Rahner and Barth are compatible or analogous on prevenient grace is a different and better question than to ask whether they say the same thing. They do not say the same thing. The more interesting question asks if, and how, the two be read compatibly in the sense suggested by the operative metaphor of harmony. That is, can the distinct voices of Rahner and Barth be heard as harmony rather than discord?  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 362.   Ibid., p. 371. 38  Ibid. 39  Ibid. 36 37

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While Karl Barth is widely regarded as emphasizing prevenient grace, he is often maligned with the accusation of slighting human freedom. Many interpret his theological epistemology, for instance, to leave no room for an authentic human response and dialogue because it claims God as both object and subject of revelation. Rahner, on the other hand, is widely acknowledged for the dominant role freedom plays in his theological system, a system whose ontological claims about human personhood are predicated on a genuine and free dialogue between God and humanity. Because of the stress on freedom, an excessively optimistic understanding of human capacity and a concomitant diminished role of prevenient grace are sometimes impugned to Rahner. Such stereotypes misleadingly suggest that the theologians are diametrically opposed on questions of freedom and grace, when in fact they employ different strategies to pursue shared intentions and ends. The stereotypes also misleadingly suggest that grace and freedom are related to each other oppositionally as in a zero-sum game, as if advocacy of grace functioning as the condition for the possibility of response to revelation necessarily results in a proportionate decline in human agency. Rahner and Barth unambiguously reject this zero-sum relationship between grace and freedom. In truth, the previous chapter’s interpretation of Rahner’s theological anthropology had this criticism in mind and aimed to clarify the role grace occupies in his system. Barth’s presupposition that the world is godless and consequently that there could be no “natural” way for human knowing to grasp or discern the revelation of God rests on two issues. The first is divine mystery and hiddenness, the objective remoteness of God obtaining even in God’s own self-interpretation in revelation. The second is human sinfulness. With respect to the unnknowability of God caused by alienation from God, viz., sin, Barth is clear that godlessness does not attach to creation as such. Sin is neither entitative nor creative; it is not capable of redetermining created reality in a way that could undo the creative action of God determining human reality as good. That is why Barth describes it as nothingness (das Nichtige), as a “secondary” determination of humanity whereas grace is “primary,” for it can be said to “exist” only in the form of goodness perverted.40 While sin does not reverse the divine declaration of goodness, it does pervert the creature with devastating effects, and is therefore an impossible possibility in light of the divine decision to create genuine others for covenant partnership. The godlessness of human persons inferred from the reality of sin is a comment on epistemology rather than ontology, one which underscores the indispensable role of grace in creaturely hearing and doing of the Word.41 God, then, because of his 40  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 289–368; Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, pp. 32, 206; John C. McDowell, “Much Ado about Nothing: Karl Barth’s being Unable to Do Nothing about Nothingness,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 4 (2002): 319–35. 41   A comprehensive assessment of sin is not possible here. It is enough to note that Barth is relatively Augustinian in his insistence that sin is neither ontologically creative nor capable of undoing the divine determination of creatures as good: “(1) the good which

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objective remoteness and mystery, and because of human sin, must be the object and subject of revelation, the giver and recipient. Objectively speaking, the divine commitment—because of Christ—to reconcile humans to himself accounts for why there is revelation at all. Subjectively speaking, grace must be the means by which persons hear the divine Word and are able to respond with a definite doing as Christians. To this effect Barth writes: “man as he is, in his creaturely existence as man and as an individual, is opened, prepared, and made fit by God for God.”42 This empowering activity of God in human hearing and doing of the Word is the function of the Holy Spirit. Just as the human creature cannot produce the Word of God, neither can she accept that Word on the supposed strength of her own merit and receptivity. Barth uses passive verbs to describe the human role in this process. The most active stance a person can take in this process is the stance of non-evasion, that is, that she permit and not evade the divine Word being spoken to her.43 Freedom plays just this role, such that “if it does not belong to our freedom to put ourselves in this position [of being the object of divine action], it is none the less our freedom which we exercise in this position.”44 Notwithstanding this role allotted to freedom, “the fundamental significance of the Holy Spirit for the Christian life is that this, our participation in the occurrence of revelation, is just our being grasped in this occurrence which is the effect of the divine action.”45 This represents a theological turn from the subject in such a way that both the objective and subjective ground of revelation is God.46 If God is unknowable, Barth nonetheless does not conclude that humans do not know God. He concludes they know God by God, in the Spirit; they know God in the gift of faith and in faith’s corresponding obedience. Their response to God in faith is subjectively born out by God the Holy Spirit rather than being the product and possession of their autonomous selves. For Barth, the human capacity to know God is given only in the event of revelation itself, in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.47

remains to a man as a sinner is not merely a ‘relic’ but the totality of his God-given nature and its determination, and (2) in the same totality he exists in the history of the perversion of this good into evil, and is caught up in the movement from above to below. His total being in this movement is his miseria which has its limit only in the misericordia Dei” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 489; cf. 485, 488). 42  Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, p. 7. 43   Ibid., p. 8. Barth likens the one who evades the divine speech in false autonomy to one who “finally raves[s] to and fro within the confines of his own faculties, like a hungry hyena in its cage” (ibid., p. 11). 44  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 364. 45  Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, p. 6. 46   Trevor Hart, “Revelation,” in Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, p. 51. 47  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, pp. 166, 321.

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Scholars’ discussions of Barth’s doctrine of revelation and theological epistemology rightly contextualize his position in terms of those against whom he responded critically, especially, Friedrich Schleiermacher.48 The similitude of Karl Rahner’s anthropology to that of Schleiermacher—especially with respect to Rahner’s transcendental subjectivity and Schleiermacher’s God-consciousness— can place him in dangerous connection with Schleiermacher, and so criticisms Barth leveled against the one are frequently thought to apply to the other as well. This is not the place to report and adjudicate the fairness of Barth’s criticisms of Schleiermacher. Nor can we rehearse the diminution in these criticisms witnessed from Barth’s early to later writings. However, we can note that his hostility was focused upon Schleiermacher and the school of modern liberal Protestant theology in which Barth was educated.49 Although Barth admits to Rahner in personal letters of correspondence his confusion over Roman Catholic beliefs concerning Mary, nowhere does he explicitly criticize Rahner’s own theological system, in part or whole.50 This fact may have less to do with a tacit approval of Rahner than with a general lack of interest and communication between Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians during this period of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, one should not immediately assume the criticisms against Schleiermacher are convertible to Rahner. While Barth and Rahner are noted for their different strategies concerning revelation, grace and freedom, such differences do not preclude analogous relationships in critical aspects of their anthropologies. For instance, Rahner’s characterization of human persons as transcendentally open and receptive to revelation does not presume revelation is forthcoming as a matter of course. It remains grace: human persons’ transcendental orientation before God does not coerce revelation or remove divine freedom and good pleasure. Rahner’s explication of transcendental subjectivity and the receptivity it suggests does not take revelation for granted. Nor does transcendent subjectivity suggest a kind of homo religiosus who could be independent of the divine freedom and good pleasure that are the condition for revelation’s possibility. Rahner repeatedly insists that in the event God were not to speak the divine Word, human creatures’ fulfillment would consist of an eternal listening to the divine silence. Persons’ transcendent “orientation does not imply that we have a right to this revelation, but only that we have a duty to accept it, should it freely and gratuitously be granted to us.”51 Revelation in Rahner, as it

48

  Trevor Hart, “Revelation,” pp. 38–41; Graham Ward, “Barth, Modernity, and Postmodernity,” Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. 49   Cf. Hart, “Revelation”; James O. Duke and Robert F. Streetman, (eds), Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? (Philadelphia, 1988). 50   Karl Barth, Letters 1961–1968, ed. Jürgen Fangmeier and Nirich Stoevesandt, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, 1981), pp. 278–82, 287–8. 51   Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York, 1994), p. 14.

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is in Barth, is unnecessary and therefore utterly gratuitous and a result of the divine good pleasure. Secondly, the transcendental openness characterizing human persons is due objectively to that to which they are open. It is due to their constitution by God and not their own subsistence or achievement. Their capacity for self-transcendence toward God and neighbor is described predominantly with language from above: it is not an autonomous movement of the creature toward God but rather the creature’s absolute dependence on the “infinite horizon of being” making itself manifest. “Transcendence opens up for us when we receive an object from without, showing itself by itself.”52 And in Foundations of Christian Faith he writes: “he cannot understand himself as subject in the sense of absolute subject, but only in the sense of one who receives being, ultimately only in the sense of grace.”53 That the locus of control and agency in Rahner’s thought is from above accounts for why he prefers a passive voice to render his point: human receptivity is underscored with respect to knowledge of God being neither native nor intuitive but something for which persons are created and into which they are opened. In this case, a passive voice is critical in conveying Rahner’s epistemological and theological intent. Human persons, as spirit, do not open themselves up, but rather are created for transcendence and are opened up into a transcendence that, to be sure, is precisely their own.54 At no point does grace cease to be the condition for the possibility of knowledge of God. Nor is there for Rahner a point at which grace ceases to be the condition for the possibility of human dialogic response to God’s revelation. Rahner reinforces the graciousness of revelation by claiming something about the human person in addition to and in tension with her transcendental subjectivity, namely, that she is also the “emptiness” (Leere) into which revelation is poured.55 However transcendental subjectivity is interpreted, Rahner clearly underscores the radical dependence of persons on God suggested by the image of empty space. Not only is transcendental subjectivity described in terms that underscore its dependent and receptive qualities, but that same subjectivity is also at times described as the emptiness into which God speaks. The apparent tension between these two claims 52

  Ibid., pp. 119, 122.   Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William Dych (New York: 1978), p. 34. 54   “One is only accepting what one undeniably is, both real and yet derivative, a creature which produced in freedom and is produced as grace as it acts” (Karl Rahner, “Grace and Freedom,” in Karl Rahner (ed.), Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi [New York, 1975], p. 601; cf. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 183). 55   Cf. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 217, 223 (Ger., pp. 216, 221). Elsewhere Rahner uses the terms “mere void” and “desert of nothingness,” in “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York, 1974), pp. 111, 120. 53

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is in fact no tension at all. For both claims insist that persons’ orientation toward transcendence in no way removes their existential poverty and dependence vis-àvis God. This emphasis corresponds roughly with Barth’s insistence that God is both the object and subject of revelation, that God as Holy Spirit creates faithful responses, and that revelation grasps and conditions humans rather than the other way around. Both Rahner and Barth agree that divine speech makes possible human hearing. Third, and with respect to the conception of obediential potency (potentia obedientialis), human transcendence is described from below as potency for obedient listening. Note that this is not yet an act of obedient listening: potency designates neither what human persons are, nor what they will be or are owed, but what they might become in view of the divine commitment to communicate. Taken for granted in human nature, then, is not an accomplished listening but a capacity for listening absolutely dependent on the freedom of God to reveal the divine speech in condescension toward the spiritual creature symbolized as “empty space” dependent on revelation to create the conditions for a free dialogue to occur, a dialogue whose obedient character is known and affirmed definitively and regulatively in the person of Jesus Christ. Nor need the obediential potency be regarded as an abstract formula or Weltanschauung in Karl Barth’s sense of the term. Rahner derives obediential potency from, and explains it in terms of, the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in Jesus Christ. It does not explain Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ explains it. The obediential potency functions more to explain the incarnation—the radical selfexpression of God in human nature—than to posit human capacity in theoretical denial of the incarnation. As an anthropological strategy, the obediential potency makes little sense within the system if sectioned off from Christology where its real application and telos are to be found. In view of the incarnation, obediential potency is a theological construction applied to Jesus Christ and by extension to humanity because of Chalcedon’s designation of him as a real person (verus homo) like us in all things but sin. This is one of several examples in Rahner’s system of how Christology shapes and determines anthropology so that, when both terms are properly understood, Christology is anthropology and vice versa, a slogan for which Rahner is well known. Moreover, the incarnation signals the divinization of the world and the participation of all humanity in Christ. While Jesus’ absolute obedience ratifies history as the successful dialogue between God and spiritual creatures, it does not decide the fate of individual histories of dialogic response. It guarantees the general success of cosmic history as a dialogue established by a free God on behalf of free spiritual creatures, even as particular individual histories continue to be played out in open freedom. It would be unwise to ignore the real distinctions that separate these two great theologians, especially in theological method. This brief comparison does not mean to gloss over these distinctions. Its central task is to press our attention further to witness how issues of critical importance to both theologians—such as prevenient grace—are parsed in such a way that analogies or correspondences

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can be drawn, so that the differences stand not on their own but side by side with patterns of similarity and correspondence. They both take pains to insist repeatedly on the human person’s absolute dependence on God both for the graciousness of revelation and for its reception. One might yet quarrel with one or the other’s construal of this dependence. This comparison will have been helpful if it has narrowed the space in which any such quarrel might occur. It will have been helpful if it has increased understanding and appreciation on both sides. It will have been helpful, in short, if the reader has now begun to hear the voices of Rahner and Barth distinctly but together, and judged the sound produced to be closer to consonance than dissonance. 3.3  The Unity of Loving and Praising God This section details two levels of unity pertaining to the love commandments—the first on the loves themselves, the second on the theologians. First, it treats Karl Barth’s position on the unity of loves and second, in comparison with Rahner’s position on the same, brings into clear view the critical role unity and distinction play in the notion of harmony. This section analyzes the unity and distinction between the positions of Rahner and Barth concerning love for God and the relation of that love to love of neighbor. To be sure, the unity characterizing Barth and Rahner on this issue in no way disappears on account of the role distinction and difference will be shown to occupy in the comparison. The fact that both Rahner and Barth unambiguously lay claim to a unity of loves is one of the material bases warranting the claim that the theologians should be interpreted reciprocally in terms of this principle of unity, a unity understood according to the musical metaphors of harmony and polyphony. All analogies or correspondences in theological discussions require genuine difference in order to be posited in the first place, just as a piece of music can entail harmony only by positing distinction and variation within itself. To continue the musical analogy one step further, the reader does well to imagine the score of music as the church, and the harmony and melody lines as distinct theologians representing variation and contrast within the one church. The benefit of the analogy involves the listener hearing these distinct lines as constituents of a single piece of music, lending complexity and depth to the one score, rather than perceiving them as two separate, much less antagonistic, scores. Distinctions between the two theologians on the unity of loves nonetheless should not obscure the vision of their prior and more general unity, a unity whose nature is not destroyed simply because Rahner and Barth express it according to different methodological commitments. To be sure, there can be no unity where there is identity. Unity thus requires some tolerable degree of distinction and difference in order for harmony and not discord to be its product. The present discussion will accent distinction as a property in the analogy between the two theologians, yet will also show that their material differences on the love commandments do not harm the methodological premise of this book, namely, that their material claims

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should be heard together and in terms of each other, and that doing so enhances one’s understanding of the shared material theological claims Rahner, Barth and Desika, are eager to express in their distinctive ways. Recall certain key motifs Rahner used to govern his own treatment of the unity. First, Rahner appropriates the theme of mediation and construes it in both biblical—specifically Johannine and Pauline—and metaphysical terms. Second, a variation on the motif of anonymous Christianity came to expression in the assertion that a genuine love of God occurs wherever persons “exit” themselves in a sacrificial abandonment of self in love of others. Third, love of neighbor achieves its robust identity only when joined to a love of God which itself achieves full consciousness in a personal devotion to Jesus Christ. Rahner and Barth agree with the non-negotiable tenet that love of God and neighbor are mutually inclusive and comprise an essential unity. They agree, albeit with a distinction in emphasis on the “priority” love of God holds in the unity of the two loves, and on the mediating function of love of neighbor vis-à-vis love of God. They also agree that love is the beginning, end and content of the Christian life. Yet the theologians at times differ sharply on strategy and on the doctrinal issues brought to bear to elucidate the unity. 3.3.1  Love of God and Love for God It is worth noting at the outset that Barth’s treatment of the unity of loves in Church Dogmatics, I/2 §18 and of the Holy Spirit and Christian love in Church Dogmatics, IV/2 §68 may set terms of discussion for, but not yet expose and elucidate, the normative Christological anthropology contained in Church Dogmatics, III/2, where the reader is treated to eloquent descriptions of real humanity (wirchliche Menschlikeit) and co-humanity (Mitmenschlikeit) as the performative content of loving one’s neighbor in response to God. In Church Dogmatics, I/2, however, Barth is exercised by issues of method and revelation and by the positions he means to reject in his own discernment of the unity of loves. He is largely uninterested here with the performative content of love neighbor or with its horizontal details, apart from insisting it is united to the love of God as praise.56 56   That methodological issues trump praxis in his discussion of the second love commandment is somewhat disappointing and, were it not for vast sections of Church Dogmatics, III/2, devastating to his view that dogmatics includes and posits ethics. The constant resurfacing of methodological discernment in Barth’s writing has given one commentator reason to suggest that “the epistemological preoccupations—of both Barth and many of his commentators—threaten at times to get in the way of the strong, confident, expansive and convincing depictions of the work of Christ and of the Christian life at which Barth excels” (John Yocum, “What’s Interesting about Karl Barth?—Barth as Polemical and Descriptive Theologian,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 4 [2002], p. 29). I concur with Yocum’s judgment and therefore treat real and co-humanity below in §3.3.3.

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For Barth, the second love commandment finds a home not in a supposedly distinct subject matter of moral theology or ethics—since dogmatics posits ethics— but in doxology, as the Christian response to grace and the Holy Spirit.57 Later, in Church Dogmatics, III/2, he will locate the relational and corporate dimensions of human personhood in anthropological proposals derived from the subject matter of Christology.58 Accordingly, Barth’s discussion of the performative content of neighbor love—what we can label as “responsibility”—will be postponed until §3.3.3 below, so as to focus presently on the love commandments and on the unity and order which he believes characterize their relation. Like Rahner, Karl Barth understands the love of God in systematic connection with other loci of Christian doctrine, particularly Trinity, revelation and justification. In direct correspondence to Barth’s insistence that knowledge of God is given only in revelation and fundamentally not achieved through bottom-up human inquiry—what he thinks of “works” in the crass sense—he likewise insists that persons love because they first were loved, that they recognize love only when exposed to God’s love for them given in revelation. The love of the human person for God should be her response and correspondence to the love of God for her, ‘set in motion’ by God’s prior acts of love revealed in the Word.59 As the living expression of the human children of God, as the self-determination of human existence, neither in essence nor in actuality can love be understood in itself, but only in that sphere or light of the divine predestination, in which we stand when he hear and believe in the Word of God and are born again as the children of God. If love is the essence and totality of the good demanded of us, how can it be known that we love? Obviously it can be said that we do so only because something else can first be said of us, that we are loved, that we are men beloved [daβ er ein Geliebter ist]. If there is nothing in the Christian life which can precede love, the love of God for man must first precede the Christian life as such, if it is to begin with love.60

This epistemological comment is a strategy Barth uses consistently in the treatment of Christian doctrine. Christian living commences when one is able to acknowledge   On Barth’s unification of dogmatics and ethics, see Barth, Ethics, p. 13; The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life; Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 371; II/2, p. 512ff.; Nigel Biggar, “Barth’s Trinitarian Ethic,” pp. 222–7. 58   John Yocum persuasively argues that Barth implicitly exposes the corporate and communal dimension of the human person in his dogmatic statements on the Trinity, Christology and election prior to formally announcing an anthropology (Yocum, “What’s Interesting about Karl Barth,” p. 33). Yocum’s suggestion is helpful and will be corroborated below. 59  Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 753 60  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 372 (Ger., p. 409); cf. Church Dogmatics, IV/2, pp. 752ff.; 1 Jn 4:10. 57

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and celebrate this order of love, because it will have meant that the Christian despaired of her own capacity to seek and find “what is above” in a false freedom and autonomy, that God plunged her into despair of an alleged natural desire for God.61 When she accepts being informed and conformed from above, she will have moved into new life reborn as a child of God capable of loving God. Once again, this raises the question to what viable extent does Barth advocate human freedom. Can a person herself, in her subjectivity, really be said to love God if, as Barth requires, revelation and grace “recreate” her and if such re-creation is the condition for the possibility of her responding to God in love? Barth means to suggest neither that divinity takes the place of humanity nor that humanity gives way to divinity. Much like Rahner, he answers this question by drawing from Christology to inform normatively human reality qua creature of God. A creaturely reality, let us say, which as such, as human self-determination, is re-created by God himself in the sphere or light of the divine predetermination, thus being transformed, becoming love instead of non-love, but not ceasing on that account to be human self-determination and therefore a creaturely reality. … In strict analogy with the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ, what takes place in man by the revelation of God is this: his humanity is not impaired, but in the Word of God heard and believed by him he finds the Lord, indeed in the strict and proper sense he finds the subject of his humanity, for on his behalf Jesus Christ stands and rightly stands in His humanity at the right hand of the Father. … When the children of God love, they are earthly members of His body, longing for their heavenly head.62

In other words, a key ingredient in the human love for God is the disposition of humility that allows God to be God and the human to be human; the disposition that sees creaturely reality to consist authentically only in its divine determination and, indeed, participation.63 That is where one encounters the subject of one’s humanity, namely, in Jesus Christ, in whose humanity all participate. In that sense, persons’ autonomy (Eigenständigkeit) has been taken away from them.64 They do not cease to be free persons, but their freedom and humanity grow in direct proportion to their responsibility to God.65 Nevertheless, they are creatures of the Lord to the extent that they submit to their identity determined in revelation, by which they confirm their ontological participation in the humanity of Jesus Christ.

 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 372.   Ibid., pp. 373–4; cf. p. 382. 63   Ibid., p. 393. 64   Ibid., p. 391. 65   “It is thus that the creature lives before God, its freedom consisting in the fact that in its autonomy it recognizes and acknowledges that it is wholly and utterly responsible to God” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, p. 121; cf. p. 127). 61

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Barth expresses the same point within the locus of pneumatology. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of Jesus Christ. It is by the “miracle” of the Holy Spirit, not by some “master-concept” concerning love, that the children of God know love and are able to love God.66 For, the tension within the one human person between the effects of the Holy Spirit on the one hand, and her own freedom on the other, by which she is free either to respond and correspond to God’s love for her or in selfcontradiction to do “a terrible thing—impossible and inexplicable” is, for Barth, no tension at all.67 The Holy Spirit is not her “acting subject” in “overpowering control.” Rather, the Spirit’s presence is the presence not of servitude but freedom: “the work of the Holy Spirit consists in the liberation of man for his own act and therefore for the spontaneous human love whose littleness and frailty are his own responsibility and not that of the Holy Spirit.”68 The impact of the Spirit is thus characterized better by gratuitous liberation than coercion of or competition with human agents. Exactly what persons do when they love God can be stated only in direct reference to what precedes their loving, namely, God’s reconciling love for the creature. In the revelation of the Word of God, the divine life is shown to be an actively self-relating triune community of love as Father, Son and Spirit.69 The Word of God also reveals what the divine life is ad extra for the world, captured succinctly in the name Jesus Christ, in whose person the godhead elects, guides and reconciles the world to Godself. Self-sacrifice is the form such reconciliation takes. “This self-sacrifice of God [Selbsthingabe Gottes] in his Son is in fact the love of God to us,” a love which gives divine life into human existence and becomes present to all in human solidarity. The Son becomes heir to the shame and curse of all in sin, “bears away” from us our own shame and curse, and presents us—in his own person—to the Father as pure and spotless children.70 For this reason Barth is convinced that “when we try to describe to ourselves the love of God, we can only express and proclaim the name of Jesus Christ. That is what it means to speak concretely of the love of God.”71 Only with a clear sense of divine love for the human creature can one begin to shape the consequent human response of love. For not only does love conceived apart from revelation in a “master-concept” issue in self-righteousness, but the human task of corresponding to divine love is impossible unless a clear vision can be had of that to which one means to correspond. In short, human love for God “must correspond [entsprechen] on man’s side to that which is said by God on His side.”72 Like Karl Rahner, Barth turns to the synoptic Jesus’ response to the  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, pp. 374–5.  Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 776. 68   Ibid., p. 785. 69   Ibid., pp. 756–66. 70  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 378. 71   Ibid., p. 379. 72   Ibid., p. 380 (Ger., p. 418). 66

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question, “which is the greatest commandment?” (Mk 12:28), which appears in Luke 10:25 as the question “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” to determine the content of loving God. These texts of scripture inspire Barth to develop six material claims concerning in what human love for God consists. First, Barth envisions an ecclesial setting to the Christian love for God. He thinks the verse from Deuteronomy 6:4 included in the Marcan account—“Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord”—is significant for the reason that the commandment to love God is directed not to “humanity in general” or to “historical groupings,” but to “Israel,” and for Barth the true community of Israel is the church of Jesus Christ.73 While the exegetical and theological difficulties of this interpretation of “Israel” cannot be detailed here—simply acknowledged—it is important to Barth’s position to note that, while it is not possible for everyone to hear the commandment to love God, the commandment nonetheless requires a decision of which all are capable of making. In keeping with the ecclesial modesty for which Barth is known, it is likewise important to connect this claim with his insistence that exactly who belongs to the church is “constantly being decided afresh.”74 “True Israel” qua the church of Jesus Christ is, then, the ideal community of human hearing and self-determination in correspondence to divine predetermination, and need not coincide with the church qua institution. Indeed, the criterion for being a member of true Israel—the church—is whether one (i) hears the commandment to love God, (ii) understands this commandment in correspondence to the love of God for all in Jesus Christ and (iii) subsequently lays hold of her future as a person who loves.75 Second, he correlates the notion of idolatry with his familiar Reformation concern over works righteousness, “that what is our own, even our own love for Him, can never be anything but our shame and our curse.”76 Barth recalls the first two commandments of the Decalogue against idol worship and redetermines them Christocentrically, as the refusal to let Jesus Christ be Jesus Christ; the refusal to let God in Jesus Christ be one’s sole helper. The opposite of love for God is, then, the refusal to choose God as one’s Lord the way God has chosen Godself as Lord to be pro nobis. For, “in virtue of His promise, God takes the place of man. He takes the matter which is for man a matter of life and death right out of his hands and makes it His own business. Therefore man belongs to this Lord.”77 The subsequent question Barth asks—“What other lords can be compared with him?”—finds its appropriate answer, rhetorically, in the Christian’s declarations in response to the work of God in Christ, noted above in the previous chapter: “He and not I! He and not we! He, the Lord! He for us!”78 Positively, love for 73

 Ibid.  Ibid. 75   Ibid., p. 381. 76  Ibid. 77   Ibid., p. 383. 78   Ibid., p. 368. 74

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God is the acknowledgment and acceptance of God’s unique, sacrificial actions pro me. Negatively, I fail to love God in futile attempts to perform this function of lordship myself, or by falling prey to the promises of idol lords who are false because of their impotence vis-à-vis the Lordship of the one God who “acts toward [us] in a manner in which none but He can act.”79 Love for God depends on the acknowledgment of this lordship and on the corresponding disposition toward such lordship, namely, receptivity and praise. Third, Barth construes the “thou shalt” of the commandment in accordance with the operation of grace. The fact that the commandment is phrased as “thou shalt” signals human responsibility for what is commanded. It is “Law”: not the law confronting persons from outside but the Law consequent to persons’ being in covenant with God. Covenant partnership with God, even when abused by the human participant, constitutes her as a creature and claims her from within. One might say covenant partnership determines her ontologically. When she loves God, she loves from her heart, her core. Yet, her love does not have its origin in herself. Love is commanded of her, and it is her responsibility to fulfill the command, but in the words of Kierkegaard, the fulfillment “does not have its origin in the heart of man.”80 Rather, “it is only in this way that it is the commandment of God, not one which proceeds from our own heart, but one which is inserted into our heart by Him, which is appropriated by our heart and which in its divinity is a means of blessing to us in the sense of Kierkegaard.”81 The language concerning “appropriating” what is “inserted” into the human heart recalls the earlier discussion of Barth’s understanding of freedom as genuine human freedom only when, in obedience, it is predetermined by divine revelation and truly free in such predetermination. One’s freedom grows in proportion to obedience, just as human love for God is truly human and truly love only when “inserted into” and subsequently “appropriated by” the heart. Fourth, the decisive quality of creaturely love for God is that it is directed to a genuine other—to God and to neighbor—and thus eschews the self-righteousness which Barth is convinced lurks in all self-love and erotic love of others. Alterity is the necessary condition for agapic love to flourish, for the lover needs an object, an opposite, a Thou with whom to relate in love.82 Love of self is solitary and 79

  Ibid., p. 382.   Ibid., p. 386. 81   Ibid., p. 386. 82   The distinction Barth draws between agapic and erotic love should be interpreted in connection with his Christological anthropology detailed in Church Dogmatics, III/2, where the “real man” is declared to be in voluntary “I–Thou” encounter with his “fellow-man” (see §3.3.2 below). With this in mind, Barth defines agape as “the orientation of human nature on God in a movement which does not merely express it but means that it is transcended, since in it man gives himself up to be genuinely freed by and for God.” In contrast, erotic love lacks alterity and humility: “Eros is love which is wholly claim, wholly the desire to control, wholly the actual attempt to control, in relation to God” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, 80

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lacks the other, and in this deficiency is no love at all but an attempt to consume and control. Love of God is the only true love, for it posits God as a genuine other and in positing God, it posits the neighbor as well. Barth thus expands the prior claim concerning idolatry into a critique of self-righteousness and classifies as Weltanschauung perspectives that provide material content to the notion of selflove contained in the second commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. As the wrath of Calvin rightly felt [love of self] meant the elevation of something negative in itself into a principle. It was obviously the dictum of a “natural” theology and anthropology, that there is in man—manifestly unaffected by the Fall—the life principle of an original unitas ad se ipsum of all life, on the basis of which self-love is something good and possible, taking precedence over love of one’s neighbor.83

The mirror of the word of God in which the real human person is seen, reveals the “self-knowledge of repentance” in contrast to the false knowledge of oneself as capable of loving in a way that somehow avoids expressing curvatus in se.84 The mirror of the Word of God reveals to persons the divine actions on their behalf and the proper human attitude resulting from acquaintance with such actions, namely, that they be “driven to repentance and held there.”85 He has not taken away our existence from us; we have not ceased to be ourselves. We are still free. But in that existence he has left us without root or soil or country, “having transferred us to the Kingdom of the Son of his love” (Col. 1:13), having Himself become our root and soil and country. From the standpoint of his incarnation and exaltation, the fact that we are “translated into the Kingdom of the Son of God” means that as the Second Adam He has assumed human nature, that He has united it to his divine person, so that our humanity, our existence in this nature, no longer has any particularity of its own, but belongs only to Him. And from the standpoint of reconciliation and justification effected in him, it means that, bearing our punishment, achieving the obedience we did not achieve and keeping the faith we did not keep, He acted once and for all in our place.86

IV/2, p. 744). Moreover, Barth assigns the “heathen”—by which he presumably means nonChristian persons—to the category of erotic love only. This declaration, while pejorative toward non-Christian persons, serves a key soteriological claim: that the one Lord wills to be the self-giving God for any and all persons bound in erotic loving, “Christian” or “heathen” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, pp. 748–9). 83  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 388. 84  Ibid. 85   Ibid., p. 390. 86   Ibid., p. 391.

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Fifth, and in light of the “order of humiliation” (Ordnung der Demütigung) contained in these first four claims concerning the human love for God—an order to be experienced not as “shameful” but “sweet” (süβ)—those who hear the word and respond to God in love will rejoice that God has confronted them in this way.87 They will confirm the One who has acted for them and will rejoice to hear the word of God telling them of the divine actions of reconciliation. They will rejoice to look at themselves in the mirror of the word of God and to let God be God, having found the operation of grace and the order of humiliation sweet and empowering. Sixth, and finally, the command to love God is a command that applies to and embraces whole persons in their existence before God. Recapitulating the unity of justification and sanctification, Barth insists that the love of God claims persons in their entirety, that is, from their inner beliefs to their life of action. This is, after all, why he unites love of God and neighbor as “the two-fold commandment of love in the divine revelation.”88 Moreover, an order governs the manner in which persons in their entirety are commanded to love, the same order governing the relation of justification to sanctification and—in the Christological locus—the relation of the divinity to the humanity of Jesus Christ. In one person there can be no division between her participation in Jesus Christ and her life of loving. The latter must follow upon and attest the former; her sanctification must follow upon and attest her justification. Barth’s discussion of the unity of soul and body later in Church Dogmatics, III/2 nicely illustrates the “order” intended here by repeating its method and logic almost exactly. The whole person—soul and body—claimed for covenant partnership in Church Dogmatics, III/2 is the same whole person claimed for the love of God in Church Dogmatics I/2. The unity of soul and body is governed by the same Chalcedonian logic governing the incarnation. Chalcedon stipulates that the one person Jesus Christ “must be confessed to be in two natures, unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, distinctly, inseparably, and that without the distinction of natures being taken away by such union, but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one person and subsistence.”89 For Barth, this motif of dialectical inseparability and distinction is critical vocabulary for speaking of the union of body and soul in the humanity of Jesus, which is patterned after Chalcedon’s union of divinity and humanity. Jesus is the norm and exemplar of human integration—verus homo—because his body is ordered to his soul. Barth extends the analogy one step further to say that revelation therefore reveals humans to be “wholly and simultaneously both [soul and body], in ineffaceable difference, inseparable unity, and indestructible order.”90 His grammatical strategy to convey “inseparable unity” is to use either soul or body as a noun and the other as an 87

  Ibid., p. 394 (Ger., p. 433).   Ibid., p. 410. 89   “The Creed of Chalcedon,” in David F. Ford and Mike Higton (eds), Jesus: Oxford Readers (Oxford, 2002), pp. 100–101. 90   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 325. 88

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adjective modifying that noun, and then to reverse the noun and adjective: the “real” person is an “embodied soul” or “besouled body.”91 Elsewhere Barth insists that this unity does not compromise the integrity of soul and body, but he will state it twice, switching the italics for emphasis: “That man is the soul of his body is the secondary fact which is no less dispensable to real man than the first, namely, that he is the soul of his body.”92 At times, however, Barth must speak separately of “soul” and then “body” since these are two “moments” with an indivisible human nature, moments that in the person of Jesus are a “picture of peace.”93 The harmony between these moments, then, does not preclude but includes and requires distinction. By “distinct” Barth means “order,” for the soul determines the body for a particular kind of service. This picture of peace and inseparability contains a first and a second, an upper and lower, a command and obedience, lordship and service. The ordering principle entails superordination and subordination, but not on the exploitative model of a tyrant and slave. Both moments—both soul and body—have equal share in the dignity of the one whole person because neither moment can make theological sense in absence of the other.94 It is within this sphere of meaning that Barth, in Church Dogmatics, I/2, suggests whole persons are claimed for the love of God. Just as he switches the noun–adjective order of soul and body—so that persons are embodied souls or besouled bodies—so too he understands the two love commands on a similar model of ordered mutuality. The analogy with love should be clear. Just as the body is ordered to the soul and in this order the two are a picture of peace, so too the love of neighbor is ordered to the love of God and, as will be discussed shortly, is expressed by the image of a smaller circle contained within a larger. These six claims concerning in what love of God consists are all focused on human acknowledgment of divine love understood as the life-act of God, as God’s self-giving ad extra, namely, the love of God shown in reconciling sinful humanity to himself in Jesus Christ.95 Human love has the essential character of response to 91

  Ibid., p. 350.   Ibid., p. 418. 93   Ibid., p. 338. 94   Ibid., p. 338. The order contained within the unity of Jesus’ person, and its implication for order between justification and sanctification, is well expressed in this passage: “In the being of Jesus presented in the NT, we look in vain for a moment when His corporeality plays a special and independent role. It is never wanting; it is always present; it is the companion, helper, and servant of all his words and acts. … His body is used and governed by Him for the purpose of a specific and conscious speech and action and suffering. It serves him in the execution of this purpose. It is impregnated with soul, i.e., a body filled with this consciousness. … This is the distinction and inequality to be noticed within the oneness and wholeness. The fulfillment, the willing and execution and therefore the true movement of this body occurs from above downwards, from soul to body and not vice versa” (ibid., p. 339). 95   On love as the divine life-act, see Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 772. 92

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the divine love made known in justification. Love of neighbor does not represent a departure from this theme of acknowledgment. Indeed, Barth reinforces the theme of acknowledgment with his comments on neighbor love, which he presents under a doxological title: “the praise of God.” 3.3.2  Unity in Order: The Neighbor as an Occasion for Praise Whereas Karl Rahner discussed love of neighbor in terms of the human subject’s existential development toward becoming verus homo in similitude with the humanity of Jesus Christ, Karl Barth discusses love of neighbor strictly in theological terms as the praise and gratitude the children of God owe to God, eschewing the vocabulary of existential development and human dignity. A telling comment on the status Barth grants the “neighbor” can be found in the very first sentence of his section on the praise of God. He notes that, “rather strangely, the emphasis in Mk. 12 falls on the last part, the ‘second commandment’, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’.”96 Over many pages he underscores the problematic nature of this scriptural passage, notifying his readers what it does not mean, namely, that there could be a valid form of self-love on which neighbor love could be based. Before addressing the many clarifications Barth cites, it is helpful first to get a sense of what the second commandment for him means positively. The whole meaning and content of the command to love our neighbor is that as God’s children, and therefore as those who love him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, we are summoned to be claimed for the praise of God as the activity and work of thankfulness [Dankbarkeit] which, by reason of our being as those who love, we cannot avoid. The second commandment has no other meaning and content apart from and in addition to: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name.”97

While he comments extensively on the inter-personal relational content implied in the second love command under the headings of real humanity and co-humanity in Church Dogmatics, III/2, Barth’s parsing of the second love command in Church Dogmatics, I/2 clearly gravitates away from the theological sub-disciplines of fundamental ethics and moral theology. The second commandment is elevated to—or parsed in terms of—theology proper (theos): that is, doxology. His method for establishing the unity of love commandments differs from Rahner’s. Rather than detailing the connection in a single orderly essay, as Rahner did, Barth discusses the two commandments in discrete essays in Church Dogmatics, I/2 §18. The first section of §18 lays out his “doer of the word” anthropology, the second section describes what constitutes love for God and the third describes love of neighbor in doxological terms. To be sure, sections 2 and 3  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 401.   Ibid., p. 401 (Ger., p. 442).

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are related and intended to modify each other. Yet, organization of the material into discrete sections points to the particular way Barth envisions praise to be the principle that orders neighbor love. He clarifies this early in his discussion of the second commandment, where he calls the reader’s attention to three flawed construals of the unity of loves. The first flaw posits that the two loves simply exist side by side with equal force. The second flaw posits the two loves as identical. The third, which most closely approximates the truth of the matter, separates the second commandment from the first as relative, derived and subordinate.98 While he wishes to impose a definite ordering principle to govern the relationship between the two loves, he ultimately rejects this third option because the second command is no less a “command” than the first. The third option too weakly conveys the “command” quality of the second love commandment. It is not the case that “when it is a question of the neighbor we are at a lower stage of the divine commanding, on a field of secondary decisions, which merely follow or accompany love of God.”99 The third option also too weakly associates the second with the first love command. There should be an order between them, but not subordination; there should be a difference, but not separation. In other words, the unitive relationship Barth envisages between the loves is strongly analogous to the unity of natures in the person of Jesus Christ affirmed in the Chalcedonian Creed and to the unity of soul and body affirmed in his anthropology. The Creed functions for Barth as a normative pattern regulating his articulation of all loci. An appreciation of this pattern percolating throughout Barth’s theology allows one in turn to appreciate the proper sense in which his dogmatics as a whole is “particularist” or Christocentric.100 The order that should exist between the divinity and humanity of Jesus, between the soul and the body and between justification and sanctification is the same order that shapes the unity of the love commands. That is, there is a discernable first and second, but no division or separation between them. This order is captured nowhere more clearly than in Barth’s own image of a circle enclosed within a circle. Imagine two concentric circles, a larger and a smaller, with the smaller enclosed within the larger. The larger circle represents love of God. It encloses the smaller circle because it includes and posits within itself the love of neighbor. Love of God is “the real cause and expository principle” of our love of neighbor; likewise, love of neighbor is the “token” of our love to God.101 While the image implies a diminutive status of the second commandment relative to the first, it does not assign to it an arbitrary status. The image of concentric circles underscores the priority of the first as the ordering principle that governs the two commands in their mutual relation. “The commandment of love to the neighbor is enclosed 98

  Ibid., pp. 402–6.   Ibid., p. 406. 100   George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (New York, 1991), pp. 32–5. 101  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 410. 99

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by that of love to God. It is contained in it. To that extent it is inferior to it. But for that very reason its shares in its absoluteness.”102 The second love command is absolute and no less gospel than the first, and while Barth urges the reader not to regard it as arbitrary, its value is found not in the absolute worth of the neighbor but in its function of the commandment to praise God. Barth’s comments on the status of the neighbor, to which we now turn, confirm this. Love of neighbor has a doxological logic that resists humanistic construals founding its importance on assumptions about the dignity and worth of the neighbor. His criticism of the identification of love commands will be discussed shortly in connection with Karl Rahner. For now, it is enough to note Barth’s assumptions about the neighbor. He finds problematic any picture of the human person resulting in the praise of humanity. He likewise finds problematic any motivation for love of neighbor founded on suppositions about the neighbor’s intrinsic worth and dignity. Not only is the person revealed in scripture incapable of loving based on his own initiative and resources, but also scripture addresses persons in terms of their sin and reconciliation. It does not praise them. “As scripture sees it, man as such has not dignity on his own, nor has the fellowship of man with man.”103 Barth insists that whatever dignity persons possess is fundamentally derived and not a constitutive possession or autonomous achievement. If the neighbor is to be loved, she is to be loved not on account of what she is or does on her own but on the basis of who God has made her in covenant and grace and reconciliation. There can be no “humanity based on itself,” no “self-based sanctity.”104 There can be no conception of the neighbor as representative of the human race and object of collective moral action, as one whose humanity is fulfilled in relationship to another, as is claimed in the forms of Idealism of which Barth is weary. To be sure, Barth will have much to say about real humanity consisting in encounter and 102

  Ibid., p. 411.   Ibid., p. 404; cf. p. 414. Barth gives voice here to a supposition running throughout Church Dogmatics. It is not clear, however, how he reconciles this claim against inherent dignity with his other claim concerning sin being non-creative and unable to thwart the divine determination to covenant partnership and reconciliation. It would seem the permanence of human worth implied in the latter involves a logic contrary to that of the former. 104   Ibid., pp. 403–4. Barth seems to take seriously the fact that in the Parable of the Good Samaritan the lawyer, not Jesus, first cited the twofold love commandment, but in such a way that he did not understand it even though he knew the law well enough to recite it. For this reason, Barth concludes: “There is, therefore, in the third evangelist an awareness of the fact that a twofold love is demanded of the one man who as the rest of the account makes clear is neither ready for nor capable of it. Of course, it is not by nature or by himself that the lawyer knows what he recites” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 417). This is perhaps an example of Barth’s scriptural hermeneutics privileging the pervasiveness of human sin, because of which there can be no “way from man to God and God’s grace, love and life” (Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, 179, cited in Will Herberg, “The Social Philosophy of Karl Barth,” in Karl Barth, Community, State and Church: Three Essays [Garden City, 1960], p. 20). 103

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fellowship. Under the rubric of the second love command, however, the ascription of inherent value either to persons or to relationships too easily reduces religion to humanity and love of God to love of neighbor; in both instances Barth fears that a logic from below controls the relationship between the two so that “identity” rather than “unity” characterizes the relationship.105 In other words, a normatively corporate and relational understanding of human persons is not attacked here. Rather construals that posit identity between the two loves are being attacked, as is the source and basis of the unity as the extent to which love of neighbor functions as something other than the praise of God. These and other clarifications Barth draws are best understood as specifications of the general Barthian axiom that there can be no way, from below, to traverse the chasm or diastasis separating humanity from God. Like Rahner, Barth views love for one’s fellows in terms of mediation, as “the material, the opportunity for the necessary maintaining of our faith in the sphere of this world.”106 Barth is nevertheless fundamentally ill at ease with assigning constitutive worth and dignity to persons because this might then motivate one’s love of neighbor, rather than the desire to praise God in the sphere of this world. One must keep in view the full object of horizontal love lest one become distracted from its leitmotif: doxology. If the neighbor functions to point beyond herself to God, if loving her mediates in a this-worldly fashion one’s love for God, then this raises the question: who, in Barth’s eyes, is the neighbor? What is the neighbor’s function and significance in addition to mediating love of God? Does she have a horizontal significance in addition to the vertical? She does. The neighbor’s horizontal significance is to reiterate the narrative of justification. Toward that end, Karl Barth utilizes the concept of neighbor revealed in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk.10:25–37). In Barth’s interpretation, the neighbor does not simply represent the collection of all anonymous individuals toward whom Christians are responsible—friend or foe, insider or outsider. Indeed, Barth seems to think the lawyer’s question, “And who is my neighbor?” is the wrong question to ask, because the question itself implies that the lawyer knows already, or thinks he knows, who God is. Barth’s point, of course, is that the lawyer cannot know God if his motivation for asking the question is self-justification, if he does not want to live by mercy (v. 29). The appropriate question thus cannot be the horizontal preoccupation with the neighbor’s identity but the theological and doxological preoccupation with the One who alone justifies.107 Not all fellow men are “neighbors.”108 The latter term, for Barth, specifies one’s fellow man as benefactor and bearer of divine compassion. The Samaritan neighbor symbolizes the compassion of God by echoing that compassion and  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 403.   Ibid., p. 415. 107   Ibid., p. 417. 108   Ibid., p. 419. 105 106

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witnessing to Jesus Christ in a this-worldly fashion.109 The man laying half dead in the ditch along the side of the road symbolizes the reality of persons in this world vis-à-vis God: dependent on another for mercy. The Samaritan is the broken man’s neighbor precisely in relating to him with mercy and compassion. In his blindness the lawyer, too, symbolizes the reality of persons in this world. It is the Samaritan who embodies what [the lawyer] wanted to know. This is the neighbor he did not know. All very unexpected: for the lawyer had first to see that he himself is the man fallen among thieves and lying helpless by the wayside; then he has to note that the others who pass by, the priest and the Levite, the familiar representatives of the dealings of Israel with God, all one after the other do according to the saying of the text: ‘He saw him and passed by on the other side;’ and third, and above all, he has to see that he must be found and treated with compassion by the Samaritan, the foreigner, whom he believes he should hate, as the one who hates and is hated by God.110

Karl Barth exhibits a phenomenal talent for interpreting biblical passages in concise conformity with his own theological outlook, in this case, with his theology of sin and grace. “We see and have a neighbor,” he writes, “when we are wholly the givers and he can only receive. We see and have him when he cannot repay us and especially when he is an enemy, someone who hates us and injures us and persecutes us (Mt. 5:43).” The Samaritan neighbor cared for the Jew “without hesitation and with unsparing energy.”111 In so doing, the Samaritan witnessed to God and fulfilled a function analogous to God’s actions on behalf of sinful human creatures bent on pursuing their own “work” of self-justification despite their impotence in so doing. The neighbor is thus a kind of window onto God, sacramentally mediating in her person the mercy and compassion of God toward others. 109

  The Samaritan can be said to “symbolize” divine compassion insofar as he reveals and makes present the compassion of God implied in Barth’s rehearsal of justification mentioned above. The terms “bearer,” “representative,” “sacramental significance” and “sign” underscore the neighbor’s mediation of divine compassion (ibid., pp. 416, 436, 435). 110   Ibid., p. 418. 111   Ibid., p. 420. The parable of the Good Samaritan also functions as a kind of litmus test for the integrity of ecclesial identity and mission. For the church is nothing other than the work of service men and women render each other in proclaiming Jesus Christ. The Christian community is not “church” when it takes the form of the priest and Levite, where service is refused. Moreover, the service Christians render unto each other, while it might imply horizontal specifications, is in the first instance service of a theological kind. “In the Church we cannot wish to justify ourselves, we cannot try to live by self-will, but only by mercy. In the Church we flee to Jesus Christ proclaimed, that is, to our neighbor, who offers us the service of proclaiming Jesus Christ” (ibid., p. 422).

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Karl Barth manages to get great mileage out of this parable, for he also assigns to the neighbor a rather different function. The neighbor is also a “mirror” onto oneself, revealing one’s own sin and impotence precisely as these are shown to be properties of the neighbor and of oneself in solidarity with him.112 Barth likens looking into the neighbor’s eyes as looking into a mirror and seeing “a suffering fellow creature in need of help.”113 The neighbor suffers this identity and is wretched, and at this point Barth draws a correlation between him and Jesus Christ, for the two bear “an actual similarity” insofar as they undergo suffering and misery.114 This is the second difference between “fellow-man” and the more specific “neighbor”: one sees the “fellow-man” precisely as “neighbor” when his suffering and plight are acknowledged and correlated with the suffering of Jesus Christ. The neighbor is thus known, on the one hand, as the bearer of divine compassion and, on the other, as cruciform. The two descriptions are united in Jesus Christ himself. For the neighbor to be the bearer of divine compassion is at once to be a human confronting another human in Christ’s stead. Likewise, for the neighbor to be the mirror in which persons view their sin and suffering is to stand in Christ’s stead, reflecting the sin and suffering Christ took on for the sake of all.115 The neighbor exposes sin and promises compassion, and in this twofold sense he becomes the occasion for persons to encounter Jesus Christ. Both functions point to the fidelity of the divine commitment to justify human creatures and hold them in covenant partnership by their participation in Christ. When these two functions are experienced and appreciated, one cannot help but direct acknowledgment vertically. The neighbor’s sacramental mediation of divine mercy motivates the “children of God” to acknowledge God and to recognize the permanent relation to the neighbor in which they stand, a relation ordered by God’s relation to them. This result of [the child of God’s] meeting with the neighbor will inevitably have the consequence that he knows himself to be summoned afresh to the love of God, the God who first loved him in his sin and his misery. The encounter has certainly done him the service of pointing him afresh to the grace of God by reminding him of his lostness. It will therefore cause him to seek anew the one without whom he can be nothing. But it was the neighbor who mediated this reminder. It was the neighbor who came into his life with this benefit. He cannot therefore make this movement of new love to the gracious God by himself. He cannot dispense with the neighbor. For him, the child of God, the dissolution of his private existence by the known solidarity of need cannot be reversed. He cannot forget the one with whom he has seen himself in the same condemnation.116 112

    114   115   116   113

Ibid., p. 433. Ibid., p. 428. Ibid., p. 429. Ibid., p. 431. Ibid., p. 437.

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3.3.3  Thick Description: Real Humanity and Co-humanity The investigation of what Barth means by love of neighbor should not be restricted to his direct comments on the theme in Church Dogmatics, I/2. It was just demonstrated that Barth locates love of neighbor within the rubric of doxology: the neighbor represents in herself the occasion for others to praise God by loving her. Their love of her should not, according to Barth, be premised on her worthiness or inherent dignity as a human person, abstractly defined. Indeed, as Barth’s image of a mirror suggests, the neighbor also functions as the mirror by which one’s own sin is identified. In the words of the quotation above, the neighbor’s significance consists in her “dissolution of private existence by the known solidarity of need.” Yet Barth assigns an important role for human dignity; it is conferred on her vertically by virtue of God’s covenantal determination and not horizontally by virtue of an “abstract” humanism. As Eberhard Busch notes, the fact that God has concluded a covenant with humanity does, of course, constitute a “peculiar distinction” on the part of the human person (III/2, 18). It is to be seen in the fact that the human person has thereby been qualified as God’s covenant partner. The corollary that the human’s qualification through God’s covenant reveals is that human createdness means that the human is intended for co-existence.117

Were one not to read past Church Dogmatics, I/2, one could easily gain the mistaken impression that Barth has a weak appreciation of interpersonal responsibility and love, that love of neighbor for Barth has been so thoroughly annexed by doxological concerns that it has become a virtual casualty of his relentless preoccupation with theocentrism. That is not the case. Later, in Church Dogmatics, III/2, Barth elaborates a Christological anthropology exposing the performative content of real humanity. His language in this later volume has shifted: no longer does he speak of neighbor love. The notions of “real humanity” (wirklich Menschlikeit) and its trait of “co-humanity” (Mitmenschlikeit) are what now concern Barth. These new notions, while not identical with love of neighbor, underscore the active content of being human in the normative and Christologically determined sense of that word.118 Barth defines love in irreducibly doxological terms: Love is the new gratitude of those who have come to know God the Creator as the merciful Deliverer. As such it is the gracious gift of the Holy Ghost shed abroad in the hearts of Christians convicted of sin against God and outrage

117   Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 193. The awkwardness of the second sentence might have to do with translation difficulties. 118  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 282.

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against themselves, and to that extent lost, but assured of their justification and preservation in faith in Jesus Christ (Rom 5:5).119

Christian love—including love of neighbor—is the grateful response to the reality of being justified by God in Jesus Christ; it is essentially a vertical response of acknowledgment and gratitude. But with his new vocabulary in Church Dogmatics, III/2 of “real humanity” and “co-humanity” Barth refers not to love as such but simply to “humanity,” that is, to the “secret of humanity,” which consists in being “with” and “for” one’s fellows, prepositions bearing great theological weight for Barth. In a somewhat simple but profound equation, Barth writes that “Man is in fact fellow-human … the encounter of I and Thou” (der Mensch ist mitmenschlich, er ist in der Begegnung von Ich und Du).120 Humanity … is not Christian love, but only the natural exercise and actualization of human nature—something which formally is on the same level as the corresponding vital functions and natural determinations of other beings which are not men. The fact that a stone is a stone involves a definite nexus of chemical, physical, and mathematical conditions and determinations. The fact that a plant is a plant involves a specific organic process. … But the fact that a man is a man involves freedom in the co-existence of man and man in which the one may be, and will be, the companion, associate, comrade, fellow and helpmate of the other. This is human nature, humanity.121

Real humanity and co-humanity inject a “thick description” of interpersonal responsibility into Barth’s Christological anthropology, in ways that neither Rahner nor Desika manage in their descriptions of love and service, respectively.122 The 119

  Ibid., p. 275.   Ibid, p. 285 (Ger., p. 344). 121   Ibid., p. 276. 122   I use the term “thick description” in the manner in which it is defined by many representatives of the school loosely labeled post-liberal Christian theology, especially George Lindbeck, Hans Fei, David Kesley and Ronald Thiemann. They borrow the term from Clifford Geertz, assigning to it the characteristic of an intensely specific and focused form of theological discourse predicated on investigation of the symbols and language of the Christian semiotic system, its “doctrine.” Thick description seeks to expose the conceptual structures beneath the tradition’s peculiar symbols and language. It does this precisely by focusing on the cultural-linguistic core of the religious tradition through exposure to it in what Geertz calls “exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters” (cited in George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age [Philadelphia, 1984], p. 115, and Ronald Thiemann, Constructing a Public Theology, p. 153). Barth more than Rahner can be characterized by this semiotic theological method, and he accordingly arrives at a description of interpersonal responsibility (“being in encounter”) that is thicker and richer in kind than Rahner’s description of neighbor love, even though both are Christologically derived. 120

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relative lack of this content in Rahner123 and Desika is not a forced product of their methods or systems. It is simply a description at which Barth uniquely excelled. In view of our musical analogies, then, we can imagine here Barth surging forward and scoring his own dominant melody line, giving unique voice to the truth of the human person in relation to her fellows, even if the other two voices in the polyphony for the moment recede or rest. To understand what Barth means by real humanity one must, not surprisingly, look to the divine life itself in order to appreciate how real humanity corresponds to it in an analogy of relationships (analogia relationis). The covenantal relationship with humanity repeats ad extra who God is in se. That is, God is one, but not alone. The divine life is a “co-existence, co-inherence and reciprocity,”124 the one triune God who is “in Himself the One who loves eternally, the One who is eternally loved, and eternal love; and in this triunity He is the original and source of every I and Thou.”125 The divine simplicity is such that it nonetheless is constituted by partnership and reciprocal relationships in encounter. Because humans are created for fellowship with God, they too, insofar as they are real, are directed toward fellowship in the interpersonal sphere, pre-eminently in the encounter of man and woman, who in their differentiation and incompleteness demonstrate that humanity as such is co-humanity. That real man is determined by God for life with God has its inviolable correspondence in the fact that his creaturely being is a being in encounter— between I and Thou, man and woman. It is human in this encounter, and in this humanity it is a likeness of the being of its Creator and a being in hope of Him.126

The humanity of Jesus Christ, because it alone is the true imago Dei, mirrors the divine life by being for God and by being for fellow humans in covenant. If the divinity of the man Jesus is to be described comprehensively in the statement that He is man for God, His humanity can and must be described no less succinctly in the proposition that He is man for man, for other men, His fellows … what distinguishes Him as a cosmic being, as a creature, as a true and natural man, is that in His existence He is referred to man, to other men, his fellows, and this not merely partially, incidentally or subsequently, but originally, exclusively and totally.127

123   Linnane, “Ethics,” in Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 163–7. 124  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 218. 125  Ibid. 126   Ibid., p. 203. 127   Ibid., p. 208; cf. p. 291.

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Jesus’ humanity is “real” (wirklich) because he alone is for God and for others in covenant partnership in this original, exclusive and total fashion: he is the image of God. His being for God and for others obtains by virtue of an “inner material connection as well as a formal parallelism” between being for God and being for others in analogy to his one person admitting of both human and divine natures.128 “For God first, as the One who gives Him His commission, as the Father of this Son, is for man. This excludes any possibility of the man Jesus not being for man as He is for God.”129 Indeed, the solidarity with which he binds himself to his fellows is “real” precisely because “there is not in Him a kind of deep, inner, secret recess in which He is alone in Himself or with God, existing in stoical calm or mystic rapture apart from his fellows, untouched by their state or fate. … He Himself is human, and it is for this reason that He acts as He does.”130 This being of Jesus constitutes the objective—if not always subjective—being of all human persons. They too are real insofar as they are for God and for each other in covenant partnership and responsibility. Yet the inviolable truth of their ontic being as a being for others can be covered over and made unrecognizable in sin, understood here as the decision in freedom for an existential isolation synonymous with personal self-contradiction.131 Her subjective or noetic self-determination mocks her objective or ontic divine determination, alienating her from her true being in encounter. Such an isolated individual mocks freedom, for freedom, as noted before, grows in proportion to obedience and responsibility before God. Such a one succeeds only in contradicting herself, rather than corresponding to herself qua creature of God created by God for covenant partnership, understood holistically as both vertical and horizontal covenantal obligations. She does not and cannot succeed in divesting herself of the objective truth of her being, which is a being in relation.132 The “true human,” Busch writes, is “the human as God in Jesus Christ sees him, creates her, ensures that he cannot be lost. That is 128

  Ibid., p. 217.  Ibid. 130   Ibid., p. 210. In the fine-print section, Barth interprets several New Testament stories in which Jesus, in profound empathy with those he meets, takes their cause into his own person and makes it his own cause. Such empathy is central to the force of what Barth means by the prepositions in his phrase “Jesus is a man with and for other men.” Barth rejects as “inhumanity” any self-willed isolation from fellows, neutrality or opposition in relation to them, or casualness of their significance (ibid., p. 227). 131   Ibid., p. 206; see pp. 231–42, for Barth’s lengthy rejoinder to Nietzsche’s Übermensch existing above the masses in azure isolation, which Barth likens to misanthropy (p. 234) and immoralism (p. 236). 132   “Theological anthropology carries a special responsibility in this regard, for it can and should demonstrate that co-humanity is indeed an ‘inviolable constant of human existence’ and not just a demand” (Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 289). The inhumane person cannot break away from that demand any more than godless people can break away from God” (Busch, The Great Passion, p. 196). 129

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the person to whom God turns, the person in covenant with him.”133 Busch’s remark rightly employs a critical preposition for Barth—“in”—for it is clear that concept of real humanity is conditioned exclusively by the person of Jesus Christ, and that, moreover, with Paul, Barth holds that God elects to see and value persons precisely as seen and valued in Christ, in whom they participate as members of his body.134 Their value as persons consists in their participatio in humanitate Christi. Accordingly, the theological truth of their humanity is disclosed in and as the truth of Jesus’ humanity, which by grace they share and to which, by grace, they are commanded to correspond in their own creaturely self-enactment. In what, then, does the basic form of humanity consist? What specific actions and relationships are laid bare in a personal history that enacts a “parable of the existence of his Creator”?135 Barth employs the conceptually rich term encounter (Begegnung) to answer this question.136 The basic form of humanity, as disclosed in the humanity of Jesus Christ—the one image of God—is a being in encounter: “The minimal definition of our humanity, of humanity generally, must be that it is the being of man in encounter, and in this sense the determination of man as being with the other man.”137 In this way, Barth specifies the force of the preposition in “being with their fellows,” as being in encounter. Barth prefers the Latin verb existere over esse to describe the being of human persons, since the former more successfully points to a concrete history of relationships and interpersonal encounter, whereas the latter is thought to risk connoting a static or merely self-positing essence.138 He takes encounter so seriously that he equates it with the phrase “I am as Thou art,” signifying that co-humanity and not some external notion of human being controls what counts and does not count as human. That is, one’s humanity is not defined by what she achieves or fails to achieve, what she does or does not do, what she creates or does not create; her humanity is not defined by the particular features of her personal history. It is defined instead more broadly and deeply by her being in encounter or not being in encounter, by her correspondence or lack there of with the normative interpersonal encounter for which all persons are determined. Barth’s equation of this encounter with the quite simple terms “I am as Thou art,” underscores the free decision of such a person to identify herself precisely in connection with the ones to whom she is directed and referred—those to whom

 Busch, The Great Passion, p. 194.  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, pp. 133, 226; Wolf Krötke, “The Humanity of the Human Person in Karl Barth’s Anthropology,” in Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, pp. 163–4, 167; John Webster, Karl Barth (New York, 2004), p. 100. 135   Krötke, “The Humanity of the Human person in Karl Barth’s Anthropology,” p. 168. 136  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2 (Ger., p. 299). 137  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 247. 138   Ibid., p. 248 133 134

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she directs and refers herself—whose histories now in her freedom become her own history. To be in encounter is to exist in radical openness to one’s fellows, symbolized as: (i) looking another in the eye, (ii) being in mutual speech and hearing, (iii) being in mutual assistance and (iv) being in gladness in encounter. We turn to these in order. Looking one another in the eye  Barth likens optic vision with interpersonal openness and knowledge. To look into another’s eye and to see her is also to allow myself to be seen by her. In the I–Thou encounter there can be no hiding from seeing the Thou or from being seen by her. Both I and Thou are human insofar as we encounter each other in reciprocal interest and insight. All seeing is inhuman in which the one who sees hides himself, refusing to be seen by the fellow-man whom he sees … being in encounter is a being in the openness of the one to the other with a view to and on behalf of the other. We give each other an insight into our being. And as we do this, I am not for myself, but for thee, and Thou for me, so that we have a share and interest in one another. This two-sided openness is the first element of humanity. Where it lacks, and to the extent that it lacks, humanity does not occur. … To the extent that we move out of ourselves, not refusing to know others or being afraid to be known by them, our existence is human, even though in all other respects we may exist at the very lowest level of humanity. (It is not necessarily the case, but seems to be a fact of existence, that where we think in other respects that we are nearer the depths than the heights of humanity we are generally much more open with and for one another, and to that extent, despite all appearances to the contrary, much more human than on the supposed heights.) The duality into which we enter when we encounter one another directly and not indirectly, revealed and not concealed as man with man; the participation which we grant one another by the very fact that we see and do not not see one another, these are the first and indispensable steps in humanity, without which the latter ones cannot be taken. … It is a great and solemn and incomparable moment when two men look themselves in the eye and discover one another. This moment, this look, is in some sense the root-formation of all humanity without which the rest is impossible.139

As profound as this description of looking another in the eye is, Barth thinks it is but the requisite first step to being in encounter. As a first step, it is limited by the fact that the one seeing must construct a picture of the “Thou,” since by vision   Ibid., pp. 251–2. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is, according to the categories Barth establishes here, a sustained narrative of inhumanity, of persons who despite their familial relation and constant physical proximity utterly fail to acknowledge each other with the honesty and openness Barth intends with “encounter.” 139

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alone she is unable to contribute her own self-knowledge, except insofar as she lets herself be seen. This is but a provisional, partial and incomplete knowledge of the “Thou.” More is required for I and Thou to engage in a common field of life and activity. Being in mutual speech and hearing  “Humanity as encounter must become the event of speech. And speech means comprehensively reciprocal expression and reciprocal reception, reciprocal address and its reciprocal reception.”140 Speech allows for a more thorough and cooperative penetration of spheres than vision alone; speech allows for genuine interpersonal presence and awareness. The interpersonal openness laid bare in vision offers no guarantee that the “I” will see and the “Thou” will be seen, or that the “Thou” will see and the “I” will be seen. As the first step in openness, vision must give rise to speech and hearing. Words are not genuine self-expression when in some respect I keep back myself, not representing or displaying myself. Words are not genuine self-expression when I represent myself in another guise than that in which I know myself to be to the best of my information and conscience. Nor are they genuine selfexpression when they are perhaps a mask by means of which I try to prevent the other from understanding me, and thus do not really intend to express myself at all. … To take [another person] seriously and therefore to have a human ear is to move toward the self-declaration of the other and to welcome it as an event which for my own sake must take place between him and me. … The word of address is necessary as a kind of penetration from the sphere of the one into the sphere of another being. As I address another, whether in the form of exposition, question, petition or demand, but always with the request to be heard, I ask that he should not remain in isolation but be there for me; that he should not be concerned only with himself but with me too; in other words, that he should hear. Address is coming to another with one’s being, and knocking and asking to be admitted. … Each fellow-man is a whole world, and the request which he makes of me is not merely that I should know this or that about him, but the man himself, and therefore this whole world.141

The striking suggestion that each fellow person is a whole world unto herself marked by a definite history lends depth and individuality to “I” and “Thou.” Speech is the necessary vehicle whereby she imparts herself to me; my hearing is the necessary vehicle whereby I open myself and receive her. Only as these reciprocal activities of speech and hearing occur can a genuine knowledge be imparted from the one person to the other. Without reciprocity there can only be monologue or the making of noise and the hearing of noise, but not human hearing. 140  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 253 © 1960 T&T Clark International, reproduced with permission of the publisher. 141   Ibid., pp. 256–8.

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This is not simply a matter of hearing the other and doing justice to her as a person, although this is involved. Rather, the critical question of my own self-awareness is at stake in my activity of hearing her and being heard by her. For I am objectively a being in encounter, a co-humanity referred to my fellows (Mitmenschen). In other words, human hearing cannot be thought of as a gesture or favor offered to the other. My task as one who hears humanly is to find myself with and for her as I hear her, and thereby to confirm myself as I really am—with her and for her—in distinction from the fictional individual persisting in the inhumanity of isolation. Being in mutual assistance  Just as being in mutual speech and hearing was a progression from the openness of looking another in the eye, so too being in mutual assistance (Seins gegenseitig Beistand) builds upon speech and hearing.142 Mutual assistance now brings the original notion of being in encounter to an active expression of solidarity. “Action in encounter is action in correspondence with the summons which the Thou issues to the I when it encounters it, and therefore (for everything is reciprocal in this matter) in correspondence with the summons which the I for its part issues to the Thou in this encounter.”143 The reciprocity of this action is not to be missed: the Thou summons me and I summon the Thou. Only together, in our reciprocal action, are we human, because our humanity consists in the fact that we need mutual assistance much the way Barth’s exposition of the Parable of the Good Samaritan suggested. Self-sufficiency is exposed as inhuman; the objective untruth of the self-sufficient individual is exposed in the empty and miserable subject he becomes. He becomes the maniac who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the inhuman counterpart of the human Jesus.144 “Real man as God created him,” Barth insists, “is not in the waste of isolation” (der Wüste dieser Einsamkeit).145 If our action is human, this means it is an action in which we give and receive assistance. An action in which assistance is either withheld or rejected is inhuman. For either way it means isolation and persistence in isolation … . Assistance is actively standing by the other. It is standing so close by him that one’s own action means help or support for his. It thus means not to leave him to his own being and action, but in and with one’s own to take part in the question and burden and anxiety of his, accepting concern for his life, even though it must always be his and we cannot represent him … . In the very fact that he lives, man calls to his fellow not to leave him alone to his own devices. He knows well  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2 (Ger., p. 312).   Ibid., p. 261. 144  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3, pp. 263–4. Barth in this context employs the terms “human” and “humanity” (Hümanitat) in a normative Christological sense, connoting those persons who correspond to their creaturely reality as determined by God for covenant partnership. The term is not used in the sense of biology or species. 145  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 273 (Ger., p. 329). 142 143

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enough that he has to live his own life and bear responsibility for it. But he also knows that he cannot do this if his fellow does not spring to his side and give him his hand and actively stand by him.146

Gladness characterizes the enactment of being in encounter  As a matter of course the real human (wirklich Mensch) will find herself and gladly confirm herself in encounter with others, “well aware that [she] has no real option.”147 Her encounter with her fellows will be enacted with gladness (gerne)—not neutrality or indifference—because co-humanity is like a law intrinsic to her essence as a person. It is a law imposed from without in the sense that she is a creature of God created for this precise covenant partnership and responsibility. But it is a law that resonates within her essence as an activity of which she has been made capable, an activity she in her freedom can and should confirm with gladness. Being in encounter consists in the fact that all the occurrence which we have so far described as the basic form of humanity stands under the sign that it is done on both sides with gladness. We gladly see and are seen; we gladly speak and listen; we gladly receive and offer assistance. This can be called the last and final step of humanity. … He follows the voice and impulse of his own heart when he is human, when he looks the other in the eye, when he speaks with him and listens to him, when he receives and offers assistance. There are no secret hiding-places or recesses, no dark forest-depths, where deep down he wills or can will anything else. … He would not be man if he were without and not with his fellow-man.148

While the disposition of gladness is the final stage of being in encounter, it must nonetheless be the root of true humanity in encounter. Because her freedom from the outset consists in her seeking co-humanity as the constitutive feature of her own humanity, there can be no provision for the person who begins in isolation and retreats to isolation after various interludes of encounter. She recognizes her objective need for her fellows and their need for her in a shared vocation of covenant partnership. The alternative is simply the sin of self-contradiction, the “irrational and inexplicable apostasy from God and from oneself.”149 3.3.4  Harmony: The Unity of Loves A comparison of Karl Barth and Karl Rahner on the unity of love commands could pursue multiple topics and arguments. This comparison focuses on just two arguments and treats them simultaneously. They are comprehensive in scope 146

    148   149   147

Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., pp. 267–8. Ibid., p. 273.

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and chosen for their ecumenical promise. The first argues that the theologians’ positions can be characterized by the metaphor “harmony” because both affirm a radical unity thesis and allow for distinction between the two unified loves, even if the theologians describe that unity and distinction according to varying methods and doctrinal accents. The second argues that each theologian assigns a systematic function to the love commandments and thus draws from vocabulary reverberating throughout the system to explicate the commandments, so that they become an excellent locus through which to view, synthesize and appreciate both theological systems.150 In earlier pages, harmony was discussed in some detail as the metaphor controlling the method of intra-Christian comparison between Rahner and Barth. The material issue of comparison in the last chapter was creaturely ontology with respect to dependence on grace. The material issue of comparison in this chapter is the unity thesis precisely as Rahner and Barth in their respective ways intend the thesis to posit inseparability and distinction between the loves. Barth lays hold of his own quite constructive position in a polemical context, in plain view of interlocutors from whom he wishes to distance himself. There are three such positions Barth finds unacceptable, and it is necessary to mention them here, for while Barth never named Karl Rahner as an antagonist—he usually does name those with whom he is dissatisfied—Rahner’s position nevertheless has been associated with one of them, erroneously. The first position Barth rejects holds the two loves as separate commandments existing side by side with equal force. To use Declan Marmion’s image, according to this model the loves do not enjoy a perichoretic relation of mutual indwelling, nor does one love hold precedence over the other. They are quarantined and construed in purely egalitarian terms. The second position—the one some have linked with Rahner’s own—identifies the two loves so that, rather simply, one loves God when loving the neighbor, and vice versa. Barth links this position rather vaguely to “the humanitarian and the historical schools,” by which he means German Idealism and the Lutheran “orders of creation.”151 The third option, like the first, separates the two commandments, but unlike the first, views love of neighbor as a lower and relative stage of divine commanding. All of these are problematic, but a telling indication of the serious offense committed by the second option is the amount of ink Barth uses in its refutation, a larger amount than the other two combined. In addition, some have been tempted to align the second option with Rahner’s and 150   I do not mean here “system” in the sense of a closed and controlling form derived form general principles into which the subject matter of Christian doctrine is placed and subsequently, as Hunsinger suggests, either stretched to the breaking point or lopped off prematurely by those general principles. Both theologians adamantly resist this understanding of system. I use system here as an adjective modifying the theologians’ construal of doctrine, which are systematic rather than systems (see Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth, pp. 28, 29, 33). 151  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 405.

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view Barth’s criticism of it as criticism of Rahner’s position.152 It is, therefore, important to clarify the real distinctions between Rahner’s position and three critical flaws Barth isolates in the identity position. This task is important for a fruitful reading of Rahner and Barth side by side and also for adjudicating the fairness of Rahnerian and Barthian commentators. The goal here is not simply to perform Rahnerian apologetics. The goal rather is to make the necessary distinctions in order to create the space in which their positions can be appreciated for the common ground they inhabit. Only once that common ground has been cleared can appreciation and perspective be given to their distinctions. “Participation”  The first problem with the identity position for Barth is that, while it rightly conveys that the commandments are both the one command of God and “belong together,” it fails to convey the priority of the first as the commandment to which the second is ordered. Barth concludes: “the final and almost unavoidable logic of this solution would be the damnable confusion and blasphemy: that God is the neighbor, the neighbor God.”153 Moreover, the identification of loves finds no basis in biblical revelation. Barth worries that the identification of loves removes their difference, the same difference he expressed in his notion of “order” and his metaphor of a smaller circle enclosed within a larger circle. The analysis of Rahner’s position on the unity of loves in section §2.3 demonstrates the dissonance between it and the “identity” position Barth criticizes. Rahner, in the distinction he draws between thematic and unthematic responses to God, articulates a position strongly analogous to Barth’s. For Rahner, love of neighbor is clearly second. While it is true that Rahner’s notion of anonymous Christianity posits love of neighbor as an act of transcendental freedom that responds to God through the historical medium of the neighbor, the neighbor’s significance does not relativize the need for a vertical response to God. The vertical or thematic response is the real telos or momentum toward which all unthematic expressions strive. Just as it is true that the Christian love for God needs to reach a thematic recognition of Jesus as the object of one’s love, it is also true that nonChristian persons who respond to God through the media of their own traditions are meant to acknowledge and attest the real source and term of their response, the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. Indeed, Rahner insists that while unthematic expressions constitute persons before God, they are nonetheless deficient and underdeveloped. For Rahner, God and neighbor are clearly distinct yet related terms in the act of loving. Two additional motifs demonstrate that Rahner does not identify God and neighbor. First, he holds that neighbor mediates one’s relation to God as the categorical opportunity making the latter possible in history. Such a relation marked by mediation is distinct from relations in which the terms are collapsed into each 152   Paul D. Molnar, “Love of God and Love of Neighbor in the Theology of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth,” pp. 567–99. 153  Barth Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 403.

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other. Karl Barth also views the neighbor in terms of mediation, but in an inverse sense. Whereas Rahner thinks of the neighbor as mediating one’s relationship to God, Barth inverses that dynamic and views the neighbor as mediating God’s relationship to persons, by contributing an awareness of sin, dependence and the need for mercy. Second, Rahner, like Barth, presupposes the participation of all humanity in the humanity of Jesus Christ.154 Rahner deploys a strategy of mystical union inspired by Matthew 25 and other passages, so that when persons love their neighbors, they consciously or unconsciously love Jesus Christ, due to the participation of all in him. Rather than being identical with Jesus, by grace persons are bound to him in a mystical union. Such participatio in humanitate Christi lays the foundation for the radical import of passages from the First Letter of John and Matthew 25 in particular, where the evangelist has the Son of Man claim “just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.”155 Rahner does not regard as hyperbole the union of Christ with persons implied in this passage. In comparison with Rahner, Barth is tight-lipped on the importance of such scriptural passages and motifs, and thinks the identity position is contrary to biblical revelation. To be sure, Barth never isolates Karl Rahner as an expositor of the identity position. However, those who would associate Rahner with the position would be hard pressed to deem him inconsistent with biblical revelation.156 He may be inconsistent with Barth’s biblical hermeneutics, but not with key motifs from the biblical witness itself. One can argue forcefully that christological commitments inspire and control the tenacity with which Rahner articulates the unity of loves, even in its metaphysical parlance. Like Rahner, Karl Barth espouses a strong theology of participation, but with slightly different effect. He does not deploy it with Matthew 25 in mind the way Rahner does, correlating one’s self-constitution before the neighbor to one’s selfconstitution before God. Barth applies his theology of participation to the atonement Jesus Christ performs, to the sin of others he bears away, to his presenting sinful 154   “The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 132). “From the very beginning (from eternity itself), there are no other elect together with or apart from Him, but, as Eph. 1:4 tells us, only ‘in’ Him. ‘In Him’ does not simply mean with Him, together with Him, in His company. Nor does it mean only through Him. … ‘In Him’ means in His person, in His will, in His own divine choice, in the basic decision of God which he fulfills over against every man” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, pp. 116–17). 155   In his “Brief Anthropological Creed”, Rahner writes: “If a person reflects upon Mathew 25, he certainly does not have to deny a priori that the entire salvific relationship between man and God and man and Christ is already found implicitly in a radical love for one’s neighbor which has been realized in practice. … The self-communication of God to man by which man’s love for neighbor is borne has its eschatological, victorious, and historical climax in Jesus Christ, and therefore he is loved at least anonymously in every other person” (Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 457: italics original). 156   Paul D. Molnar, “Love of God and Love of Neighbor in the Theology of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth,” p. 588.

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children to the Father as spotless children. As will be shown in Chapter 4, Vedanta Desika espouses a theology of participation similar to Rahner’s, one that has a significant impact upon the relation Desika describes between the two loves. “Acknowledgment” and “Praise”  The second criticism Barth has of the identity position is that it makes no allowance for the praise of God, by which Barth means acknowledgment and love for the God who first loved defiant human creatures. This move represents another example of the disparity in theological method between Rahner and Barth. In Barth’s view, one ought to love God in the acknowledgment of the unique lordship of God by which creatures are justified. The dual love command is thus controlled from above; it commences with an appreciation of the actions of God in Jesus Christ pro nobis and expresses a response to those very actions. Love of neighbor expresses in history the fact that the children of God have been found and justified by God: they cannot cease attesting to the fact that they have been found by God. On this matter Rahner is both similar and different from Barth because he combines methods from above and below. He starts from below with the neighbor but includes certain priorities of a theology from above. He is different from Barth because he thinks love of neighbor can and does express love for God—at least implicitly—since doing so entails the surrender or exit from oneself on behalf of another in freedom. In metaphysical terms, the neighbor is the pre-eminent categorical opportunity for human persons to respond affirmatively to the God who by grace constituted them with a transcendent orientation. Free acts are not merely choices one makes casually throughout the day. Even in their mundane quality, free acts are always moments of self-constitution before God wherein one responds to others, self and God simultaneously. Free acts have the fundamental character of response to God because in them one affirms oneself qua creature of God and affirms the God for whom it is good pleasure to create human hearers and engage them in dialogue.157 In this way, from Rahner’s perspective, Barth’s lament that the identity position espouses “the praise of the sanctity and dignity and glory of man” succeeds only in setting up the same false dichotomy between 157

  Two comments specify this interconnection: (i) “Every act of charity towards our neighbor is indeed formally, even though perhaps only implicitly, love of God since the act is done after all by definition ‘for the sake of God loved with a supernatural love’ … wherever a genuine love of man attains its proper nature and its moral absoluteness and depth, it is in addition always so underpinned by God’s saving grace that it is also love of God, whether it be explicitly considered to be such a love by the subject or not” and (ii) “the primary basic act of man who is always already ‘in the world’ is always an act of the love of his neighbor and in this the original love of God is realized in so far as in its basic act are also accepted the conditions of its possibility, one of which is the reference of man to God when supernaturally elevated by grace” (Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. KarlH. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York, 1974), pp. 237, 246; Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 456).

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God and humans, the transcendental and categorical, the infinite and the finite, which Rahner’s methodological approach deems dubious.158 What should be emphasized here, in addition to their methodological contrast, is the extent to which both theologians accentuate the priority of acknowledging and praising God. Even if Rahner’s method starts from below, love of neighbor is an activity not opposed to but consistent with love of God, an indicator of whether one does or does not hear the graciously spoken Word and respond with a “Yes.” One should also appreciate the teleological nature of love of neighbor and of unthematic responses to divine self-communication. The ordained end of unthematic responses is explicit faith, explicit love, explicit knowledge of God.159 Thus, built into love of neighbor is a doxological seed of which Rahner expects growth and development and a transition from “unconscious” to “conscious.” For this reason it is problematic to isolate the loves as if their material consequences were at odds.160 The loves form, for Rahner, a unity marked by a teleological ordering principle. An analogy between Rahner and Barth can be pursued most fruitfully not with respect to method, but with respect to the ordering principle governing the relation of love of neighbor to love of God, an order to which both theologians give voice albeit with different tones. These precise differences allow one to hear the theologians in terms of consonance rather than the dissonance suggested initially by their methodological contrast. It would be a mistake, therefore, to assume Rahner thinks of “piety” or love of God in reductionist terms as an event implied vaguely in love of neighbor. Rahner’s Christology once again becomes useful. His notion of all persons effectively living out a “searching Christology” is relevant in this regard. As mentioned earlier, for Rahner, and Barth as well, the activity of loving is the whole meaning of the Christian life. For Rahner, Christian love cannot be directed vaguely but must find a concrete object worthy of receiving the absolute love transcendental human subjects yearn to receive and give. Jesus Christ is that ideal object of love, for in him humanity encounters “someone who as man can be loved with the absoluteness of love for God,” because he is the God-man after whom the human race collectively searches.161 For this reason, Christians who love God consciously  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 403.   “On the one hand, therefore, this experience of God is inescapable, and on the other hand it can take place in a very anonymous and preconceptual way. A person should be challenged to discover this universally present experience of God reflexively and to objectify it conceptually” (Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 454). 160   “In the case of this unity the important thing is to understand rather that the one does not exist and cannot be understood or exercised without the other, and that two names have really to be given to the same reality if we are to summon up its one mystery, which cannot be abrogated” (Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 232). 161  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 296. “Jesus becomes, in this love of ours, the concrete Absolute, in whom the abstractness of norms, and the insignificance of 158

159

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do so by throwing their arms around Jesus. Rahner means this quite seriously, as evidenced in a conversation he reports: Once I was having a conversation with a modern Protestant theologian, whose theories, to a normal Catholic Christian like me, necessarily seemed rather rationalistic—very much an existential “Jesuanity” and no longer really having a great deal to do with the Jesus of the normal Christian faith. At one point I put in with, “Yes, you see you’re actually only really dealing with Jesus when you throw your arms around him and realize right down to the bottom of your being that this is something you can still do today.” And my theologian replied, “Yes, you’re right, of course—if you don’t mean it too pietistically.”162

Backsliding into idolatry?  The third major quarrel Barth has with the identity position is that by granting methodological privilege to love of neighbor it implicitly erects a vision of God fashioned from below by human freedom and relationships rather than from above by the revelation of God’s unique lordship displayed in redemptive actions pro nobis.163 The key to understanding Rahner’s position in view of this quite legitimate concern is twofold: first, the meaning of Rahner’s term “absolute holy mystery” designating God requires clarification; second, the impact of Christology on his conception of the loves needs to be recalled. These are taken in order. The apophatic caution Rahner exhibits in talking of God is well known.164 For him, God is absolute holy mystery, and a theological statement about God is legitimate only when analogical, “only to the extent that it is always simultaneously negated,” so that theological statements about God posit more dissimilarity than similarity and creaturely knowledge of God—even in beatitude—is always creaturely and in that mode “deficient.”165 Barth and Rahner are in fundamental agreement here. Rahner offers a clever analogy between the essential truth of persons and of the purely contingent individual, are transcended and overcome” (Karl Rahner, “What does it Mean to Love Jesus,” The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, trans. Robert Barr [New York, 1983], p. 23). 162   Rahner, “What does it Mean to Love Jesus,” p. 23. For an explanation of love for God that underscores the necessary existential transformation which is the condition of possibility of love for God, see Karl Rahner, “The Prayer of Love” and “Prayer in the Everyday,” On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, trans. Bruce W. Gillette (Collegeville, 1997), pp. 25–36, 37–47; Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (New York, 2004). 163  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 405. 164   Well known and attested but frequently obscured, as in the somewhat polemical work of one commentator, who writes: “Rahner claims an innate knowledge of God while Barth insists that there is no innate knowledge of the triune God” (Molnar, “Love of God and Love of Neighbor in the Theology of Karl Rahner and Karl Barth,” p. 571). 165   Karl Rahner, ”Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” trans Declan Marmion SM and Gesa Thiessen, Theological Studies 61 (2000), p. 5; Karl Rahner, “The Hiddenness of

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God-talk. The criterion for speaking a true theological statement and for being an existentially real human person is discerned in the call of both to “a loving, trusting, self-surrender to the unfathomable reign of God, to God’s merciful judgment and sacred incomprehensibility.”166 This analogy helps to capture the real sense of abandonment in Rahner’s talk of existential surrender. It also helps to underscore the radical ontological distinction he draws between God and creatures, a distinction that need not rule out relation. Indeed, the distinction between God and human hearers achieves a permanent union and relation in the person of Jesus Christ. If the identity position worries Barth by allowing human relationships rather than revelation to control the image of God, Rahner should be viewed more as an ally than threat to Barth on this matter. Rahner’s image of God is formed in large part by the God-man himself, which is to say by the twin movements of gratuitous divine self-giving and normative human self-surrender revealed in Jesus Christ. Rahner’s vision of human relationships and how persons should conduct themselves corporately is controlled by the normative vision of human reality revealed in Jesus Christ. Christology, then, controls both poles of the discussion. If, from Barth’s perspective, the neighbor as a route to God leads one down the path toward idolatry, it must be understood clearly that Christology governs Rahner’s construal of love of neighbor by its suppositions concerning surrender, transcendence of the ego’s rubbled-over “bunker” and dedication of oneself existentially with such force and such truth that temporality and eternity meet in a moment of free hearing and decision.167 It is in view of Jesus that “theological freedom,” that is, freedom for self-disposal vis-à-vis God, must be understood. Freedom is misunderstood if conceived in terms of a “natural” human capacity learned from human experience. This would be a “worldview” or “abstraction” in Barth’s sense of the terms, whereas the freedom with which persons respond to God and neighbor can be appreciated most adequately by highlighting its function in the locus of Christology. Freedom is systematically misunderstood when not drawn into explicit connection with Jesus or when Jesus himself is denied the role of demonstrating in his person the true and faithful human response to God. Barth God,” Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Moreland, OSB (New York, 1983), p. 231. 166   Rahner, “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” p. 5. “I want confirm the experience that theologians are worthy of the title only when they do not seek to reassure themselves that they are providing clear and lucid discourse, but rather when they are experiencing and witnessing, with both terror and bliss, to the analogical back and forth between affirmation and negation before the abyss of God’s incomprehensibility” (ibid., p. 7). 167  Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, pp. xix, 3, 29, 46. The image of the ego closed in on itself as a rubbled-over bunker stems from Rahner’s experience in Munich toward the close of World War II when Germans seeking security in bunkers risked burial in them from allied bombardment. Thus, he describes those whose hearts are enclosed and shut off from God and neighbor as die Verschütteten—those who have been covered over, rubbled-over, buried.

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and Rahner seem to be echoing each other here in their shared need to approach the issue concretely, which is to say, Christologically. An issue of more contentious difference is human dignity. Barth’s reluctance to reason his way toward love of neighbor by way of human dignity has to do with the contrast between the revelation (read: condemnation) of sinful human nature and the revelation of obedient covenant partnership, both disclosed in the humanity of Jesus Christ. Here Barth undoubtedly represents a departure from the theology of Karl Rahner, whose Catholic tradition and Vatican II context make him quite comfortable with the language of dignity, and who late in life confessed that his theological system might have developed the reality of sin more thoroughly, a tacit concession to theologians in the mold of Karl Barth.168 On the other hand, Rahner too is concerned that the neighbor not function as the occasion for cheap piety. This was the force of the distinction he drew between unthematic and thematic faith in—or love of—God in anonymous Christianity, a distinction carrying with it an evaluation and teleological orientation of love of neighbor toward thematic awareness of freedom’s ultimate object, namely, God. Barth’s refusal to allow human dignity to attach to the neighbor in se signifies a departure from the theology of Rahner, which envisages the neighbor as possessing at least the dignity commensurate with signifying in her person the categorical opportunity for others to abandon self and express their transcendental love of God, as well as the dignity of one who participates in Christ. In fairness, Barth too adheres to a strong theology of participation, but this strand of his thought is absent from the locus of love of neighbor. Barth also views love for the fellow man in terms of mediation, as “the material, the opportunity for the necessary maintaining of our faith in the sphere of this world.”169 Nonetheless, he refuses inherent worth and dignity to persons because dignity could then motivate one’s love of neighbor, usurping the desire to praise God in the sphere of this world through love of neighbor. One must keep in view love of neighbor’s doxological leitmotif. This issue exemplifies how two theologians can differ in method and in anthropological assumptions yet still arrive at strongly analogous conclusions: in this case, that love of neighbor be united to love of God in such a way that it be annexed by the concerns of doxology. Only in light of the doxological agenda both theologians prioritize does love of neighbor attain its complete meaning and significance. In this sense, Karl Rahner affirms Barth’s thesis that love of neighbor is ordered to the love of God as the praise all owe to God in the sphere of this world, since for Rahner persons’ unthematic responses have an internal telos toward finding thematic expression, without which they remain incomplete. Each theologian employs a contrasting method to reach conclusions on the unity and difference of the love commandments. Rahner’s writing is predominantly from below yet at critical points from above as well and resistant to facile generalizations 168

  Karl Rahner, “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” p. 10.  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 415.

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from below.170 Barth’s writing is overwhelmingly from above with deep suspicion toward theological dynamics working from the opposite direction. This is reason enough for a figure like Barth to dispute the program of a figure like Rahner. Yet evidence marshaled here and elsewhere suggests that methodological conflict need not preclude hearing material consonance and, therefore, grounds for dialogue. It is their relative comparability on a material theme and relative disagreement on method that allow the reader to learn from both theologians more deeply through the process of reading them together. Holding them together in this way has the effect of producing in our ears the sounds of similarity and difference, point and counterpoint, melody and harmony. Through the production of theological “harmony” and all the compatibility and incompatibility the metaphor suggests, the reader is afforded multiple angles and attestations of the material theological issue both theologians judge imperative to the Christian life: the unity of one’s response to God and of one’s responsibility to neighbor.

170

  Kevin Vanhoozer, “Human Being, Individual and Social,” in Colin Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, 1997), p. 171, gives the impression that Rahner’s theology is strictly from below in this narrow sense, lacking a vocabulary of dependence, grace and the Holy Spirit in connection with Rahner’s anthropological claims concerning transcendent human nature.

Chapter 4

Polyphony: Piety and Responsibility in Vedanta Desika 4.1 Context The opening pages of the chapter on Karl Rahner noted that a complete analysis of his metaphysical anthropology was beyond the scope of this project. We settled on the more modest task of elucidating the ways in which his metaphysical outlook impacts upon his theological decisions, particularly in the region of theological anthropology. A similar stipulation needs to be made for the present discussion of Vedanta Desika, which must be limited to the same agenda and not pretend to paint a complete portrait of the fourteenth-century Hindu Srivaisnava community and its theology.1 The discussion must be limited to the same questions that controlled our investigation of Rahner and Barth, namely: what themes in Desika’s system recommend themselves for consideration as the vague categories “piety” and “responsibility,” and how, if at all, are the two unified?2 What sort of grammar does Desika employ that might be considered cognate with these vague categories and with the textured manner in which Rahner and Barth described each in terms of an organic relationship? This focus shapes the three theologians as reading guides to each other and as partners in a common conversation. What was first a Rahnerian melody became a harmonic dialogue between Rahner and Barth, whose points of contrast and compatibility were clear at methodological and material levels. Now it is time to deepen and intensify this conversation by introducing the fourteenthcentury Hindu Srivaisnava theologian Vedanta Desika. Until now, previous chapters have assumed a harmonic structure—featuring two voices interacting with and against each other—that now expands into a polyphonic conversation wherein all three voices reflexively are heard in terms of each other and are mutually clarified

1

  The works of Desika I have consulted are English translations relevant to this topic, with emphasis on his Srimad Rahasyatrayasara, trans. M.R. Rajagopala Ayyangar (Kumbakonam, 1956), henceforth RTS. Citations of RTS and other works will include either chapter or verse numbers in addition to page numbers. For an explanatory list of Desika’s many writings, see G. Srinivasa Murti, “Introduction,” in M. Duraiswami Aiyangar and T. Venugopalacarya (eds), Sri Vedanta Desika, Sri Pancaratraraksa (Madras, 1967), pp. xxii–xxvi. 2   I borrow the term “vague category,” a useful comparative tool, from Robert Cummings Neville and Wesley Wildman, which I discussed in Chapter 1.

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in the process.3 The introduction of Desika’s voice injects greater aural color into the polyphonic interchange. His contribution is not reducible to the theological, for in the context of polyphony his contribution is also aesthetic. Some introductory remarks on Desika’s historical, communal and theological contexts will help to prepare the reader for a new theological vocabulary as well as set parameters for the polyphony to follow.4 Vedanta Desika’s given name was Venkatanatha (1268–1369). He was born in Tuppil near Kanchipuram, in South India, and lived most of his life in the holy city Srirangam. The Srivaisnava community recognized Venkatanatha’s prominence and contributions by giving him the honorific title Vedanta Desika (“preceptor of the Vedanta”). He displayed at an early age considerable talent for a wide array of religious and secular learning. By the age of twenty he had become expert in the scriptures (sruti), the traditions of interpretation (smrti), and law books (sastras).5 The Srivaisnava community dubbed him Kavi Tarkika Simha (“a lion among poets and logicians”), an ascription Desika did not hesitate to announce in his   See Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1: The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2005), pp. 147–68, 547–84, 629–90. 4   Attribution of the term “theology” to Hindu intellectual traditions has been disputed by Western scholars—and Indian scholars influenced by the West—occupied with the Enlightenment suspicion of “myth” and “miracle.” For these scholars, “theology” is a secondary if not suspect form of scientia in comparison to knowledge conveyed in the disciplines of philosophy and science. In the example of Vedanta Desika, the term is both patently appropriate and non-exclusive of non-theological discourses. His texts are simultaneously confessional, intensely devotional, produced for the benefit of the Srivaisnava religious community and rationally defensible. For this reason his task comports well with the confessional enterprise Christians recognize as “theology.” Cf. Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Theology After Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany, 1993), ch. 1; “Restoring ‘Hindu Theology’ as a Category in Indian Intellectual Discourse,” in Gavin Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford, 2003), pp. 445–75. The Sanskritic concept most adequate to this synthetic understanding of theology is dharma, which connotes religion, natural or cosmic law and the active human responsibility to maintain it. Desika’s own theology depicts just this synthesis. Cf. Desika, RTS, p. 345; Vedanta Desika, Isavasyopanishad Bhasya, trans. K.C. Varadachari and D.T. Thathacharya (Madras, 1975), p. 61; Joseph Prabhu, “Trajectory of Hindu Ethics,” in William Schweiker (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics (Oxford, 2008), who describes dharma as at once a metaphysical and ethical “cosmic contract to which the individual is bound, both in the sense that she derives support from it (Sanskrit, dhar) and the corresponding obligation to support it.” Cf. also Saral Jhingran, Aspects of Hindu Morality (Delhi, 1989), p. ix, for whom “Hinduism is an integrated whole in which religion, philosophy, morality and social culture are so intimately related, that neither morality, nor any aspect of Hinduism, can be studied in isolation without reference to its other aspects … Hindu Dharma … is a very rich, highly complex and composite whole which cannot be understood in a mono-polar terminology.” 5   Steven Paul Hopkins, Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedantadesika in their South Indian Tradition (New York, 2002), pp. 27–30. 3

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text honoring Ramanuja, his theological predecessor.6 This name is significant, for it recognizes not only the linguistic facility he exercised writing in three languages—Sanskrit, Tamil and Prakrit—but also the breadth of his intellectual facility covering a multitude of literary genres: drama, poetry and devotional hymns, logic, philosophical and theological prose and scriptural commentary.7 His work is encyclopedic and creative. Because of his traditional religious education in the Sanskrit language and his local upbringing as one who spoke Tamil and studied Tamil intellectual and devotional traditions, Desika’s literary production included a combination of both languages called manipravala, a highly Sanskritized form of Tamil, which is the dominant idiom of his Srimad Rahasyatrayasara. His polylinguism, while common among intellectuals in the Srivaisnava community, illustrates a capacity to coordinate and reconcile varying intellectual strands within his linguistic, religious and secular contexts. It suggests also a pluralistic disposition and cosmopolitan sensitivity for inclusion and synthesis, theologically and linguistically. The Srivaisnava religious community labeled its Vedantic position “Visistadvaita” and understood its theology and piety as the authentic response to and interpretation of the Vedas, indeed as an “unrefuted and unrefutable” response. While its roots can be traced back to older Tamil and Sanskrit Srivaisnavaism, the Srivaisnava community arose distinctively in the tenth century ce and developed a long line of teachers (acaryas) responsible for the interpretation and transmission of tradition, among whom Desika included himself.8 While Nathamuni was the community’s first major acarya, his Nyayatattva is known only through citations to it in later texts. Yamuna (Nathamuni’s grandson) was also a significant Srivaisnavite acarya, and Ramanuja (c.1017–1137), the most prominent acarya, expounded Visistadvaita tenets in polemical contradistinction to Buddhism and alternative Hindu paradigms such as Sankhya, Vaisesika, Yoga and especially Advaita.9 Desika continues Ramanuja’s polemics against rival   Vedanta Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, trans. D. Ramaswami Ayyangar (Tirupati, 1965), v. 72, p. 145. 7  Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, pp. 6–8; Francis X. Clooney, SJ, with Hugh Nicholson, “Vedanta Desika’s Isvarapariccheda (‘Definition of the Lord’) and the Hindu Argument about Ultimate Reality,” in Robert Cummings Neville (ed.), Ultimate Realities: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project (Albany, 2001), pp. 96–7. 8  Desika, RTS, ch. 1, p. 11; cf. chs. 29–30, pp. 566–73. In RTS, ch. 1, p. 15, Desika lists six requisite traits of an acarya. They are God’s love, good deeds done by chance, the gracious glance of God, freedom from hate, willingness to learn, conversation with good men. 9   R.C. Zaehner, Hinduism (Oxford, 1962), p. 100; Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, trans. Adidevananda (Mylapore, 1992); Vedanta Sutras with the Commentary of Ramanuja, trans. Georg Thibaut (Delhi, 1996); Ramanuja, Vedarthasangraha, trans. S.S. Raghavachar (Mysore, 1978); John Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious Understanding (New Havens, 1974); Julius Lipner, The Face of Truth: A Study of the 6

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systems, mentioning in several texts how his system is “like a hurricane blowing away cotton bits—the arguments of the protagonists of rival schools.”10 While there is no direct historical or textual evidence for the claim, many believe that Ramanuja, who wrote in Sanskrit, nonetheless allowed the bhakti devotional poetry of the Tamil Alvar saints (those “immersed [in God]”) to affect deeply his own piety and theological construction.11 In virtually all of his texts—especially Yatiraja Saptati—Vedanta Desika makes clear his affiliation with and reverence for Ramanuja by expounding, commenting on and honoring the latter’s system.12 Indeed, Yatiraja Saptati expresses Srivaisnava theology and piety in 74 verses of adoration to Ramanuja, to whom this text attributes the roles—associated with avataras—of protector of Srivaisnavites and an accessible source of saving knowledge. Several verses from the Yatiraja Saptati demonstrate this, the first of which clarifies the religious significance Desika assigns to Ramanuja: By putting down the pride of Sankara and others, by protecting (his teacher) Yadavapraksha (or the glory of the Yadavas) by his own prowess, and by removing apaarthas (wrong interpretations or non-Paarthas) from the Sruti, (i.e. the Vedas of the ear), this Ramanuja is indeed that Rama-avaraja [avatara] come into the world again.13

In another poetic and laudatory verse, Desika again reveres Ramanuja—who he now calls Yatiraja (“King of Ascetics”)—for the salvific knowledge he originates and communicates, and for the rest and protection he provides to “those tired of traversing the endless cycle of” samsara: Yatiraja shines victorious as the mountain from which all knowledge (like rivers) has its source; as the tree under which (whose shade) those tired of traversing the Meaning and Metaphysics in the Vedantic Theology of Ramanuja (Albany, 1986); cf. Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, vv. 69–70, pp. 137–8. 10  Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, v. 71, p. 140. Desika repeats the image of cotton (i.e. rival schools) being blown away by a strong breeze (i.e. Visitadvaita and its gurus) in RTS, Intro., p. 9; cf. ch. 22, pp. 221–4. 11  Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, p. 6; Norman Cutler, “Tamil Hindu Literature,” in Gavin Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford, 2003), pp. 145–58. 12   Sri K.S. Narayanachar, “Sri Venkatanatha as a Devotee of Sri Ramanuja,” in D. Krishnaiengar (ed.), Sri Desika Sambhavana: Seventh Centenary Commemoration Volume (Mysore, 1968), pp. 11–18. 13   Vedanta Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, v. 13, p. 26; cf. v. 12, p. 24; v. 20, p. 43. The term apaartha in this quotation refers to what is lacking or defective in meaning (artha), to what is mistaken in meaning. Elsewhere Desika affirms that “the acarya should be venerated and worshipped as if He were the Lord himself. For both possess the same qualities” (Vedanta Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, trans. D. Ramaswamy Ayyangar [Madras, 1979], v. 2, pp. 8– 9). That is, the acarya mirrors or embodies the Lord’s “unobstructed and indestructible compassion” or aaanrisamsya (ibid., p. 11).

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endless cycle of birth (and death) take rest; as the young (morning) Sun which does away with the night of the maya of all perverted intellects; and as the full moon for the rising ride of the sea of scriptures.14

The following verse from the same text indicates the soteriological efficacy of Ramanuja’s teaching—and implicitly that of Desika’s—with specific images and metaphors, especially one in which Ramanuja is likened to an able and dependable charioteer “driving” disciples’ minds. Desika clearly views the community to be susceptible to the direct teachings and influence of Ramanuja, the greatest of all acaryas. Yatiraja who is like a shady tree offering protection to those who travel along the highways of Vedanta; who is like a great treasure to those who have given up desire; who is the charioteer so to say for the hosts of his disciples who are all great and also varied, driving the chariot of their minds in proper direction; who is like the dawn dispelling the darkness of the three worlds; and who is the crest jewel among those who follow the Vedas, this Yatiraja illumines the unchanging and constant knowledge about high and low.15

Vedanta Desika means to take up the agenda of his community’s theological predecessor and authority, Ramanuja, in the truthful articulation of Visistadvaita. Indeed, Desika sees himself as anointed and protected by Ramanuja.16 As its name in Sanskrit suggests, the term Visistadvaita connotes a unitive tension between two distinct and related terms—a noun (advaita) and the adjective modifying it (visista). Visistadvaita makes an ontological claim concerning ultimate reality and finite selves that can be described as “qualified non-dualism,” or “non-dualism of what is qualified,” or “non-dualism with a difference.” The ontological referents or poles of “non-dualism” are absolute Brahman and countless number of selves (jivas). Brahman and jivas are understood together as a unity-in-difference in analogy to the relationship between body and soul. Visistadvaita affirms the ontological participation of selves—who are real and innumerable—in Brahman even to the point of implying the identification of the two, so long as the difference between them is nonetheless preserved.17 Desika states this difference in epistemological terms: “Continuously I delight in yourbeauty which remains untouched by any object

 Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, v. 28, p. 55.  Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, v. 46, p. 91; cf. v. 59, p. 113. 16   Ibid., vv. 66–7, pp. 129–31. 17   On the genuine difference in Visistadvaita between Narayana and jivas, in contrast to Advaita, see Desika, RTS, ch. 27, p. 393. On the plurality of selves as genuine, not illusory, see Desika, RTS, ch. 27, pp. 362, 393; Desika, Isavasyopanishad Bhasya, p. 75. 14 15

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of thought.”18 He gives lengthier expression to such divine transcendence in RTS while quoting the Vamanapurana: [Narayana’s] qualities cannot be enumerated even in tens of thousands of years by even all the gods assembled together. If there be any man of pure mind anywhere, gifted with the period of life appointed for Brahma and if he be further endowed with a thousand mouths, he may be able, O best of gods, to enumerate one ten-thousandth fraction of Thy qualities or may not be able. … So also we fall back from the praise of Govinda, owing to our deficiency of intelligence and not owing to any deficiency in His qualities.19

Second, insofar as it is connected with Ubhayavedanta, Visistadvaita also makes a distinctive linguistic claim “since it refers to both (ubhaya) Vedanta doctrine written in Sanskrit and the mystical experience recorded in the Alvars songs in Tamil as its sources.”20 Distinguishing itself from the non-dualism of Advaita, Visistadvaita as qualified non-dualism claims that there are many selves in a cosmos (jagat) in which plurality and physical reality are genuine modes or prakaras of absolute Brahman, a claim fundamentally at odds with Advaita’s strict non-dualist teaching. In addition, Visistadvaita differs from Advaita in its high regard for the devotional element of Tamil literature, especially that of the Alvars, according such literature the status of revelation along with the Vedas and their crowning texts, the Upanisads. From Advaita’s perspective, the devotionalism of Srivaisnava Tamil literature is philosophically weak. Both the ontological and linguistic inclusiveness of Visistadvaita connote the union of two terms: in the first, the union of and difference between supreme Brahman and selves characterized analogically by the dependence of a body (atman) on its soul (Brahman); in the second, the attempt to integrate and synthesize the Sanskrit Vedic knowledge (jnana) of the Upanishads with the popular Tamil devotional theism of the Alvars, both of which are revelatory, authoritative, reconcilable, and communicative of the same message. For at least these two reasons, the Visistadvaita of Vedanta Desika should be understood in contradistinction to earlier Advaitic philosophy, which has its own long lineage of teachers and is known best through the writings of Sankara (eighth century ce), who supplied Advaita’s most dominant, sustained, and extant articulation.21 Both Advaita and Visistadvaita are Vedantic in their acceptance of   Vedanta Desika, Varadarajapancasat, trans. Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Bombay, 1990), v. 49, p. 53. 19  Desika, RTS, ch. 4, p. 37. 20   Gérard Colas, “History of Vaisnava Traditions: An Esquisse,” in Gavin Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford, 2003), p. 247; cf. Desika, RTS, ch. 4, pp. 34–41; ch. 6, p. 87. 21   Eliot Deutsch and Rohit Dalvi (eds), The Essential Vedanta: A New Source Book for Advaita Vedanta (Bloomington, 2004). 18

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a single supreme Brahman or Self as ultimate reality, the attainment of which is the supreme goal of finite selves, and both traditions turn to the same authoritative scriptures to form their theological foundation. A few comments on Advaita will help to illumine and situate the Visistadvaita claims to which Desika subscribes.22 A concise way to appreciate the Advaita nondualist position is to consider the hermeneutical privilege it grants two Upanisadic texts regarded as “great sayings” (mahavakyas). The Advaitic tradition lifts these sayings from the corpus of Upanisadic literature and lends them particular authority as hermeneutical lenses through which the Upanisads as a whole should be read and interpreted. The sayings constitute both sacred text and hermeneutical strategy. The great sayings are: “I am Brahman” (aham Brahmasmi) and “You are that” (tat tvam asi), from the Brhadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanisads, respectively.23 The Advaita tradition interprets these as the identification of atman and Brahman, of self and ultimate reality, without remainder. The deepest center of oneself and the deepest center of the universe—Brahman—are radically nondual. The identification of atman and Brahman means there is no independent self or selves; that reality as such is non-dual or singular; that all is Brahman. One’s goal thus becomes the conscious recognition of this truth, the self’s contemplative realization of Brahman. The words of the French Benedictine Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) express the realization of Brahman: This final intuition has passed through every level of being, every image, every intermediary. The arrow has hit the bulls-eye. Through itself the atman has attained itself. The ‘I’ which it caused to sound at the different levels of consciousness, the physical body, life, thought, the entity consisting of desire and will, when once it is uttered in the deepest self, proves to be the one ‘I’ uttered by the cosmic absolute, Brahman, at the very source of its self-manifestation. … Tat tvam asi [Chandogya Upanisad 6.8.7 and parallels] is the final teaching of the guru at the moment when the mighty waters have broken all the dykes, and the glory of the one light has shone from the depth of being and illuminated the world in its entirety, sarvam idam.24

  Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism (Albany, 1994), p. 249.   Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, 1.4.10; Chandogya Upanisad, 6.8.7, in Upanisads, trans Patrick Olivelle (New York, 1996), pp. 10, 152. See Clooney, Theology After Vedanta, pp. 85–8, where the author suggests “this identification of great sayings by Sankara and the later commentators is itself a constructive exegetical move, one neither required by nor in total harmony with the upanisads” and, “[the great sayings] stand in stark simplicity over against the rich variety of statements in any given upanisad.” The Advaitic great sayings comprise not the meaning of the Upanisads but rather the meaning and hermeneutical strategy the Advaitic tradition ascribes to them. 24   Swami Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux), The Further Shore (New Delhi, 1975), p. 94. 22 23

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The Advaitic view holds that the experience of differentiation and of plural selves as conscious centers of thought and bodily action is the result of ignorance or avidya, a distortion in perception likened to sheaths (kosa) or layers of unreality superimposed onto Brahman, obscuring its true perception and causing it to misapprehend reality and to mistake Self for “body” and “world.” The perception of plurality, of many selves, and even of oneself as an independent center of consciousness and bodily action, is thus a misapprehension without cause from beginningless time. On this fundamental ignorance Ramana Maharsi writes: It is only the erroneous knowledge that mistakes one for another that is called mind. What was (originally) the pure sattva mind, of the nature of pure knowledge, forgets its knowledge-nature on account of nescience, gets transformed into the world under the influence of tamoguna (i.e., the constituent of prakriti which makes for dullness, inertness, etc.), being under the influence of rajoguna (i.e., the constituent of prakriti which makes for activity, passions, etc.), imagines ‘I am the body, etc.; the world is real’, it acquires the consequent merit and demerit through attachment, aversion, etc., and, through the residual impressions (vasanas) thereof, attains birth and death.25

The singular reality of Brahman has no attributes or qualities by which it can be described (nirguna); it simply is consciousness or knowledge (jnana). As one Visistadvaita commentator suggests, the Advaitic non-dual view of Brahman’s consciousness “is not consciousness which is conscious of anything within it or outside of it, for there is nothing else within it or outside of it. It is the only Real and nothing else can be said of it except that it is the opposite of non-existence, nonconsciousness and finiteness.”26 Misperception (avidya) causes Self to suffer under illusory attachments and aversions, and so the reacquisition of knowledge (vidya) becomes the sole means of release (moksa) from the suffering of misapprehension with its cycle of birth and death (samsara). Knowledge is attained when the self experiences and knows the great sayings from the Brhadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanisads—“I am Brahman” (aham Brahmasmi) and “You are that” (tat tvam asi) 25   Ramana Maharshi, Self-Inquiry, trans. T.M.P. Mahadevan (Tiruvannamalai, 1981), p. 10. 26   M.R. Rajagopala Ayyangar, “Introduction,” to Desika, RTS, p. xxi. Ayyangar’s stark characterization of Advaita’s Brahman might lack nuance with respect to Advaita’s predication and denial of qualities to Brahman. His characterization should be moderated by a more complex—perhaps dialectical—reading of the Upanisads and of Sankara. To this end, Clooney argues that a proper Advaitic interpretation of Brahman will acknowledge the back and forth throughout the Upanisads with respect to predicating (saguna) and denying (nirguna) qualities to Brahman, who in the Upanisads is both “proclaimed” and “ineffable.” The tension between predication and denial of qualities to Brahman can be seen as a textual strategy conveying to the reader the apophatic quality of Brahman. Cf. Clooney, Theology After Vedanta, pp. 81–5.

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as true and true of oneself. Moreover, such knowledge is not to be equated crassly as data. “The Upanisads repeatedly claim … and the Brahmasutras clarify, that the knowledge in question is not merely a case of intellectual judgment putting an end to error and uncertainty, but a deliberate and willed process of contemplation or meditation.”27 Qualified non-dualists like Ramanuja and Vedanta Desika charge the Advaita non-dual reading of the Vedas with producing a flawed ontology that, somewhat ironically, is itself a misapprehension with disastrous soteriological consequences. They also hold that Advaita Vedanta tends toward human arrogance and “conceit,” thereby compounding its misapprehension of self and God.28 They suggest instead that the one absolute Brahman is personified as Visnu (i.e. Narayana— “resting place of living beings”) with his consort Sri; that Narayana has individual souls (cit) and the insentient world (acit) as his dependent but distinct modes (prakaras); and that Narayana with Sri protects those who surrender the responsibility and burden of their protection to them (prapatti) in a contemplative relationship of love (bhakti).29 Pace the Advaitins, the Srivaisnava community holds that release is attained not through contemplation or what it considers Advaitin “esoteric knowledge” but through entering into a relationship of surrender, love, contemplation of and service to absolute Brahman, personified as Lord Narayana with Sri.30 Such surrender, moreover, and the love it produces, is itself a form of knowledge (jnana), which alone saves. Desika offers a compact definition of prapatti or surrender in the form of a prayer: “Lord, I, who am nothing, conform to your will and desist being contrary to it, and with faith and prayer, submit to you the burden of saving my soul.”31 The Srivaisnava tradition construes inner plurality within the godhead to be wholly consistent with the claim that Narayana is the one absolute Brahman. Sri 27   S.S. Raghavachar, “The Spiritual Vision of Ramanuja,” in Krishna Sivaraman (ed.), Hindu Spirituality: Vedas through Vedanta (New York, 1989), 267. 28   Desika understands the independence of jivas from the Lord as the “disease of conceit” (Desika, RTS, ch. 27, pp. 362, 365). Consider the following verse from Desika’s hymns in praise of Ramanuja: “I pay obeisance to that preeminent Sanyasi (Yatiraja) whose bright shining eyes drive away the darkness born of self-conceit and obstruct (impede) the path of enemies (rival schools). It is only by drinking the pure water offered by that ocean of nectar-like Daya [compassion] (i.e., Yatiraja), that the dark cloud (Lord Varadaraja) on the top of the Hastigiri (i.e., Kanchi) showers (boons) on us in excess of (our) expectations” (Desika, Yatiraja Saptati, v. 62, p. 118). 29   For a lengthy list of the Lord’s attributes to be meditated upon with reference to the Tiru mantra, where Desika offers a sustained and informative “doctrine of God,” see Desika, RTS, ch. 27, pp. 389–92. For a corresponding “doctrine of jiva” or theological anthropology, see Desika, RTS, ch. 27, pp. 392–6. 30   Satyavrata Singh, Vedanta Desika: His Life, Works, and Philosophy: A Study (Varanasi, 1958), p. 373. 31   Vedanta Desika, Nyasadasaka 2, cited in Raghavachar, “The Spiritual Vision of Ramanuja,” p. 271.

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eternally shares divinity with the Lord, is viewed equally divine with the Lord and both Narayana and Sri are the object of devotees’ prayer and surrender. It is useful to consider briefly this concrete example of Desika’s use of the participation motif, since it will be repeated several times throughout other loci of Desika’s reflection. We now observe the participation motif for the first time, describing in this context the co-divinity of Narayana and Sri. The tradition conveys this claim through a strategy that defines Narayana and Sri in terms of continual reference to each other; they are “ever inseparably connected.”32 The two choose to be “ever inseparable” and involved in a coordinate referential relationship, a unity-in-distinction Desika likens to the relation between the rays of the sun and the sun itself.33 While both modes of the godhead share in all divine actions, but Narayana tends to be associated more with justice and Sri with mercy. The Sri Guna Ratna Kosa of Parasara Bhattar (twelfth century) contributes a view that Desika adopts, namely, that Sri occupies the special role of pleading the cause of creatures before Narayana, extolling him to exercise grace (prasada) generously. The following verse of Desika exemplifies this dynamic by extolling Sri to be gracious to Desika by pleading his cause to Narayana: Mother mine residing in the lotus! I make this small and humble request to Thee. Pray bestow thy grace on me. Please make this Devanatha, Thy beloved consort, listen to my words as if they are the prattlings of His child.34

It should be noted that the strong distinction between Sri as one who advocates and recommends living beings to Narayana, for whom justice is primary, poses no threat to a thick sense of divine unity. The twelfth-century acarya Bhattar poetically affirms the unity of Narayana with Sri. Bhattar remarks that Narayana and Sri jointly possess divine qualities: “Yours in Him, His in You, both ways they are displayed as in a mirror, exceedingly delightful.”35 For this reason, SrimanNarayana is the most inclusive name for the godhead, even though the simplified  Desika, RTS, ch. 27, pp. 355–6.   Ibid., ch. 4, p. 33. cf. ch. 28, pp. 426–36, esp. 430. 34   Vedanta Desika, Devanayaka Panchasat, trans. D. Ramaswamy Ayyangar (Madras, 1978), sloka 4, pp. 9–10. Another text—his Saranagati Deepika—once again extols the grace and mercy of Sri when Desika refers to his own need to surrender to Narayana with Sri on account of his incapacity to accomplish his purushartha (ultimate goal in life) on his own. Note the first person address to Narayana and how it includes Sri: “Thy Mercy (Daya) the Supreme Empress should be there to help me attain my desire (Purushartha)” (Vedanta Desika, Saranagati Deepika, trans. D. Ramaswamy Ayyangar [Madras, 1990], v. 44, pp. 114–15). The Srivaisnava community believes the status it accords Sri is supported by the authority of the Vedas, the Ramayana, Visnupurana, Pancaratra-agama, and by Alvar poetry (cf. S.S. Raghavachar, Visistadvaita [Madras, 1977], pp. 62–3). 35   Parasara Bhattar, Sri Guna Ratna Kosa, vv. 32–3, in Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (New York, 2005), 35. 32 33

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“Narayana” is understood to connote Sri, since she interpenetrates with him the one divine reality.36 That the Srivaisnava community understood the proper name Narayana to connote the divine couple is further corroborated by another verse from Parasara Bhattar’s Sri Guna Ratna Kosa: The Lord’s proper nature and his independence, O moon-faced one, surely come from His intense union with You; and when the time comes for interpreting it, O Mother, Sri, it’s the same with the glory of Your lover, even if scripture does not mention you separately, because You are inside Him.37

In other words, the essential nature (svarupa) of Brahman is Narayana with Sri.38 The Srivaisnava community for which this God is the absolute Brahman of the Vedas recognizes divine complexity by lending a clear referent to the prefix in its own name: Sri-vaisnava.39 This pattern within the godhead is but one example of many to follow of the participation motif. The South Indian community did not remain monolithic. It suffered a clear division in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the roots of which some scholars trace to the fourteenth with Vedanta Desika and his older contemporary Pillai Lokacarya (1205–1311), even if both are pre-schism. The schism gave rise to the Northern school (Vatakali), which recognized Desika as its founder and spiritual leader, and to the Southern school (Tenkalai), represented by Lokacarya. At least two reasons account for the schism. The first and lesser reason has to do with the Northern school’s bias toward the Sanskrit tradition and the Southern school’s bias toward the Tamil tradition, notwithstanding the fact that both schools wrote in manipravala and acknowledged the worth of Sanskrit and Tamil.40 To be sure, both Vatakalai and Tenkalai Srivaisnava authors wrote in the hybrid 36   See Gerhard Oberhammer, Die Lehre von der Göttin vor Venkatanatha (Vienna, 2002), p. 33, who speaks to the subtle distinction involved in Desika’s claim that Narayana with Sri is one single reality (eine Eigenwirklichkeit) yet without being strictly identical (ohne jedoch identisch zu sein). 37  Bhattar, Sri Guna Ratna Kosa, v. 28, p. 34. 38  Desika, RTS, ch. 23, pp. 249–59. The svarupa or essential nature of a thing is defined as “the substance or thing which is defined by attributes peculiar and unique to it” (ibid., ch. 5, p. 50). 39   Desika does not hesitate to refer to feminine qualities of the godhead when he writes: “Methinks, like the mother toward her dull-witted son, Thou art affectionate to me” (Vedanta Desika, Dayasataka, cited in A. Srinivasa Raghavan, Visistadvaita [Tirupati, 1985], p. 125). 40   Colas, “History of the Vaisnava Traditions,” p. 249; Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, pp. 31–2. For a brief account of the community’s division into Northern and Southern schools, see Patricia Y. Mumme, The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute: Manavalamamuni and Vedanta Desika (Madras, 1988), pp. 1–8. For a longer account, see Nainar Jagadeesan, History of Sri Vaishnavism in the Tamil Country: Post-Ramanuja (Madurai, 1977), pp. 169–208.

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Sanskrit–Tamil manipravala style. Desika’s Srimad Rahaystraysara, the most systematic and comprehensive treatise produced by either school, is a towering example of manipravala. RTS, it has been argued, nonetheless evinces Desika’s bias toward the Sanskrit brahmanical tradition by illustrating his “concern to argue both the Srivaisnava sectarian cause and the Visistadvaita theology from the perspective of the orthodox Sanskrit law books (sastras) and the brahmanical social order (the varnasramadharma).”41 Many of Desika’s works, including RTS, “are dominated by Sanskrit idioms and vocabulary.”42 The Southern school, in contrast, leaned further in the direction of the Tamil vernacular as the language of revelation and of teaching, and in so doing appealed to a wider, less caste-based spectrum of Srivaisnavites for whom exposure to Sanskrit erudition would be an unreasonable expectation. The Northern school gave more weight to “Brahmancentered Sanskrit learning and so implies a more ‘conservative’ caste-bound orthodoxy associated with the Sanskrit sastras.”43 These distinctions in emphasis between the two schools, however, are relative, since the Vatakalai and Tenkalai were united more by their similarities than divided by their differences. Desika, for example, while acknowledged as a precursor of the Vatakalai school, seems to have been intent on reducing rather than increasing the division in Srivaisnavism. This linguistic difference between the Northern and Southern schools was overshadowed by a more divisive doctrinal issue: the relation of grace and work in the human performance of prapatti (surrender) and attainment of moksa (release). The reader observing this communal conflict within a Christian frame of reference cannot help but notice its analogy with the sixteenth-century dispute on freedom and the relation of work to grace that erupted in the Christian church when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg in 1517.44 The doctrinal dispute concerned the Northern and Southern schools’ interpretation of prapatti or surrender as a critical ingredient to the attainment of liberation or release. The two schools agreed on the critical importance of prapatti in attaining release but assessed the nature of prapatti differently, each stipulating nuances which in turn had an impact upon their views on freedom, grace and soteriology. Both schools affirmed salvation by grace alone—“alone” in the sense that selves or jivas depend absolutely on the grace of God for salvation. Narayana saves jivas. The Northern Vatakalai tradition, however, while affirming the sola gratia motif, was also known for affirming the need for the self to exert itself in the sense of providing the Lord a pretext or initiative (vyaja) to solicit the operation of grace. Lokacarya’s Southern school reacted negatively to this proposal, insisting that such effort amounts to thwarting and evading the operation of grace. Rather than effort manifesting itself in action or work, the Southern school claimed passivity  Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, p. 35.   Ibid., p. 35. 43   Ibid., p. 31. 44   John Dillenberger (ed.), Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York, 1963), pp. 489–500. 41 42

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as the best preparation and response to the grace of Narayana.45 The following two images—the cat and the monkey—help us to summarize broadly the central distinction between the two schools, even if the differences between them are exaggerated by the metaphors. They are only somewhat helpful in framing the sympathies of the Northern and Southern schools, but relatively unhelpful in indicating the nuanced position Vedanta Desika carved out in several texts. An analysis of Desika’s texts below in §4.2 will help us to represent his position with the subtlety it deserves and which cannot be adequately captured by the following, heuristic imagery: The Tenkali school is the “cat” school of salvation, holding that God saves the soul the way a mother cat carries her kitten, by the scruff of the neck: the soul is utterly passive and can do nothing to affect the process. On the other hand, the Vatakalais are monkeys when it comes to salvation, for the soul, they say, in order to be saved, must exert some effort; there must be some pretext (vyaja) for God to act, just as the baby monkey first leap onto its mother’s back and then hold on for dear life in order to be carried by her. Otto, with perhaps a hint of Lutheran tongue-in-cheek, calls the Vatakalai monkey a “synergist.”46

Subsequent sections of this chapter parse Desika’s position more adequately than these general images allow. For now it is adequate to note that the human pretext or initiative (vyaja) for divine action is itself supported and made possible by divine action. That is, Desika affirms an understanding of grace as prevenient, and it is the (graced) human action of prapatti so conceived that he deems necessary. For example, in the following verse of his Saranagati Deepika, he clearly disowns any understanding of human initiative (vyaja) that could contribute to an understanding of prapatti as autonomous and independent from divine action: Ruler! That Prapatti which is important and is performable by oneself—that too can be, has to be, bestowed only by Thee out of Thy grace. Pray also consider my present state with a fondness for Thy Feet, and bestow on me what you think fit and proper, in respect of the means and the end.47  Singh, Vedanta Desika, p. 396.  Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, p. 31, referring to Rudolph Otto, Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum: Vergleich und Unterrscheidung (München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930). 47  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 55, p. 131. This and other of Desika’s texts render suspect the judgment of Hopkins and Benjamin Walter who are impressed by the explanatory power of the “cat” and “monkey” images. Walter, for example, misleading asserts that for Vedanta Desika God’s grace is sahetu—“with cause”—whereas for Pillai Lokacarya it is spontaneous. Desika’s position, however, predicates the human pretext (vyaja) or cause (sahetu) of grace on the operation of grace itself. He does not quarantine divine and human action in the human performance of prapatti. 45 46

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The subtlety with which Desika treats the relation of grace to prapatti will be adressed more adequately below in §4.2 with reference to the distinctive manner in which the author expresses human weakness, inadequacy, sin, and thus dependence on Narayana. The same discussion will help to contextualize the role Desika assigns to bhakti.48 These preliminary contextual remarks help to situate Desika’s anthropology of dependence, his theology of piety, and his unification of piety and responsibility. We turn now to those issues in order, while throughout bringing his comments into polyphonic conversation with Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, whose voices are already in place. 4.2  Three Mantras: Srivaisnava Anthropology The Rahasyatrayasara (“Auspicious Essence of the Three Mantras”) is Vedanta Desika’s most sustained piece of constructive theology—a South Indian summa theologiae—and therefore serves as the primary source for assessing the themes of dependence and surrender in his anthropology as well as the related unification of piety and responsibility.49 This section of the chapter analyzes the anthropological claims at stake in Desika’s exposition of the three mantras or rahasyas, especially in view of what his ontology suggests about human dependence and its connection with one’s surrender to and love of Narayana. The section to follow, §4.3, will call attention to the doxological force of Desika’s sesa–Sesin ontology, and §4.4 will note the ecstatic quality of Desika’s doxology as it extends horizontally to include responsibility towards one’s fellows in community. The mantras function as critical components to Vaisnava understandings of human identity vis-à-vis Narayana and of the divine composure and activity on behalf of bhaktas (those who love the Lord) and prapannas (those who surrender to the Lord). As rahasyas, they are “secret” in the sense of expressing most precious knowledge. One does well to hear Desika’s anthropological claims with the voices of Rahner and Barth still ringing in one’s ears, particularly their claims concerning human nature and its dependence, freedom, grace and responsibility. Doing so anticipates the polyphonic aural effect to come. The three mantras are said to contain the essence of Srivaisnava piety. They read as follows:

48   On human inadequacy and sin—even in the utterance of prapatti—and the consequent emphasis Desika places on grace, see Desika, RTS, ch. 8, pp. 95–6. 49   That is, because it is his summa and his most “systematic” text, RTS is the more primary of the Desika sources this chapter utilizes. His other, smaller works supplement the forthcoming analysis in important ways, most notably in supplying clear expressions of the anthropological commitments which lead Desika to advocate prapatti as a sure upaya or means to moksa.

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[1] The Tiru mantra: aum namo narayanaya Om, reverence to Narayana. [2] The Dvaya mantra: Sriman narayana caranau saranam prapadye Srimate narayanaya nama I seek refuge at the feet of Narayana with Sri. Reverence to Narayana with Sri. [3] The Caramasloka: sarva dharman parityajya, mam ekam saranam vraja aham tva sarvapapebhyo moksayisyami, ma sucah Having surrendered all means of righteousness, with me alone take refuge. From all your sins I will free you. Do not grieve.50

These mantras contain in seed-like form the piety of the Srivaisnava community. To recite them is to recite all that needs to be recited, to say all that needs to be said, about the Lord with Sri, jivas and the means of moksa or release. The three rahasyas state in concise form the anthropological, soteriological and doxological principles on which Desika expands in lengthier prosaic (RTS) and poetic (Saranagati Deepika, Nyaasa Vimsati, Vadarajapancasat and Abheeti Stavam) formats. If the three mantras compress the truth about reality for Srivaisnavas, the first mantra—the Tiru—further compresses such ultimate truth.51 The Tiru mantra contains the other two within itself, such that one who knows truly the meaning of the first mantra will take the next step and utter the Dvaya mantra on surrender, which will in turn allow one to appreciate the meaning and significance of the Caramasloka as a report of distinctively divine action taken on one’s behalf and in response to one’s dependent condition. Desika purports that when one sincerely utters the first mantra—“Om, homage to Narayana”—“the meaning of everything becomes known,” namely, the identity of the referent of Om (the Lord), what it means to be a jiva or self and the need to surrender the burden of granting one’s release to Narayana, who “alone” (ekam) grants release.52 The synthetic and summative quality of the Tiru mantra perhaps accounts for Desika’s chapter on it being the second longest of RTS at 74 pages. Indeed, he construes the first mantra 50   This English translation comes from Francis X. Clooney and is unpublished. M.R. Rajagopala Ayyangar’s translation can be found in RTS, ch. 2, p. 18. Patricia Mumme’s translation of the rahasyas, which differs slightly from Clooney’s and considerably from Ayyangar’s, reads: [1] Om, homage to Narayana [2] I take refuge at the feet of Narayana joined with Sri; Homage to Narayana, Lord of Sri [3] Having relinquished all dharmas, resort to Me alone as a refuge/upaya. I will release you from all sins. Do not despair (Mumme, The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute, 273–5). 51  Desika, RTS, ch. 7, p. 89. 52   Ibid., ch. 2, p. 19.

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as the hermeneutical key to the Dvaya mantra, Caramasloka and the Vedanta as a whole. It is “the most important of the vyapaka mantras, within which lies imbedded the gist of all the revealed truths found in the srutis and smritis without any exception.”53 Desika cites the Naradiyam on the supreme importance of the Tiru mantra’s distilled summation of the Vedas’ meaning (artha). Of all the mantras, the mantras treating of Bhagavan are the highest. Of the countless mantras treating of Bhagavan, the three vyapaka mantras are the highest, so also the eternal moola-mantra [Tiru] is the highest of all mantras; of all secrets, this is the supreme secret; of all things that purify, this is the most purificatory.54

This is a synthetic Srivaisnava claim concerning theology, anthropology, soteriology and doxology. The mantras mean to shape one’s self-consciousness precisely in terms of a prescribed alterity: as one whose nature it is to exist for Narayana and one’s fellows and who therefore ought to do so consciously. One finds spiritual transformation and release precisely in this dual role of service, which pleases the Lord.55 One’s ontological and interpersonal foundations are determined by the mantras’ soteriological and doxological focus on Narayana and on what that focus requires in persons’ communal interaction. Ontology thus contains piety, and the two mutually explain each other, mirroring the truth about jivas and their Lord. To be, ontologically, is to be for and toward God. Bhakti and prapatti give to this ontological reality a mental, verbal and physical form. That is why the Tiru mantra—“Om, reverence to Narayana”—takes the form of a verbal doxology, precisely as an utterance (ukti) acknowledging the Lord (Om) and the ontological fact that all things exist for God and by their existence praise God. Ontology directly gives rise to and assists in the explanation of doxology. While the mantras themselves do not explicitly raise the matter of interpersonal responsibility in community, Desika’s exposition of them nevertheless embeds such responsibility within doxology, authorizing and lending force to responsibility on the horizontal level because of how ontology and doxology are construed on the vertical.56 This move, discussed below in §4.4, to embed responsibility in doxology represents yet another gestation of the participation motif in Desika’s thought. That is, the move is strongly analogous to the Srivaisnava stipulation according to which the goddess Sri is understood to be included and referred to in the name “Narayana.” Narayana is none other than Narayana with Sri, constitutively. Analogously, Desika will embed responsibility within the logic of piety. While the mantras do not explicitly give voice to horizontal responsibility, Desika’s exposition of them does. The reader notes that Desika’s theological voice 53

    55   56   54

Ibid., ch. 27, p. 345. Ibid., ch. 27, p. 348. Ibid., ch. 27, pp. 346–7. Ibid., ch. 3, pp. 25, 28–9; ch. 5, p. 52.

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achieves consonance with the voice of Karl Barth, whose exposition of the love commandments authorizes love of neighbor according to the vertical criteria of acknowledgment and praise, and which, like Desika, brings to bear multiple other loci on the articulation of that unity. Rahner, Barth and now Desika model theology as a systematically interconnected enterprise. Since this horizontal extension of the mantras’ internal logic, however, will be the subject matter of §4.4 below, the remainder of the present section specifies in what human dependence and surrender consist. Dependence should be understood in three separate but intimately connected ways: ontologically, doxologically and soteriologically. He avers to all three senses in what follows: When Bhagavan is seen in the mirror of the Vyapaka mantras, which disclose His all pervasiveness, one will see that the universe (which we perceive with our senses) is absolutely dependent on Him for its existence and continuance and likewise for its activity and the fruit or result arising from it; since the universe is supported and controlled by Him and is also solely for the fulfillment of His purposes, one will understand that it is the body of the Primeval Creator. By realizing this relationship of the universe being the body of the creator, one is able to reach the heart of the Srutis.57

First, all selves or jivas are dependent on the Lord—their Bhagavan personified as Narayana with Sri—in the ontological sense discussed above in reference to the characteristics demarcating Visistadvaita as distinct from Advaita. That is, Lord Narayana has the entire cosmos (jagat) as his body or modes (prakaras). To state the same point from below would be to say that all sentient (cit) and insentient (acit) beings have their existence from the Lord who freely creates them for his own purpose or enjoyment (lila).58 All beings likewise are indwelled by the Lord, by virtue of whom—and in whom—they exist. Their existence is derived and dependent with respect to origin and continuance. They are “inseparable” from the Lord, their “support.”59 Their essential nature (svarupa) is to be dependent on the Lord’s will (sankalpa) in just this way, and it is simply because of the Lord’s will that the universe and its beings exist and by his support.60 In an analogous way, Desika says, the essential nature of the jiva’s gross (i.e. material) body is likewise dependent; it depends on the self or atman for support and animation. The body exists only in connection with the atman, and perishes once the atman leaves it. It is the same for the jiva and all other beings composing the universe or body of the Lord. They live insofar as he indwells and supports them, and would cease if he were to cease such creating and sustaining activity. This is the Visistadvaita take 57

    59   60   58

Ibid., ch. 3, p. 22. Ibid., ch. 4, p. 40. Ibid., ch. 3, pp. 23–4. Ibid., ch. 5, p. 63.

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on the Upanisadic claim that the Lord is the Self of all. This is the ontological— Westerners might add, panentheistic—sense in which Desika affirms dependence of the jiva on Narayana. The ontological participation of Narayana within the cosmos and living beings is no minor or abstract philosophical remark, for, as Desika suggests, the world abounds with opportunities for the jiva to gain right knowledge of the Lord as the Self of all, which is tantamount to knowing reality as it is: Entering into the world, Thou dost support it. Thou art the one who commands it, Thou art its master (Seshin) and the consort of Lakshmi. Thou hast everything and everyone (else) as Thy body, and art the primordial cause. If by the multitutde of distinctive marks of Thine, a person knows Thee to be Purusothama, such a person is praised (in song) in this world as one who knows everything.61

Second, the ontological commitment gives rise to a doxological nuance. The universe is for the fulfillment of the Lord’s purposes, or as Desika says quite bluntly: “sentient beings and non-sentient beings exist not for their own sake but for the fulfillment of God’s purposes. Their nature is ever to exist for somebody else (i.e.) the Lord. In using them for his purposes, his glory is manifested.”62 While ontology thus naturally gives rise to doxology, this is not to say that sentient and non-sentient things suffer a deficit in value or meaning in and of themselves, for Desika affirms their integrity precisely due to—not in spite of—their orientation to Narayana. He affirms an unflinching theocentric view of jivas and the universe, and underscores a consequent implication for anthropology, namely, that jivas are to be Bhagavan-centered rather than self-centered, and thus truly congruent with their own essential nature (svarupa) which glorifies God.63 The false views according to which the jiva is reducible to the body or is independent of the Lord, are false precisely because they function as obstacles to moksa. False views, practically speaking, do not solve the problem of samsara. Right knowledge here is critical, not simply the variety that leads to intellectual certitude but, more importantly, soteriological efficacy (jnana).64

 Desika, Saranagaati Deepika, v. 5, p. 58.  Desika, RTS, ch. 3, p. 25. 63   Ibid., ch. 3, p. 26; ch. 4, p. 45. The term “self-centered” is not Desika’s. I use it, following Ramanuja’s commentary on Gita 18:65, to connote a pejorative meaning, since being appropriately focused on self, i.e., intent on realizing one’s essential nature as a jiva and a sesa and thus maintaining dharma—contributes toward one’s purushartha or ultimate goal in life, i.e., liberation or mukti. That would be a salutary example of being selfcentered. But that Desika prescribes for the self a theocentric disposition is corroborated in his numerous citations to Ramanuja, the Puranas, and the Alvars in RTS, ch. 4, pp. 34–8. See Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, p. 597. 64  Desika, RTS, ch. 5, p. 48. 61 62

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What is it about the self’s nature that determines it for this kind of vocation, as one who exists to serve and glorify Narayana? We continue to circle around this question with the assistance of another category Desika offers early in RTS, namely, coordinate predication or samanadhikaranya.65 Desika lays out coordinate predication as the God–world ontological relationship in his appropriately titled “Chapter on the Most Important and Distinctive Doctrine that is Unique to Visistadvaita.” The doctrine maintains that the relationship between Iswara and the world of sentient things is that between the soul and body, because of which every word, whatever its ordinary denotation may be, such as “cow,” “man” and the like, refers ultimately to Iswara who is within them as their innermost soul.66

Ramanuja too affirmed coordinate predication in his Vedarthasamgraha and, below, in his Gita Bhasya: Everything constitutes the body of the Supreme Person forming only a mode of Him who is their self, the Supreme Person alone exists, and all things (which we speak of as diversity) are only his modes. Therefore all terms used in common parlance for different things, denote Him only. Sri Krsna shows this by coordinating some important ones among these entities with Himself.67

Coordinate predication holds that all words—all locutions—both designate and point beyond their finite referent to signify the Lord. The linguistic theory genuinely differentiates cit and acit from Brahman without severing their relation to Brahman. The body–soul analogy captures the dependent relationship of the world to God and entails an ontology of participation featuring the dependence of jivas on the Lord and the Lord’s support of those jivas. Desika suggests this is what marks off Visistadvaita as unique and distinctive (pratitantra) among its rival schools of thought.68 All sentient and insentient things—cit and acit—participate in the Lord by being his modes or prakaras. So too, the Lord indwells, animates and supports. Therefore, to reference a thing or being—a dog for example—is to refer to the dog and the support internal to the dog by which and in which it lives and moves and has its being. Christians will note the Pauline tone of that phrase, but it belongs properly to Desika as well, when he notes that the fifth criterion of a good acarya is that he or she “is deeply attached to the Lord and … lives, moves, and has his being in Him.”69 All words, as Ramanuja and Desika insist, penetrate deep into the referent 65

  Ibid., ch. 6, p. 77.   Ibid., ch. 3, p. 22. 67  Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, p. 249; cf. Ramanuja, Vedarthasamgraha, par. 94, p. 75. 68  Desika, RTS, ch. 3, p. 22. 69  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 1, p. 3. 66

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and denote the one absolute Brahman, Narayana, the Self abiding in the hearts of all. Coordinate predication thus links human speech to the structure, ground and support of the cosmos and naras or living beings. A recurring pattern has surfaced once again, that of participation. With respect to the godhead, as suggested earlier, the goddess Sri is internal to and embedded within Narayana and, moreover, is understood to be referred to and included by the name Narayana. With respect to ontology, sentient beings (cit) and nonsentient beings (acit) are the body of God and are understood to be included in any reference to Narayana (ayana [resting place, refuge or abode] of naras [living beings]).70 Likewise, with respect to language, words referring to things in the world participate in much more than the things to which they refer; words denote the obvious referent like “dog” but also the less obvious but decisive referent— Narayana—who must be acknowledged systemically in order for any thing or self to be designated properly by words. Vedanta Desika’s system is soaked in the motif of participation, with respect to the godhead, ontology, anthropology and language. Consider this comprehensive statement: When the pramanas or sources of knowledge (like perception and inference) reveal an object or thing, they disclose the essential nature or svarupa of the object, the attributes that define it, the (other) qualities of the object so defined and also its activities. The essential nature is always revealed as endowed with the attributes that define it. It is not possible to speak of the essential nature of a thing (svarupa) except in terms of the respective attributes. To speak of an object minus its attributes would be as meaningless as to speak of a hare’s horns.71

This comment had an enormous impact on how the community construed a theology of Narayana, since proper and adequate speech about the Lord and his essential nature entails speech about the attributes or naras comprising the body of God. Desika also relies on theological grammar to convey participation, referencing the “immanence” (antarvyapti) but not exhaustion of the divine in all beings and things: [The word Narayana] is considered to indicate that Narayana pervades all things and beings with in them (i.e.) that He is immanent within them. If we take Narayana to be a tatpurusha compound (naranam ayanam: the abode of Naras), the (compound) word indicates that he pervades them from without (they being within Him (i.e.) that He is transcendent. These two are declared in the srutis (Narayananuvakam). Immanence (or antarvyapti) means being present inseparably connected with other things and beings in such a way that it cannot 70  Desika, RTS, ch. 3, p. 28. Etymologically, the word naras refers to human beings who depend on the Lord (nara) (ibid., ch. 27, pp. 356, 378). 71   Ibid., ch. 5, p. 51.

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be said that He is not present where they are. … Being full and complete in every object, on the part of One who is both immanent and transcendent, means that that aspect or phase of His which is within any one upadhi or conditioning factor is capable of (creating, sustaining, and destroying) and doing such other things to all things and beings. It does not mean that his essential nature is all contained (and exhausted) within any one object (to the exclusion of all others).72

Coordinate predication can be expressed also through the use of teleological language underscoring Narayana as the final destination of language: “Brahman, Samkara, Indra, Self-ruler, Self, Universe,” O Self of all beings animate and inanimate, by these words, O Lord of the Hill of Elephants, the unfailing Utterances aim at you, who are the place where all words end, who are the cause of everything.73

Finally, Desika expresses coordinate predication in the explicit doxological language of praise: Words such as “sat”, which produce a knowledge of being common, words such as “sivah” which create also an illusion of another entity, have one voice to refer to you, Narayana, O Lord of the Hill of Elephants; that is not realized for any other than you; and it is ascertained by the power of words to express a meaning appropriate to their object.74

The common thread uniting the forms of participation, of which coordinate predication is an example, seems to be Desika’s persistent desire to acknowledge the divine, to give the divine its just due—to praise God as God is fit to be praised (stavyah), in thought, speech and interpersonal relations (§4.3 below).75 Third, jivas are dependent with respect to soteriology, as the Dvaya mantra states: “I seek refuge at the feet of Narayana with Sri. Reverence to Narayana with Sri.” This mantra entails an honest assessment and recognition of one’s dependence on another due precisely to the svarupa or essential nature of the jiva and its unmet dharmic responsibilities. Desika includes this sort of personal honesty and recognition, namely tyaktamanaha or the absence of false prestige or self-importance, in a list of fifteen qualities a good student must have.76 In this way, the Dvaya mantra should be read in anticipation of the Caramasloka, which is the divine confirmation of the need to surrender all means or works of righteousness (dharmas) and resort to the Lord, who “alone” (ekam) grants moksa. 72

  Ibid., ch. 27, p. 381.  Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 12, p. 15. 74   Ibid., v. 14, p. 19. 75  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, p. 50. 76  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, pp. 14–16. 73

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The jiva is thus charged with the active responsibility of giving over the burden (bharasamarpanam) to the Lord associated with her release from samsara and attainment of moksa. At times Desika construes the performance of prapatti relatively basically, as simply doing what one ought to do in conformity with one’s svarupa and dharma. First one should prostrate in full before the guru three times and touch his feet with one’s head and receive the [Dvaya] mantra like a poor man expecting a hidden treasure. Having thus received the mantra, one should seek refuge under me. By this mantra alone should one surrender oneself to me. He who has done so becomes one who has done what one ought to do.77

Prapatti is thus a norm, the doing of what ought to be done. Along with bhakti yoga, prapatti represents a “direct and independent” means (upaya) to moksa or spiritual liberation.78 Notwithstanding the assertion that both upayas are direct and independent means to moksa, Desika assigns to prapatti a privilege, sufficiency, and universality of scope which bhakti lacks.79 To appreciate the priority Desika assigns prapatti, let us first appreciate his understanding of bhakti yoga and certain anthropological presuppositions that help to clarify why emphasis falls on the surrender of prapatti. Relative to prapatti and its cognates, Desika sacrifices little ink expounding bhakti. This is not because bhakti issues a different, lesser goal than prapatti, nor because bhakti produces a lesser bliss in moksa than does prapatti. The absolute dependence of the jiva on Narayana is no less absolute for the bhakta. In truth, there should be no absolute division betwen these two spiritual arts as if they were diametrically opposed alternatives, for in a substantial way they interpenetrate each other insofar as each counts as service or kainkarya to the divine.80 In the Bhagavad Gita, from which the Srivaisnava tradition derives the importance of bhakti, bhakti is associated both with devotees’ intense love and longing for the Lord and union with him, and with the acknowledgment that the Lord alone is worthy of worship and capable of fulfilling devotees’ purushartha or ultimate goal in life. Desika specifies bhakti as the desire to know the Lord with perfect clarity and intimacy, to see the Lord face to face in a visio Dei, and to rest  Desika, RTS, ch. 28, p. 421.   Ibid., ch. 9, p. 110. 79   Ibid., ch. 8, p. 100. 80  That prapatti should not be shorn from bhakti—since it can be considered an accessory to bhakti—is evident in one of Desika’s hymns on surrender, which appeals to the desire to contemplate the Lord continually: “May I think continually on you, who are invoked by seekers of eternal purity, who suppress by your look the blindness of the world, who wear a yellow cloth, whose net of arms dispels fear, who eat the oblation in Brahman’s horse-sacrifice” (Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 44, p. 51; cf. Desika, RTS, ch. 8, p. 94). 77 78

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in that visio with bliss and salutary attachment. Bhakti is thus the jiva’s loving meditation on (upasana) the Lord marked by unsurpassed love which has, for its object, the essential nature and the like (form, qualities, etc.) of Bhagavan who is not dependent on anyone else … . Bhakti is of the form of a continuous stream of knowledge which is of the nature of uninterrupted memory like oil streaming down continuously; it has clearness similar to that of visual perception [i.e. bhakti is a form of jnana or knowledge]; it grows from strength to strength by being practiced every day until the day of the journey to Paramapada and terminates in the remembrance of the last moment.81

Bhakti is a form of knowledge subject to all the (laborious) requirements of orthodoxy and learning. It is not, therefore, in the words of one commentator, “a state of emotional excitement that comes up like an effervescence and then perishes.”82 The communion entailed in bhakti, frequently imagined by the Alvar poet saints as optic vision of and physical proximity to the Lord, produces in the jiva a real knowledge of the divine which converts to love of the divine, for knowledge and love become convertible terms. “Knowledge and bhakti become identical.”83 The bhakta loves the Lord on the basis of having experienced communion with—or in—the Lord, which compels the bhakta to remain in contemplative, loving union. Desika clearly indicates that bhakti is a means to the release of moksa. His position here in fact constitutes one of the major quarrels between him and his Srivaisnava colleagues of the Southern Tenkalai school, such as Pillai Lokacarya and Manavalamamuni, for whom bhakti is not really an effective upaya at all.84 For example, these representatives from the Southern school would read the “alone” (ekam) of the Caramasloka to insist that the Lord is the only upaya for moksa, that any alleged cooperation on the part of the jiva bears no influence on the operation of grace.85 Vedanta Desika’s endorsement of bhakti notwithstanding and without subtracting from the efficacy and achievement of bhakti, he nonetheless elevates prapatti over bhakti for what appear to be quite practical reasons. Bhakti, in order to be successful, requires an impressively capable person to perform it since its fruits are delayed in this life and, possibly, in lives to come. The bhakta attains moksa only after much delay, only after the expiration of past karma built up from “beginningless time.”86 Bhakti does not, in other words, destroy the history  Desika, RTS, ch. 9, p. 106.   Swami Tapasyananda, Bhakti Schools of Vedanta (Madras, 1990), p. 79. 83   Ibid., p. 79. 84   Patricia Mumme, “Rahasya Commentaries,” in Pillai Lokacarya, Mumuksuppai with Manavalamamuni’s Commentary, trans. Patricia Y. Mumme (Bombay, 1987), pp. 20–21. 85   Mumme, “Rahasya Commentaries,” p. 21. 86  Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 3, p. 3. 81 82

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of karmic residue the effects of which the jiva must live out in space and time, throughout this life and perhaps future lives. Desika suggests that, practically speaking, it is difficult to adjudicate when, how, and under what conditions bhakti succeeds as an effective means for moksa: It is true the Gita says that for those who practice karma yoga, the effort will never perish or be in vain. What has been built up will, of course, remain built up, as it were, of stone. But we cannot say when the fruit will be attained, whether at the end of a kalpa or of a manavantara or of a yuga. Even sages like Vasishta, who ever acted in such a manner as to please God, had to wait a long time. Those who acted against the will of God like Vritra and Kshatrabadhu attained moksa without any such delay [because of prapatti]. So it is difficult to say which individuals have done meritorious deeds that would lead to moksa without delay. Similarly it is difficult to say who has done bad deeds leading to divine chastisement causing delay.87

Bhakti does entail, however, the distinct benefit of the “happiness of devout worship in this world for a long time.”88 In short, the jiva has little reason to trust bhakti as a means for moksa. Certainly the majority do not, even all who are caste-eligible. He summarizes the constraints bhakti places on the bhakta in the text below, introducing a soberly realistic expectation to bhakti as an upaya: Since bhakti yoga is not suitable for those who do not belong to the three higher castes [sudras are excluded de jure] and likewise also for those in these three castes who are wanting in jnana or ability or both and since it will not suit those who cannot endure any delay in the attainment of its fruit (namely, moksa) and are therefore extremely impatient, prapatti is prescribed as the sole and independent means of moksa for them. Since it will be the means of securing all desired objects, it has been prescribed in the place of para bhakti for those who know their limitations.89

Bhakti, then, is problematic for the masses of sudras or servants who do not belong to the three higher castes; it is problematic for members of the three higher castes (Brahmins, Ksatriyas, Vaisyas) who lack the ability or knowledge to practice and whose efforts will pale in comparison to their karmic histories; and it is problematic for those who cannot bear delay in the attainment of moksa. Bhakti is thus theoretically possible for the upper three castes but difficult, uncertain and possibly risky. Not least for the reason that the history of sin the jiva commenced from beginningless time begets more sin, here and now. “One  Desika, RTS, ch. 4, p. 46.   Ibid., ch. 8, p. 102. 89   Ibid., ch. 9, p. 108. 87 88

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act of disobedience leads to further acts of sin. ‘Sin committed again and again destroys wisdom and the man without wisdom begins further acts of a sinful nature.’ ”90 For such a one, the difficulty of bhakti is accentuated. Desika thinks a consciousness of one’s sinfulness from time immemorial can be a helpful form of suffering—like walking on the “hot sands of samsara”—that will create in the jiva “a desire to hasten towards the path leading to bliss [prapatti].”91 The Dvaya mantra, in this context, is an honest self-assessment born out of spiritual maturity and humility.92 With great poetic force, Desika juxtaposes two images to further convey the disparity between these two upayas. Bhakti is likened to a “boat” and prapatti to a “bridge,” both of which can transfer the jiva across the sea of samsara to the farther shore. To be sure, the boat and bridge are both upayas. The one, however, is predicated on karmic action while the other is predicated on divine grace. For those who are unable to hold the boat of devotion to you, for those who are not able, O Giver of Boons, to go to the farthest end, for those who desire to cross at their will the mass of waters which are existences, you are an unbreakable bridge to reach yourself.93

The difference between boat and bridge rests on a distinction in agency. The jiva performs bhakti by her own agency whereas in prapatti the jiva surrenders the burden of responsibility to the Lord, who is the more sure, safe and immediate means to cross over samsara. Desika even thinks time is of the essence, that sins are sprouting out of control such that, hyperbolically speaking, soon not even Narayana will be able to destroy them: If, before the sprouts of sins, issuing from a mass of bad acts, grow without control, you do not approach with your bow Sarnga, even you will not be able to stop their growth, O Lord of the Hill of Elephants.94

Hyperbole and rhetorical flourish notwithstanding, Desika finds risky any upayas having to do with self-reliance, since the effort of a jiva in performing dharmas, for example, is compromised from the start. In the following verse, Desika again refers to the jiva attempting to cross over a mass of waters; the obstacle he points to in this verse is not the sea of samsara but his own karmic history of sin. Ranganatha! If in respect of (my) sea of sins which increases (in size and volume) every moment and cannot be crossed over, any praayaschitta (an act to atone for   Ibid., ch. 4, p. 44. The citation is from the Mahabharata.   Ibid., ch. 4, pp. 46–7. 92   Ibid., ch. 13, p. 138. 93  Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 31, p. 39. 94   Ibid., v. 38, p. 46. 90 91

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While Desika mentions several deterrents to bhakti, one in particular merits sustained attention, namely, the feeling that one is unable to perform bhakti, that the self is akinchanya or bereft of upayas leading to moksa. First, Desika construes “ability” to perform bhakti simply as “the capacity to understand the meaning of the sastras and the capacity to perform what is ordained therein.” The human predicament was mentioned earlier in this chapter and figures into the appreciation of being utterly helpless, having no resources (akinchanya). Desika takes seriously the pervasive ignorance or avidya infecting all sentient life. Avidya refers both to the ignorance of being limited in time and to the more nefarious ignorance which misunderstands the truth of oneself, Brahman and their relationship. This latter sense of ignorance causes Desika to hesitate with respect to persons in the upper three castes being competent to perform bhakti despite being caste-eligible. The jiva might be ignorant of upayas other than prapatti. The jiva might be unable to perform the upayas with which she is familiar. In either case, stress falls on the jiva being akinchanya—helpless and bereft of the ability to perform upayas other than the surrender of prapatti.96 Thus, conscious recognition of being akinchanya renders the jiva eligible for prapatti. Second, the other characteristic qualifying a jiva for prapatti is her ananyagatitatvam—opposition to interests other than moksa and to a refuge (saranya) other than that provided by the one true Lord, Narayana. She is undistracted by the sweet but ultimately painful nectar of sense pleasures and unimpressed by idolatrous claimants on her attention and affection. In other words, the jiva embraces the Lord’s feet in surrender. While he views himself as an acarya in the line of Ramanuja with all the spiritual accomplishment such status entails, and as one who likens his own writings to a lamp illuminating the world for naras struggling in the darkness of ignorance, he also views himself quite critically in the terms of sinfulness and akinchanya, which is to say, weakness, inconstant faith, pride and even as one whose own words of surrender are insincere and fail to emanate from his heart.97 In RTS and other texts, especially the latter half of the Saranagati Deepika, Desika is more impressed by his own insufficiency and lack than with his status as an eminent acarya revered by many during and especially after his life; indeed, one commentator suggests he was practically worshipped after his death.98 It is Desika’s consciousness of himself as a sinner rather than the accomplished 95  Desika, Abheeti Stavam, trans. D. Ramaswamy Ayyangar (Madras, 1987), sloka 16, p. 49. 96  Desika, RTS, ch. 10, p. 113. 97  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, vv. 54, 58, pp. 129, 138; cf. vv. 41, 42, 44. 98   Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat, “Introduction” to Desika, Varadarajapancasat, p. ix.

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acarya that steers him toward prapatti as the ideal means for moksa, in addition to multiple attestations of akinchanya he finds in the tradition.99 His anthropology is thus grounded in personal experience and the personal honesty he judges to be critical for the spiritual path. The self-indictment finds multiple expressions across his literary corpus. First, he regards himself as committing an offence simply by aspiring after the glory of serving Narayana, a glory only great ones—the blemishless acaryas—achieved. He takes shelter under them; he does not presume to attain the glory of serving Narayana directly but rather indirectly through the line of acaryas behind whom he positions himself.100 The self-effacement continues as he compares himself to a dog with uncontrollable thirst, wondering aloud whether he pollutes the living water sustaining him: What detriment would occur here to Thee if I also enjoy Thy infinite glory enjoyed by Lakshmi, Bhoodevi, etc.? Does the stream originating from Thy foot ‘Ganga’ become polluted by being lapped (drunk by licking) by a dog with uncontrollable thirst?101

In a strikingly Pauline tone, Desika assures the reader of his many failings and tendency to be at counter purposes with his own svarupa, for which the pleading Sri becomes the gracious remedy: Swamin! Every moment I do prohibited acts as if they were acts ordained to be done. I give up doing ordained acts as if they are prohibited ones. Like these, the hosts of my other transgressions are innumerable. The Mercy (Daya) the Supreme Empress should be there to help me attain my desire (Purushartha).102

He reminds the reader of the magnificent power of divine grace in distinction from the “vast heap” of his own sins: Thou fond of Saranagatas; Thy prowess (Sakthi) is so immense that it not only puts down the pride and arrogance of the asura called Madhu, but in a trice turns about (destroys) countless groups of lakhs and hundreds of crores of Brahmandas (Universes) and feels shy. Pray, command that Sakthi to destroy the vast heap of my sins.103

Desika’s theocentric or God-saturated mind prevents him from dwelling on his sins in a narrowly self-involved fashion. Rather, they poorly advertise the majesty  Desika, RTS, ch. 29, pp. 471–2.  Desika, Saranagaati Deepika, v. 41, p. 110–11. 101   Ibid., v. 42, p. 111. 102   Ibid., v. 44, p. 114–15; cf. Rom. 7:21ff. 103  Desika, Saranagaati Deepika, v. 48, p. 120. 99

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of Narayana as creator. Significantly, Desika, who elsewhere mentions the pain involved in samsara, surrenders not so much for his own benefit or relief but so that the Lord’s gracious initiative does not appear to be fruitless: (Lord) having made me utter these words “I am to be protected by Thee; I am a burden unto Thee” which I never uttered before, which are mere (empty) words not emanating from the heart (but only from the lips), pray do not render Thy effort fruitless (valueless) by allowing Thy great qualities to be degraded by my sins, like other gods, and that too in the presence of Thy Consort, Lakshmi.104

The prapanna should recall that the Visistadvaita ontology discussed above, detailing the Lord as the inner self or ruler of sentient beings, applies to the order of grace as well. The Lord, being the inner ruler, is the source of prevenient grace rendering the prapanna able to utter the words of surrender as a pretext (vyaja) or initiative for the Lord’s saving action. Ruler! That Prapatti which is important and is performable by oneself—that too can be, has to be, bestowed only by Thee out of Thy grace. Pray also consider my present state with a fondness for Thy Feet, and bestow on me what you think fit and proper, in respect of the means and the end.105

This verse in particular makes clear that the term vyaja or pretext is somewhat misleading. Because the pretext itself falls under the rubric of grace or divine action, it would be misleading to suggest that the Lord acts only on behalf of those who have already taken the initiative, for the Lord’s own initiative is the sine qua non of prapatti. The human initiative takes the character of response, and is the jiva’s correspondence to the Lord’s inherent will to save, a will which conditions jivas’ performance of a vyaja. On this matter Desika’s theology of grace thus comports well with both Rahner and Barth’s, differences of grammar and emphasis notwithstanding. The acarya places blame for his suffering on himself—not on the Lord— recognizing that the chasm separating them is due to the jiva, not the Lord, as are all obstacles obstructing the repair of their relationship. Yet he manages to salvage a sense of dignity attaching to the jiva’s self-imposed separation from the Lord, not because self-contradiction is laudable but because he has become the object of divine compassion: You have entered inside every creature, O Lord, Lord of the Hill of Elephants, and you stand very near; but I am very far from you; may this very I be again

104

  Ibid., v. 54, p. 129.   Ibid., v. 55, p. 131.

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and again thus far from you; your compassion, indeed, is spontaneous, if there is no obstacle.106

In all these examples, Desika conveys to the reader a distinct modesty with respect to human capability that simultaneously glorifies the divine, and he does so in an autobiographical style calling attention to his own shortcomings as the vehicle for the reader’s self-understanding.107 Bhakti does not, for him, engender clear faith or trust (viswasa) in its results. But prapatti does, because in the state of surrender the soteriological burden of responsibility shifts to the Lord who is capable, compassionate, and eager for jivas to relinquish the role proper to him alone. One of the angas or limbs associated with prapatti is viswasa—which translates as faith, confidence or trust in the efficacy of one’s spiritual practice. One can trust prapatti because it surrenders the burden of moksa to God, converting what had been an impossible burden into the job description of a Lord who is both capable and eager to grant release. For some, bhakti will be adequate and efficacious, yet only after a long time and for a relatively small portion of the community. Prapatti transforms those who practice it with weak faith or trust into those with great trust (mahaviswasa) in the Lord’s desire and competency and in the divine approval with which surrender meets.108 Correspondingly, Desika assigns the capability to save or grant release from samsara to Narayana, who is both “capable and compassionate.”109 Indeed, Desika likens the eagerness of Narayana to protect and save to one keeping vigil: Why, O Lord of the Hill of Elephants, in a miserable creature like me who needs protection, should you search an external help such as dharma, etc.? Is not your will, which keeps vigil for protecting the world, a clever aid?110

This modesty or humility with respect to beings caught up in samsara—which is to say, ignorance or avidya—to be capable of their own release fundamentally informs his anthropology, rendering jivas dependent on Narayana with respect to their attainment of moksa. Like Karl Barth, the dominant role Vedanta Desika assigns to grace reflects certain assumptions about the beneficiary of grace. Divine grace has its anthropological corollaries. In Desika’s case, while bhakti is theoretically plausible, laudable and effective, the real emphasis nonetheless falls on prapatti as the spiritual discipline  Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 33, p. 41.   The entire second half of the Saranagati Deepika can be read as an autobiographical commentary explaining the need for prapatti in light of helplessness and sin. This text establishes anthropological characteristics that diminish the practical feasibility of bhakti yoga, even though the theoretical possibility is never in question. 108  Desika, RTS, ch. 28, p. 450. 109   Ibid., ch. 28, p. 448. 110  Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 37, p. 45. 106 107

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which corresponds best to the svarupa of the majority of persons and their tenuous identity as ones suffering the confusing and painful effects of samsara.111 Desika employs several distinct but relatively synonymous terms to denote the notion of surrender. These are sometimes used interchangeably; for our purposes they can be regarded as relative synonyms.112 Prapatti, the term of choice in RTS, connotes the idea of approaching the feet of the Lord in submission and relinquishment. Nyaasa, the term Desika uses in Nyaasa Vimsati, suggests the relieving of the burden of one’s ego from one’s back, as well as the subsequent freedom and relief this image implies.113 Saranagati—to seek refuge—is the term operative in the Saranagati Deepika and occasionally RTS, the former of which one commentator regards as a concise summary of the lengthy RTS.114 Prapatti and its cognates are active spiritual dispositions, active in the sense that one surrenders deliberately with a specific self-awareness and conscious intention. Surrendering the burden of responsibility for saving oneself does not, however, result in the abdication of responsibility for oneself or others. The responsibility to maintain one’s caste and stage duties is emphatically upheld, as will be shown below in §4.4. Moreover, Desika insists that prapatti is actively performed.115 This spiritual activity is passive only in the sense that one relinquishes the false view of an autonomous self capable on its own terms of progressings spiritually toward the goal of jivamukti—a released self in union with the divine.116 The surrender of prapatti, however, is not passive in the sense that one does nothing. Desika, for example, never compromises the need for a prapanna to contribute a vyaja or pretext, such as uttering the Dvaya mantra: “I seek refuge at the feet of Narayana with Sri.” Nor is surrender passive in the sense that the Lord alone is agent and the jiva an inactive patient. Yet it is passive in the sense that the prapanna ceases to disrupt her essential nature (svarupa) with wrong views, that she relinquishes autonomy, the disease of conceit, and the presumption that her essential nature possesses its own soteriological sufficiency.117 Relinquishment gives rise to freedom and renewal; the jiva experiences herself “freed from all debts” and from all fear such that, in the final words of the Caramasloka, she does not grieve.118 The words “do not grieve” in the Charamasloka are intended, Desika   Confusing and painful in the sense that samsara is likened to honey laced with poison; it can be sweet to taste yet replete with harm and destruction (cf. Desika, RTS, ch. 7, p. 93). 112  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 9, p. 25. 113  Desika, RTS, ch. 28, p. 447. 114  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 16, p. 37. 115  Desika, RTS, ch. 24, p. 269; ch. 29, p. 475; Mumme, The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute, p. 125. 116   Cf. Mumme, The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute, p. 97. 117  Desika, RTS, ch. 27, p. 365. 118   Ibid., ch. 13, p. 139; Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 19, p. 41. 111

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insists, as “the cancellation of all causes of grief.”119 In other words, prapatti in the Dvaya mantra gives rise to the experience of “new life” and “spiritual rebirth.”120 Using a vocative case in direct address to the Lord, Desika recounts the discipline of prapatti dialectically in terms of the surrender of responsibility coupled with necessity of action: Lord Varadaraja! Having been the recipient of the benignant glances of (my) Acarya which have the power to quell the speed and power of the whirlpool of samsara, having been given up (abandoned) by all other means, having now quelled my tendency to pursue prohibited paths, having dispelled all doubts by virtue of true knowledge, having prayed to Thee—possessing boundless grace— to be my protector, I have placed the burden of protecting me at Thy lotus feet, I have become burdenless and fearless.121

What specific actions attend the surrender of prapatti? The prapanna can surrender by utterance (uktinishta), an example of which is the Dvaya mantra—“I seek refuge at the feet of Narayana with Sri. Reverence to Narayana with Sri.” There are numerous examples of surrender by utterance: the Dvaya mantra is the supreme and perfect one, and Desika provides many others throughout his writings. Whatever form the utterance takes, the jiva is to affirm that her redemption is the Lord’s responsibility. Alternatively, the prapanna can surrender to the Lord by way of surrendering to an acarya (acaryanishta), that is, by being incorporated within the acarya’s own surrender, due to the intimate connection between acarya and disciple. Desika offers several illustrative analogies of acaryanishta, all of which, by likening prapannas to compromised, lowly, even parasitic beings, continue his theme of self-effacement. The first analogy praises the efficacy of Ramanuja’s surrender for others. When a lion leaps from one hill to another, the little creatures (like bugs and lice) are also taken over from that hill to the other. So also when the author of Sri Bhasya [Ramanuja] performed prapatti (the surrender of his responsibility or bhara), we too have been saved (by that act) owing to our intimate connection with him.122

Some examples of acaryanishta include:  Desika, RTS, ch. 29, p. 555.   Ibid., ch. 28, p. 428; ch. 14, p. 144; ch. 17, p. 169; ch. 27, p. 348; ch. 29, pp. 505, 561–2. Desika also uses the term “spiritual rebirth” to describe the goal of those who turn to Sri. Prapannas thus seem to experience a real transformation post-prapatti, from anxiety and grief to confidence (viswasa) and new life (ibid., ch. 28, p. 429). 121  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 22, pp. 44–5. 122  Desika, RTS, ch. 8, pp. 96–7. 119

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The blind man walks on being led by one who is not blind; the lame man is taken (across the stream) by the boatman, being placed within the boat; the children of the king’s servants enjoy the pleasures (of the palace), although they do not know the king. So also my acarya, who is also compassionate, is capable of making me attain Thee.123

However surrender occurs, by utterance or by connection to an acarya, the prapanna is to embody a set of five critical dispositions known as the angas (accessories, limbs) of prapatti.124 The first two angas focus on the obedience of the jiva and how such obedience constitutes worship pleasing to the Lord. The first—anukulya sankalpa—enjoins the jiva to cultivate a will congruent with the Lord’s will, thus leading to action pleasing to the Lord. The second—pratikulya varjanam—recapitulates the first anga as abstention from actions displeasing to the Lord. In both angas, a proper will and the conduct to which it leads is considered obedient insofar as the Lord is pleased. The third—karpanya—is consciousness of helplessness or impotence with respect to bearing the burden of responsibility for one’s release, and is related to the previous discussion of akinchanya or inability in the prapanna to take up means other than prapatti. Some commentators liken this state to depravity; the helplessness which the jiva recognizes is his or her consciousness of depravity.125 The fourth anga—mahaviswasa—is great faith in the Lord and in his bearing of one’s burden.126 Because the Lord is trustworthy, the prapanna should have supreme confidence that the promises of the Lord are true and true for oneself.127 The fifth limb—goptritva varnam—seeks the Lord for protection in some demonstrable way, such as asking for protection. Desika cites the Lakshmi Tantra to the effect that “no protection would be given when it is not sought.”128 This notion, if taken by itself, can suggest to the reader that the jiva as agent calls and provokes the Lord’s attention. This is not untrue for Desika. Yet, as was already discussed with respect to the role of a vyaja or pretext, as in the Dvaya mantra, the prapanna’s petition is itself empowered by the prevenient grace and 123

  Ibid., ch. 8, p. 97.   Ibid., ch. 11, pp. 115–26; Desika, Saranagati Deepika, chs 26–8, pp. 90–95; Nyaasa Vimsati, vv. 17–20, pp. 39–43; Mumme, The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute, pp. 128–30. 125   For example, D. Ramaswamy Ayyangar, comments on Desika, Saranagati Deepika, 92. 126   Mahaviswasa is thus strongly analogous to Paul’s Greek term pistis, which translates into English as “faith” but denotes also obedience, trust, confidence in and acknowldgment of the graciousness promise of God in Jesus Christ. In this sense Martin Luther’s construal of faith, which emphasized faith as trust in the truthfulness of God’s promises, is scripturally sound. Cf. Luke Timothy Johnson, “Romans 3:21–26 and the Faith of Jesus,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 44 (1982): 77–90. 127  Desika, Abheeti Stavam, sloka 15, p. 47. 128  Desika, RTS, ch. 11, p. 117. 124

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will of Narayana to shelter jivas.129 Desika’s citation of the Lakshmi Tantra should be understood in this way, such that the Lord’s agency is held supreme while the jiva’s agency—secondary, empowered—is nonetheless expected and respected.130 In these many ways, Desika expresses the dependence of jivas on its Lord: ontologically, doxologically and finally soteriologically, all the while never losing sight of a major theme whose recurrence throughout his texts would no doubt please Karl Barth, namely, the concern to acknowledge divine initiative and agency at every theological twist and turn. The ontological feature of dependence, however, becomes fully illumined only in connection with the critical vocabulary of sesa (servant, auxiliary) and Sesin (master, principal) characterizing the relationship of the jiva to Narayana and to the form of service or kainkarya this relationship takes. We turn to this topic in §4.3, attentive to the piety or doxology emanating from the relationship of sesas to their Sesin. First, however, we turn to our first moment of polyphony, a series of comparisons between the three authors on the anthropological subject matter. 4.2.1  Polyphony: Dependence and Autonomy The initial comparison of Rahner and Barth (§3.2.1) asked if there were any significant distinctions in the way grace meets Rahner’s “hearer of the Word” and Karl Barth’s “doer of the word.” Did one theological strategy better emphasize human dependence and need of grace more adequately than the other? The present comparison asks much the same question, but uses the format of polyphony (Rahner, Barth, Desika) instead of harmony (Rahner, Barth). The operative question in this new comparison is the same as the previous: can the three theologians be read compatibly in the sense suggested by the operative metaphor of polyphony? Can these three distinct voices be heard together profitably, that is, consonantly rather than dissonantly? They can, so long as one takes seriously the diversity and difference polyphony demands as an aural and now theological experience. Each of the three authors incisively blast egoism as the mistake of thinking oneself to be autonomous with respect to epistemology and soteriology. In all three, alterity and acknowledgment are the human counterpoints to a self-referential and mistaken autonomy. Vedanta Desika describes an ontological dependence wherein jivas, because of their essential nature, depend absolutely on Narayana for their creation, maintenance, activity, knowledge and consummation. Ontologically, the truth of jivas is that they are governed by the Lord who is their inner ruler and support and who is imagined as the body of which they are but a mode or prakara. Desika counts recognition and acceptance of this fact as a great spiritual insight which he likens to knowing all that one needs to know. This accounts for why he gives such emphasis to the Tiru mantra—“Om, reverence to Narayana”—as the kernel of right knowledge from which the other mantras arise. To utter the Tiru mantra is to  Mumme, The Srivaisnava Theological Dispute, pp. 130–39.   Ibid., p. 131.

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acknowledge the profound alterity that should characterize one’s thought and action, shifting consciousness away from self to the one Lord. For these reasons, ontology clearly gives rise to doxology. Next, the Dvaya mantra—“I seek refuge at the feet of Narayana with Sri. Reverence to Narayana with Sri”—applies the same alterity motif recommended in the Tiru to the locus of soteriology by acknowledging the self’s impotence to achieve release from samsara and union with the Lord. Such action belongs to the Lord who alone (ekam) saves. Because of the existential poverty of the jiva, moksa is given, not achieved. Desika counts this, too, as a great spiritual insight, expressing a jiva’s essential nature as a dependant of the Lord possessing no resources of her own. Accordingly, tyaktamanaha or the absence of false prestige and self-importance is one of the key virtues of a good student. It is difficult to overestimate Desika’s theocentrism here as the jiva in several ways points beyond—and yet within—herself to her inner support. This theme gains an unmistakable prominence to those who have already heard consonant declarations by Karl Rahner and Karl Barth. Karl Rahner eschews a similar notion of autonomy or egoism (Ichhaftigkeit) in his description of how persons experience their freedom and transcendence.131 They experience their freedom, first, as a fundamentally given quality. They are subsequently empowered in freedom to ‘achieve’ themselves in their actions throughout the one long course of their lives, shaping a cumulative and fundamental option for or against God.132 This entails an acceptance of their being and of the thrown life-setting in which they find themselves (Geworfenheit); it entails their affirmation of God mediated precisely by their affirmation of self within the thick ambiguity of historical existence. The opposite of an affirmed fundamental option can be pictured with the help of one of Rahner’s phrases depicting Ichhaftigkeit, namely, a “walled in ourselfness.”133 Persons fail themselves and God when they remain within the suffocating confines of a walled-in ego trapped in a circle of self-reference. They fail themselves insofar as their nature as created by God should—but does not—participate in a dialogue stretching outward and upward in search of consummation. They fail God insofar as God is the one who creates them for dialogue, gives them the capacity for dialogue, and sustains their (possibly absolute) “No.” It is no coincidence, then, that the closest Rahner comes to a description of a hell is the absolute loss of “ultimate loneliness.”134 Hearers of 131   Ichhaftigkeit translates literally as “I-ish-ness” (Karl Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, trans. Bruce Gillette [Collegeville, 1997], p. 45). 132   Rahner has been maligned for using the word “achieve” in reference to the fundamental option for its apparent disinterest in the operation of grace. I attempted to assuage this concern above in §2.2 by underscoring the unmistakable role he assigns to prevenient grace in his theology of freedom. 133  Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 46. 134   Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York, 1978), p. 104.

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the word are created with a social or dialogical orientation both to receive the word spoken to them and to speak their own creaturely word in response, finding themselves in these creaturely, spiritual tasks. The ecstatic (Lat.: ex-stasis) intent with which they are created is frustrated in any walled-in expression of curvatus in se by which they contradict and harm themselves. Rahner takes with utter seriousness the gospel dialectic according to which the only way to gain oneself (read: achievement of subjective authenticity) is to lose oneself—to go out of and die to oneself in order to transcend and gain oneself. The neighbor and other inner-worldly mundane realities present themselves as the “material” for this self-becoming and transformation. The normative vision of the human person Rahner envisions can scarcely be seen absent the “other” to whom she is directed in pursuit of her own career of authenticity, obedience, and love. This is the sense in which Rahner recommends the free surrender of the false, autonomous self.135 Karl Barth clearly states the human person’s absolute dependence on God in the loci of revelation and epistemology, asserting paradoxically that true human knowledge of God consists of God knowing God. Barth does not here intend to cancel out human freedom: recent commentators observe that this charge is among readers’ most frequent misunderstandings of Barth’s writings. Instead, human knowledge of God depends strictly on the grace of God meeting persons rather than persons meeting God unassisted. “Man as he is, in his creaturely existence as man and as an individual, is opened, prepared, and made fit for God by God.”136 Correspondingly, any suggestion that human persons gain for themselves an autonomous knowledge of God is mistaken in its presumption of human capacity and unholy in its refusal of acknowledgment. This epistemological sentiment conditions his suspicions over the tendency of worldviews (die Weltanschauung) to consist of no more than constructs of a reality humans cannot construct. The pattern of dependency repeats itself in the locus of soteriology, where Barth’s slogan “let God be God” finds in Desika the complementary insistence that one surrender to Narayana the responsibility of one’s protection (bharasamarpanam). Their sentiments are mirror images of each other, picturing a humanity exposed as bereft of the necessary resources and so dependent on God for salvation, a God who alone (ekam) is capable of saving his dependents and who, moreover, is predisposed to do just that. Barth affirms the latter sentiment in his powerful, Augustinian suggestion that sin is not creative, that it cannot re-determine the goodness of God’s creation nor thwart God’s intention to reconcile. It is, therefore, secondary and even nothingness (das Nichtige), whereas grace is primary. With respect to autonomy, Karl Barth takes with maximal seriousness the relational constitution of human creatures. That persons are directed to covenantal relationship with God and others receives in Barth’s writing no clearer expression 135

  Ibid., p. 131.   Karl Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: The Theological Basis of Ethics, trans. R. Birch Hoyle (Louisville, 1993), p. 7. 136

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than in his lengthy reply to Nietzsche’s Übermensch or superman in an eloquent fine-print section of Church Dogmatics III/2. Nietzsche’s Übermensch wills to exist autonomously above the mass of humanity in “azure isolation” by transcending humanity and becoming more than the merely human.137 In the face of this proposal Barth simply affirms that there can be no human (in his Christologically conditioned sense of verus homo) without her fellow human (mitmenschlikheit); there can be no “I” without a “Thou” because there isn’t an “I” without a “Thou.” The human person is fundamentally co-human. This is Barth’s “ontic” declaration. To persist as though autonomy (Eigenständigkeit) and not relationality or community (Gemeinschaft) were the truth of oneself— that is, to stand alone—would be to contradict one’s nature as given by God, to say “No” to one’s constitution as a creature of and before God set to the task of responsibility toward others in speech, hearing and action. What Barth means by autonomy or Eigenständigkeit is analogous to what Rahner means by egoism or Ichhaftigkeit and to what Desika conveys generally in his exposition of the Tiru mantra and specifically in the notions of tyaktamanaha (absence of false prestige) and ahankara (relinquishing of a false autonomy). 4.2.2  Polyphony: Sin and Grace Discussions of sin and grace in the three authors intensify the drift of their comments on dependence. Desika’s pen produced multiple attestations of the weak and resource-less state of sin jivas suffer through, including Desika himself as attested in his surprisingly frank introspections. The seriousness with which he takes weakness and sin can be seen in his clear emphasis on the surrender of prapatti as the most effective means or upaya to moksa. While it would be unhelpful to think of them as wholly unrelated—since prapatti can be an accessory to bhakti—Desika assigns a priority to prapatti missing in his comments on bhakti, suspecting the latter rests too much on human performance, qualifications, energy, patience, etc. While possible for some, bhakti proves to be a stumbling block for many. Bhakti becomes suspect in view of sin, which for Desika is a self-perpetuating, habitual cycle producing more of the same, thwarting one’s best intentions and vexing the effort to understand oneself. That is why one of the angas or accessories of prapatti consists in mahaviswasa or great trust and confidence in the Lord’s desire and ability to shelter beings suffering the pains of samsara. This is also the force of the word ekam or “alone” in the Caramasloka—“Having surrendered all means of righteousness, with me alone take refuge.” Helplessness and lack of personal resources in this regard renders jivas eligible for the performance of prapatti, a practice which comments as much on God—even more perhaps—as on jivas. For the performance of prapatti is graced at its beginning and end. By grace Narayana stimulates the performance of a 137   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2: The Doctrine of Creation, trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh, 1960), pp. 231–42, esp. 233.

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pretext or gesture (vyaja), ordaining the jiva to suffer through the sweet but painful attachments of samsara such that she despairs of her own resources of renewal. Such sorrow or grief becomes a spiritual insight and precondition for prapatti. Her gesture to the Lord—the Dvaya mantra for example—culminates a process the Lord himself initiated and directed. The gesture is her free consent to depend on grace, to let God be God. The protection the Lord subsequently grants the jiva is also grace, since the Lord alone possesses the requisite power (sakti) to destroy sins and has the compassionate will (sankalpa) to do so once the jiva supplies even a whimper of a pretext.138 Because of this, surrendering is doing what ought to be done. It expresses one’s essential nature as a dependent of the Lord, acknowledges the crippled state into which one has fallen from beginningless time and exhibits great trust (mahaviswasa) in the Lord’s free determination to shelter beings. Karl Rahner’s voice finds consonance with Desika’s at several critical points, most notably the way in which freedom, wounded and graced, is the critical human faculty by which a response to God is subjectively possible. Much the way the jiva’s ignorance is “from beginningless time,” human persons encounter themselves in an environment impacted deleteriously by original sin. This is their Gemeinsamkeit der Freiheitssituation, the rejection of God at the beginning of human history conditioning all future human agency. In this tragically compromised environment, actions undertaken with good intentions obtain a quality of ambiguity under the harmful influences of others and of oneself. If Desika were listening to Rahner here, he would likely suggest that their Gemeinsamkeit der Freiheitssituation is a reason why humans should despair of their own competence and simply surrender to the Lord. Surrender relinquishes false presumptions and actions, yet is fundamentally active: it functions as the necessary pretext for the Lord himself to act on behalf of jivas, supplying evidence of some small fragment of cooperation. From the perspective of the divine couple, the intent to act on behalf of jivas is constitutive of divine nature, but the Lord nonetheless desires from them a gesture that corresponds to their divine determination, much the way Rahner’s God creates spiritual creatures to hear and respond and respects their capacity to do so, creating the conditions for dialogue and reciprocity rather than simple monologue. Rahner acknowledges the significance of the human component of the relationship by suggesting a “hell” is a real possibility for spiritual creatures endowed with the freedom to utter a final and definitive “No,” effectively imposing hell on themselves. Desika and Rahner both prize the human agent and her capacity for response. Both theologians speak to a God who structures reality to make the human response possible, valuing that response even if crippled, nominal or, in Rahner’s terms, unconscious, unthematic or anonymous. The human correspondent has an integrity unto herself that God chooses to create and respect. Rahner and Desika insist that divine grace is the only adequate salve for the human condition—one’s own efforts only exacerbate the condition—yet neither theologian compromises the responsibility to act, to  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 48, p. 120.

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respond and cooperate. In short, their sola gratia soteriologies call neither for human acquiescence nor lethargy but their opposite, namely, active participation in the dialogue for which they have been prepared. Karl Barth’s conception of sin finds consonance with Desika’s substantially and stylistically. The existential poverty to which Desika makes reference in his poetic works finds a strong compliment in Barth’s writings, especially in early sections of Church Dogmatics III/2. There Barth dialectically rehearses the sin and grace dynamic with an eloquence matching that of Desika’s, voicing an optimistic portrait of the human condition on account grace, despite a strong doctrine of sin. First, sin is “radical and total,” it is the human person’s own self-contradiction qua creature of God, covering the goodness of God’s creation.139 Yet as Barth frequently insists, sin can only be “secondary” while grace remains “primary.” Conceptually, sin belongs to the doctrine of reconciliation.140 Barth displays a remarkable talent for expressing the gravity and tragedy of sin while subordinating it precisely as non-creative human action that pales in comparison to the creative and primary action of God as creator and reconciler, in Christ. [Man’s] true being is his being in the history grounded in the man Jesus, in which God wills to be for him and he may be for God. And we must again remember what all this means. The existence of every man as such, through the mediation of the one Jesus, participates in the fact that from the very first, from its very creation, God willed to espouse and did espouse the cause of His threatened creature. To be a man is to be under the sign of deliverance which comes to the creature from Jesus. To be a man is to be able to look up for the sake of Jesus, and for his sake not to have to fear destruction. To be a man is to be held by the divine mercy, and to adhere to the divine righteousness, for His sake.141

Barth’s theology of participatio in humanitate Christi resoundingly affirms the tragic human creature and sets her the task of fashioning a life in correspondence to “the sign of deliverance which comes to the creature from Jesus.” In substance, this triumph of grace coming on the heels of a strong doctrine of sin echoes a pattern in Vedanta Desika, for whom an acute awareness of human weakness and sin—laid most bare in his own self-assessments—is subverted or neutralized by a strong theology of grace extolling and praising the eager compassion of Narayana to shelter suffering beings. Sin is so pervasive that, in Desika’s view, human attempts to rectify it are wrought with peril. One should simply surrender  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 31.   Ibid., p. 32. 141   Ibid., p. 162. “If we cannot relativize sin, looking past it or through it to a pristine purity of human nature which we can isolate and consider independently, it is undoubtedly relativized, and seen past and through, and isolated as secondary, by the grace of God and therefore the will of the Creator … if we do not want to exclude ourselves from the knowledge of grace, we must not absolutize sin” (ibid., p. 37). 139 140

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the burden to the One requesting to bear it. In both Desika and Barth, sin is total and paralyzing. Yet their respective doctrines of grace allow for an optimistic—if responsibility laden—theological assessment of the human condition. Far from entertaining a passive role, the human correspondence to such divine action consists in submitting and ordering oneself to the grace of God. In Desika, this means acknowledging one’s dependence, helplessness, lack of resources and the need to provide the Lord with some evidence of cooperation (vyaja). In Barth, this means responsibility in covenant partnership: letting God be God, the acceptance of one’s relational constitution and covenant partnership in both the vertical and horizontal meanings of that partnership. 4.2.3  Polyphony: Anonymity and Caste Inclusivity Rahner and Desika give voice in analogous ways to a further implication of divine grace. Both theologians envision a God who condescends to human creatures to accept what, strictly speaking, are irregular responses according to the classical rubrics of these religious traditions. That is, Karl Rahner espouses anonymous Christianity as a strategy to open up Christian faith and life to those who might not otherwise regard themselves as religious in the specifically Christian sense of the term, and who might even protest the designation.142 The theory has been criticized by scholars from the left for being still too Christocentric and from the right for presuming too much about non-Christian traditions and the general significance of transcendental freedom. Yet those criticisms are peripheral to the subject matter of Chapter 2 and the present chapter.143 What is of present interest in Rahner’s theory of anonymous Christianity is what the theory suggests about grace and what we might call think of as a qualified divine affirmation of so-called anonymous or unconscious religious responses. For Rahner, the divine affirmation is qualified because on the one hand it celebrates persons’ confirmation of their transcendental subjectivity yet, on the other, characterizes their confirmation as incomplete to the extent that Jesus Christ remains insufficiently known and acknowledged. The unthematic should always gesture toward and find fulfillment in thematic, explicit knowledge of the object of one’s transcendental subjectivity, who is Christ. Vedanta Desika’s caste-inclusive construal of prapatti likewise opens up persons to a valid upaya or means to moksa who might not otherwise consider themselves— and whose religious communities might not consider them—eligible for formal religious practices. Desika does not subvert the caste system; he acknowledges and celebrates it. Nor does he part ways with his tradition’s tendency during this period of history to construe the spiritual life anthropocentrically. Yet he opens up prapatti to all, locating one’s eligibility for it not in caste position but in the existential feelings 142   For a general presentation of strengths and weaknesses of the position, see Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “Rahner and Religious Diversity,” Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (Cambridge, 2005). 143   Fletcher, “Rahner and Religious Diversity,” pp. 245–6.

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of having no resources and having nowhere to go but to the Lord in surrender. These conditions rendering the jiva eligible for prapatti can be experienced by all: from Brahmins all the way down to sudras or slaves at the bottom of the caste system and to mlecchas (foreigners).144 In other words, the condition for the possibility of performing prapatti is one’s recognition of in what being a jiva consists. Prapatti does not depend on the stipulations of caste position. This knowledge of oneself before Narayana is salvific knowledge; it counts as jnana. Desika opens prapatti up to all in such a way that existential authenticity becomes the preeminent consideration, rather than the incidental realities of caste position. A caste-inclusive construal of prapatti infers certain claims attaching to the doctrines of God and grace. The gesture, pretext, or vyaja of which all jivas are capable—the Dvaya mantra for example—comments more on God than the jiva even though the gesture is the jiva’s own action. The gesture comments more on God than the jiva for the simple reason noted above, namely, that God in grace enables the jiva to perform the gesture (prevenient grace) and also acknowledges and receives even the most nominal and faint gestures. Grace abides at the beginning and end of this crucial upaya. Rahner’s theology of freedom, to which the theory of anonymous Christianity belongs conceptually, also depends on a theology of grace. By now the reader has also become familiar with Rahner’s strategy of thinking through freedom in categories from below (human action and achievement) as well as from above (enabled by prevenient grace). All human creatures are created with a transcendental subjectivity by which they “achieve” themselves in freedom before God and with others. The universality of this “election” requires that Rahner make some provision in his system for those who for whatever reason do not explicitly recognize the identity of the Word coming to them but who nonetheless unconsciously respond to it in the depths of their conscience and through the mediated categories of history and human community. Such persons arguably represent the majority of the human community, past and present, and partake in what Rahner provocatively labels the “liturgy of the world.”145 He chooses not to hang his theology of freedom on the hearer’s explicit faith in Jesus Christ, although all anonymous faith should strive toward explicit expression. He articulates instead a theology of divine communication (supernatural existential) unencumbered by the contingencies and vagaries of historical existence. To this end, his doctrine of God at once affirms the universal self-communication of God to all and produces in creaturely hearers a corresponding universal hope for all. Hope is the human correspondence to, or confirmation of, unlimited grace and election. In this way, anonymous Christianity and, more broadly, Rahner’s theology of freedom and transcendental subjectivity, fundamentally blur the lines of demarcation between anthropology and theology, between freedom and grace, and  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 162.   Rahner, “On the Theology of Worship,” Theological Investigations, vol. 19, trans. Edward Quinn (New York, 1983), p. 144. 144 145

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between human and divine action. It seems that Desika and Rahner, in the notions of caste inclusivity and anonymous Christianity, articulate analogous commitments to inclusivity which in turn are analogous in their reference to grace, even if their theological grammar, cultural context, and what Rahner calls “thrownness” are quite distinct. 4.3  Piety: The Sesa–Sesin Dynamic Applied Vertically The dependence of the jiva on Narayana which Vedanta Desika is keen to express can be appreciated fully only in reference to their specific type of relationship. Not unexpectedly, the relationship of the jiva to the Lord borrows from the South Indian cultural ethos for its ontological and doxological force, but with important distinctions and emendations. Desika is conscious of the sesa–Sesin relationship (sesasesibhava) precedent in Ramanuja’s Vedarthasamgraha and Gita Bhasya and works within this tradition. Culturally, for example, Ayyangar notes that “houses, fields, wives, sons and the like are sesa to a man and exist for the fulfillment of his purposes. But they can and do exist apart from him.”146 Desika translates this cultural notion into a theological one. Theologically, he will accept the former, namely, that the Lord’s prakaras (jivas), and all of reality, have natures or svarupas theocentrically oriented to exist for the Lord’s own purpose and fulfillment. They are meant for him, for his pleasure or sport (lila); they are at his disposal. Ayyangar rightly notes that his analogy breaks down, however, in the commonsense understanding that any given house, field or wife continues to exist independent of its master or Sesin, even if, as in South Indian culture, these were understood as his possessions. Not so for the jiva vis-à-vis Narayana. Grains of rice used in the context of ritual sacrifice serve as the Vedic paradigm from which the sesa–Sesin relationship derives its meaning. Grains of rice are considered sesa when used in a sacrifice because they serve the purpose of the sacrifice, which is Sesin in the relationship of the grains of rice to itself.147 The Sesin refers to the principal constituent while sesa designates that which is accessory to the principal, that which quite literally is for the principal. The sesa is ordered—sustained by, directed to, for the sake of—the Sesin, just as the body of the jiva is directed to the self and all selves are directed to the Lord or divine Self. The jiva, precisely as sesa, is an inseparable attribute (vis’eshana) of the Lord and cannot exist apart from its Sesin. This ontological relationship was clarified in the previous section of this chapter, and yet this present section will circle back briefly   M.R. Rajagopala Ayyangar, “Introduction,” in Desika, Srimad Rahasyatrayasara, p. xiii. 147   Francis X. Clooney, SJ, “In Joyful Recognition: A Hindu Formulation of the Relationship between God and the Community and its Significance for Christian Theology,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 25 (1988), p. 360 n. 3. 146

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toward this ontological remark in order to illumine the significant doxological implications Desika intends by it. The prime analogate for a sesa is the mythical serpent who, like a throne, is that on which the Lord sits and reclines or, like an umbrella, is that which shades the Lord when moving about. Desika indicates in the first chapter of RTS how the serpent serves as the exemplar of sesa, a focused model of alterity held up for the jiva to imitate in accordance with its own essential nature. Because the jiva has the nature of being sesa to the Lord, the jiva is therefore “entitled” to actualize it consciously, deliberately, and indeed blissfully: Sesha, the serpent, is ever bent on serving the Lord in all places, at all times, and in all situations and enjoys rendering service of all kinds in varied embodied forms. As he is thus fulfilling the purposes of the Lord and has no other aims in life, he is, indeed, a real and unconditional Sesa and the name Sesa fits him in every way. The Lord shines on the bed of Sesa as the supreme and ever-youthful Sovereign of Heaven. It is His gracious desire that all souls should enjoy his blissful state and attain their goal. The jiva is thus entitled, by his essential nature, to the service of his master as his birthright in as high a degree as the eternal Sūris themselves who have the endless bliss of serving Him.148

Desika then recalls the fundamental ignorance to which the same jiva from time immemorial has succumbed, a kind of Fall narrative indicating the basic anthropological problem the rest of RTS seeks to resolve by encouraging the selfconscious and deliberate acceptance by the jiva of her sesa nature as one who is sustained by the Sesin and as one whose essential nature points beyond herself to Iswara in perpetual acknowledgment, praise, and service. Desika follows Ramanuja’s example by insisting that the peculiar function of a sesa is to promote the glory of the Sesin.149 John Carman notes that Ramanuja made infrequent use of the sesasesibhava vocabulary, yet his theology, and Desika’s too, is predicated on this relationship.150 Below Ramanuja summarizes the distinction as it applies to Narayana and jivas. The real and universal definition of sesa and sesin (the subsidiary and the principle) must be enunciated as follows: That whose nature lies solely in being valued through a desire to contribute a special excellence to another entity is the sesa. The other is the sesin (i.e., that to which the subsidiary contributes special excellence). Out of a desire to produce the fruit of sacrifice, both the sacrifice and the volitional exertion for the sake of the sacrifice, come to be undertaken. The accessories of sacrifice, come to be attended to, out of a desire to accomplish the sacrifice. Similarly, in the case of servants their nature lies  Desika, RTS, ch. 1, p. 13.   Ibid., ch. 16, p. 160. 150  Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja, p. 147. 148 149

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only in being valued on account of the desire to contribute something special to the master. Similarly, all entities, sentient and non-sentient, eternal and noneternal, have as their sole nature the character of being valued through a desire to make some special contribution to the Supreme. Hence all entities are described as subsidiary to him. He is the principle entity, the Lord of all, the sesin.151

This passage is noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, it characterizes the clear subordination of the sesa to its principle Sesin as that of a slave—or, in Desika’s language, a dasa or servant—to a master. Ramanuja construes the relationship between a slave and a master to be reciprocally benevolent and that the slave understands, enjoys and prefers its identity consisting in one who serves the master, much the way Bhattar and Desika construe the gendered reciprocity between Sri and Narayana. Ramanuja also presumes that the master is worthy of such service and has the slave’s interests at heart. While such reciprocal benevolence between slave and master seems naively idealistic at the human level of cultural practice, Ramanuja’s intention in using the metaphor is quite clear. His intention has to do with roles, with knowing one’s own essential nature and in what one’s relationship to Narayana consists. The master–slave dynamic underscores how the essential nature of jivas consists in their being for God. As before, ontological principles imply a doxological vocation. Secondly, Ramanuja does not restrict the sesasesibhava to Narayana and sentient living beings but rather lifts it up to cosmic status, characterizing the sum total of reality. Both sentient and non-sentient realities—ranging from gods to blades of grass—are each defined by being sesa in particular ways. This implies that the cosmos as a whole acknowledges and praises God simply by existing as the Lord’s prakaras or modes. Ramanuja repeats the reciprocal benevolence of this relationship in his Gita Bhasya. As the principle constituent, the Sesin is not simply the one who receives and benefits from the action performed on its behalf; the Sesin also acts on behalf of sesas, elects to be compelled by their service, and is gracious to those who selfconsciously embrace their “subsidiary” and “accessory” identities. Moreover, the sesi may not be defined as what is correlative to an action in the interest of something else, for it is just this “being in the interest of” that needs to be defined. Furthermore, we see that the chief person [pradhana] is capable of  Ramanuja, Vedarthasamgraha, par. 182, p. 146. John Carman renders the final sentence of this passage in a way that more clearly conveys the service motif: “Likewise, the essential nature of all entities, eternal and non-eternal, intelligent and non-intelligent, is solely their value for the Lord by virtue of their intention to contribute some excellence to Him. Thus everything is in the state of being subservient [sesbhutam] to the Lord, and He is the master and owner [sesi] of everything, as is declared in texts like ‘He is the ruler [vasi] of all and the Lord [isanah] of all’, and ‘the master [pati] of the universe’ ” (Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja, p. 148). 151

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action aimed at his servant or dependent [bhrtya]. If it is objected that in keeping his servant fed the chief person acts in his own interest, we reply, No, for the servant also acts in his own interest when he keeps his master fed.152

Two issues require mention. First, any hint of an oppressive or destructive brand of subordination is done away with when the Sesin is said to be “in the interest of” the slave, which is to say gracious. Ramanuja affirms the Sesin as capable of being gracious and “in the interest of” without doing harm to Narayana’s transcendent qualities of perfection and self-sufficiency. Benevolence and graciousness indicate neither weakness nor incompleteness but proper attributes of the Sesin, who also supplies their exemplification.153 Secondly, Ramanuja and Desika are aware of criticisms within their tradition of the notions of dependence, subservience and service, as a dog’s life. The Laws of Manu represent one such criticism of the sesa-Sesin relationship: Let him carefully avoid all undertakings (the success of) which depends on others; but let him eagerly pursue that (the accomplishment of) which depends on himself [IV.159]. Everything that depends on others (gives) pain, everything that depends on oneself (gives) pleasure; know that this is the short definition of pleasure and pain [IV.160].154

Desika suggests that service is in no manner exploitative. It is not the case that a sesa finds herself depreciated because the stream of service flows one way, from her to the Lord. Desika, aware of such criticism, consistently argues against it, rehabilitating the notions of dependence, service and particularly the notion of being a slave (dasa) to the Lord, while chastening a crass autonomy or independence. What both Manu and Bhatta categorically dismiss, and what Desika means to rehabilitate, is the notion that dependence and service contribute profoundly to the actualization of oneself and the related experience of bliss, provided that dependence and service are properties of one’s nature rather  Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, cited in Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja, p. 149.   Carman describes the Lord’s “being in the interest of” in this way: “The Lord can protect and save finite selves, and it is His proper function to save them, whereas the finite self is incapable of saving himself by his own effort, nor is it his proper function to do so. … The SriVaisnava tradition, though it does not obligate God to save his dependents, has tended to assume that God is by nature such that He certainly will save those who surrender themselves to Him and that He will eventually save all his creatures, who are essentially his sesas. There are some statements in Ramanuja’s writing that also tend in this direction, but what is missing is the ‘of course’ ” (Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja, pp. 150–51). 154   The Laws of Manu, trans. Georg Bühler (Oxford, 1883; reprint Delhi, 1993), pp. 153–4. 152 153

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than aberrations thereof. The Sanskrit term dasa, according to Arvind Sharma, means “slave,” and contrasts with the term arya which means “a noble person” or, collectively, “the noble.”155 Desika means to recalibrate the discussion by redefining the term, turning it on its head and converting it from a kind of insult and recipe for suffering into a profound compliment and recipe for knowledge of self, of God, and of the enjoyment produced by the knowledge of both. The implicit question Desika puts to Manu and Bhatta is: in what does your nature consist? Desika’s answer is clear: one’s being consists in being sesa to the Lord, because of which depending on and rendering service to the Lord are in one’s best interest. The sesa’s service to the Sesin, rather than exploitative, empowers the sesa toward the goal most appropriate to the sort of being it is. Rather than humiliating or demeaning, service acknowledges her essential nature precisely as sesa, as one who simultaneously grasps the truth of her own essential nature, the Lord’s, and the connection between the two.156 To discourage the impression that the service motif is an unfair burden placed on the jiva, Desika quickly indicates that the entire structure of the cosmos (jagat) shares this nature in common. In Desika’s pious ontology, that which depends on the Lord and that which can be described as a mode or prakara of the Lord is coterminous with being sesa to the Lord. In short, ontology and doxology are integral or unified. The innumerable and manifold constituents of the entire cosmos are, in their many individualized ways, sesa to the Lord simply by existing. The cosmos points beyond itself to the one on whom it depends, the one who supports it. That all prakaras of the Lord are sesa is just as true for the gods as it is for a jiva or, for that matter, a blade of grass. All are sesa to the Lord. That these are His bodies and that He is their inner self or soul is evident from these words of Brahma to Rudra—“He is the inner self of you, of me and of all those who are called embodied beings. He sees all but cannot be apprehended by anyone, anywhere”. These are sesas who exist solely for the fulfillment of His purposes and He is their seshi. This truth was expressed by the all-knowing Rudra himself in Mantrarajapadastotra, where he says, “All beings are, by their nature, the servants of the Supreme Self. Therefore I am Thy servant and, with this knowledge, I bow to Thee”.157

155   Arvind Sharma, Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Delhi, 2000), p. xv. One must acknowledge the very real possibility that the term dasa—slave—cannot now be heard in the doxological manner Desika and others intended in their historical context. For some, this word cannot and should not be rehabilitated, in view of personal and collective histories of slavery, abuse, victimization and sin. 156  Desika, RTS, ch. 27, p. 368. Desika’s non-violent intent notwithstanding, the reader can be forgiven for harboring suspicion that it is an acharya and not, for example, a servant, arguing this position. 157   Ibid., ch. 6, p. 77.

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Desika underscores in that last sentence a particularly privileged way in which the jiva is sesa. The jiva is called in a particular way to manifest—perhaps incarnate— consciousness of being sesa to Narayana. While the jiva and the blade of grass share equally in their sesa identity, the jiva can do so consciously. [Iswara] stands in the relation of a Seshi (i.e.) as one for whom everything else exists. He stands in the relation of a Seshi to both sentient beings and non-sentient things in common. In relation to non-sentient things he is a Seshi, because they exist for his purposes. In relation to sentient beings or jivas endowed with intelligence, He is Seshi in the special sense of being Swami (i.e.) Master whom it is their duty to serve, and this is the manner in which we should understand while uttering the mantras. Our being sesa to the Lord we share in common with non-sentient things but we are sesas in the special sense also of being His servants (dāsāh).158

The job description of the jiva is to be for the Lord in the sense of rendering him service (kainkarya). Not all sesas are dasas or servants. The first term designates ontology; the second designates a decision in freedom to support the ontological fact. The blade of grass is sesa but not dasa. The jiva is both sesa and dasa, and because the latter, the jiva has the unique and—Desika suggests—privileged opportunity to embrace consciously the ontological facts of her existence. Among all beings and things, the jiva embodies the distinct role of being more than simply “subsidiary to” and “dependent on” and “supported by” Narayana. The jiva has the opportunity to grasp, actualize, thematize, ratify her status as sesa, to take refuge at the Lord’s feet with deliberate intent and knowledge of her helpless condition in correspondence with the Lord’s strength, fitness and eager desire to protect those who submit to him the burden of their protection. The dignity of the jiva consists in her being dasa. Intimately bound up with this opportunity, it should be noted, is yet another ontological fact bearing profound doxological repercussions. As the jiva progresses in knowledge of self and truth, she will come to understand a critical phrase Desika uses to describe the dasa—Aham na mama (“I am not mine”).159 One of the major truths Desika gleans from the Tiru mantra—“Om, reverence to Narayana”—is the radical alterity of the jiva who is not her own and, at some fundamental level, has nothing of her own to celebrate. She is not her own; she is the Lord’s. To think otherwise is to commit the error of conceit (ahamkara). Whatever attributes the jiva might be tempted to attribute to herself she should attribute to the Lord alone who is their origin. She is not seshi of her wealth; she is not sesin of her fame; she is not sesin of any characteristic or attribute which she might be tempted to think are “hers”—not even spiritual progress. No, the jiva is receptive. “All those things that are sesa to the jiva (like his body, his attributes, his wealth, etc.) are indeed 158

  Ibid., ch. 3, p. 29.   Ibid., ch. 27, pp. 364–5.

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those that were given to him for His own purposes by the Supreme Ruler, who is the seshi of all.”160 Just as none of the jiva’s features are his or her own, neither is the jiva able to act on his or her own independent of the Lord’s support. The absence of independence in the case of sentient being is the inability to act independently (of the Lord) (i.e.,) without His help. This is because, though in the state of bondage and in the state of release, he acts in accordance with his own mind, he can only act with such things as the senses given by Iswara and by His stimulation and with His help.161

In these ways, Desika offers the jiva no meaningful strategy by which to cling to thoughts of “I” and “mine.” The jiva is the one to whom things are “given”; the jiva is sustained and stimulated; the jiva is the object of the Lord’s help. The normative vision of the jiva is one for whom it is great pleasure and satisfaction to acknowledge God and all things as given by God. All that one is and has, one’s attributes, one’s actions: all have an irreducibly given quality to them the proper response to which is acknowledgment of the Lord. The meaning of Aham na mama (“I am not mine”) is now extended to include something like “what I have is not my own.” Once again, lest this responsibility on the part of the jiva appear too burdensome, demanding, suffering inducing or scarcely rewarding, Desika offers the reader intimate and familiar descriptions of how the dasa should meditate on and serve the Lord. Citing the Sandilya Smriti, Desika writes: One should render service to the Lord like a chaste matron to her beloved husband, like a mother to her suckling, like a disciple to his acharya and like a friend to his friend. The Lord of Lakshmi should always be looked upon as a master, as a friend, as an acharya, as a father and as a mother.162

The Lord is to be loved and served in these familiar ways. The real distinction between jivas and the Lord with respect to support, reception and so on, does not, in Desika’s view, sacrifice the Lord’s accessibility. The difference between Iswara and jivas is significant and unbridgeable but does not compromise their relation or intimacy. For ultimately, and this is where Desika is at odds with Manu and Bhatta, one is not to attach caveats, apologies or excuses for being a dasa. Accepting one’s constitution as dasa is a privilege and sign of spiritual maturity, since promotion of the Lord’s delight promotes one’s own.163 It contributes to one’s own pleasure and enjoyment, as Desika notes in this somewhat humorous analogy: “In performing [rights of service], [the prapanna] should resemble not those who drink milk for 160

  Ibid., ch. 27, p. 366.  Ibid. 162   Ibid., ch. 16, p. 156. 163   Ibid., ch. 16, p. 161. 161

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relief from excess of bile, but like those who have got well easily and quickly with the help of a medicine and who drink milk with pleasure (not as a cure for disease).”164 Service to the Lord is to be undertaken with neither ambivalence nor reticence but savor and delight. A recurrent theme in Desika’s writings on surrender is the awareness on the part of the one praising that he is unfit to do so, or unfit to do so with the adequacy commensurate with the object of praise. There is a gap, in other words, between the praiser’s capacity and desire to praise on the one hand, and the degree of the Lord’s worthiness to be praised on the other. No doubt this theme is bound up tightly with Desika’s humility with respect to the jiva being karpanya—in the state of helplessness—and a sinner. This pattern is familiar. Just as the jiva has no resources of his or her own (akinchanya) from which to draw in attempting to perform dharmas that contribute to moksa and should therefore simply surrender at the Lord’s feet, neither does the jiva possess sufficient intellect and words to praise the Lord in a manner corresponding to the Lord’s fitness for praise. Yet, praise the jiva must. Two verses from Desika’s Devanayaka Panchasat and two from the Saranagati Deepika describe the predisposition toward praise and the act of praise in a manner strongly analogous to Karl Barth’s exposition of the dominant role of divine agency in human speech about God. Just as the verbal act of prapatti (e.g. the Dvaya mantra) may be uttered half-heartedly or with nominal commitment (as Desika reports of himself in Saranagati Deepika), so too one’s condition of having no resources delimits the capacity to praise God on the basis of one’s own self-sustained (and therefore illusory) capacity. Lord of Ahindrapura! That great sage rich in penance—Vyasa—has sung (about Thee in the Sahasranama) that Thou art fond of praise [stava priyah] and that Thou art also the author of praise [stota]. Pray make these names of Thine meaningful (truthful) by bestowing on me words pregnant with meaning and significance—words which will not be found fault with by highly learned people.165

The Lord is “fond” of praise. Elsewhere in RTS, Desika describes the Lord’s response to praise as “delight” (bhoga). The Lord’s purushartha (goal or purpose) is to be glorified by his dependents. Correspondingly, it is the jiva’s nature as sesa to glorify God, and to be useful to him in this way.166 More striking perhaps is the subsequent claim that the Lord is the author of praise. Desika’s prayer of praise to the Lord includes a logically prior petition for the empowerment to praise truly, in a manner that corresponds to the Lord’s own reality. The author thus implicitly respects a strong view of divine transcendence, of the difference between the Lord and his accessories, a difference compounded by the helpless and resource-less 164

  Ibid., ch. 15, p. 154.  Desika, Devanayaka Panchasat, v. 7, p. 14. 166  Desika, RTS, ch. 3, p. 30. 165

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state into which jivas have fallen. Desika simultaneously praises the Lord and confesses incapacity to do so. Such praise is then predicated on the operation of grace, an operation Desika acknowledges in the preceding verse of Devanayaka Panchasat: Thy greatness and glory are so immense and infinite that even Adisesha, Garuda and others [Nityas or the eternally freed] are unable to know their limit or extent; even Bhaktiyoga-nishtas can see only a fraction thereof. I desire to praise such a limitless Thee. Make me realize that desire of mine, and thereby (thereafter) establish (the propriety of) Thy name of Dasa-satya [who is true to his servants].167

A verse form the Varadarajapancasat offers a striking analogy between the speech by which jivas praise the Lord and the semi-articulate sounds produced by a parrot. A eulogy composed by me, whose speech depends on your command, will bring pleasure to you, O giver of boons; there is no wonder in that; the sweet prattling of a parrot in a cage attracts the heart of its trainers.168

Karur Srinivasacarya’s commentary on this verse sharply renders the parrot analogy: A trainer places a parrot in a cage, nourishes and protects him, teaches him to speak a few words and obtains satisfaction from hearing the semi-articulate sounds of the bird. In the same way the Lord places the individual self of the poet in a material body, nourishes and protects him, teaches him speech and draws satisfaction from the feeble praise of his dependent.169

The following two verses from Saranagati Deepika echo the themes of the desire and (in)capacity to praise from the Devanayaka Panchasat, yet also introduce a new consideration pertaining to divine condescension and liberality toward the jiva and her effort to praise. Thou alone art the lamp of this world; Thy Consort (Lakshmi) is the lustre (of that lamp). By the two of you alone this long (originless and endless) darkness can be dispelled. This being i.e. myself is very desirous of praising Thee who art fit to be praised, who art extremely (superlatively) fond of being praised, and who art won over by the utterance of the word sarana, signifying that Thou art sought after as refuge.170  Desika, Devanayaka Panchasat, v. 6, p. 13.  Desika, Varadarajapancasat, v. 6, p. 6. 169   Karur Srinivasacarya, commentary in Desika, Varadarajapancasat, p. 6. 170  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 3, p. 49. 167 168

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It is no coincidence that the Saranagati Deepika first mentions the divine trait of dispelling the darkness of ignorance (Dipika means “lamp”) before indicating his desire to praise the Lord and the Lord’s being won over by praise. The Lord’s salvific action produces in sesas a desire to acknowledge and praise the Lord of such actions. In addition, Ayyangar’s commentary on this verse clarifies the force of the suggestion that the Lord is “fond” of being praised. Narayana appreciates praise in any language, grammar, diction or appropriateness. Liberality and condescension characterizes his acceptance of praise. This trait emboldens the jiva to praise all the more, removing any perceived reason to shrink from the privilege of doing so. The following verse reassures the reader that shortcomings in the act of praise provoke the Lord’s mercy and forbearance, which in turn contributes all the more to the determination of jivas to praise Narayana: (Lord) Praise, etc., indulged (by me) in this manner whether they are acceptable to Thee or get into faulty ways, (reckoned as faults) I become the object for the spread of affection or of forbearance of Thine, who art submissive to (won over by) a fraction of small favorable act.171

Much the way Barth suggested that human gratitude corresponds to divine grace, Desika too thinks that gratitude is the natural and appropriate response to the divine role in prapatti and the eagerness and liberality with which the Lord accepts efforts on the part of jivas to praise him. Both prapatti and praise are enabled by the prevenient grace of the Lord for whom it is good pleasure to shelter beings and receive their praise, however feeble their performance of prapatti with its angas may be and however inarticulate their words of praise may be. The jiva is to be grateful for being capable of rendering service to both the Lord and—as will be shown below in §4.4—his devotees. The jiva is to praise the Lord’s willingness to condescend and is grateful for the multiple ways in which she is the object of the Lord’s “innate compassion.”172 The jiva should be grateful in community for the help and benefit of acaryas whose teachings mediate—even incarnate—the teaching of the Lord himself and who help to expand one’s knowledge of just these truths.173 Indeed, gratitude to acaryas acknowledges the critical nature of their role in mediating true knowledge   Ibid., v. 58, p. 137. This verse perhaps elaborates the sentiment expressed in Gita 9:23–27, where Krishna assures Arjuna that he benevolently receives the worship devotees render to lesser and false gods, and that he looks fondly on devotions made by the pure of heart. Consider vv. 23 and 26: “Even those who are devoted to other divinities with faith in their hearts, worship Me alone, O Arjuna, though not as sanctioned by the Sastras” and “Whoever offers me with true devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or some water, I accept this offering made with devotion by him who is pure of heart” (Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, pp. 311–16; cf. Desika, RTS, ch. 15, p. 155). 172  Desika, RTS, ch. 15, p. 157. 173  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 2, p. 9; Desika, RTS, Intro., pp. 7, 11. 171

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of the self, the Lord, and the relation between the two. It has been shown that this relation includes dependence of the sesa on the Sesin while the notions of grace and gift characterize the svarupa of the Sesin. The suitable response on the part of the jiva who has become conscious of all this can only really be service and gratitude, directed to the Lord and his acaryas. For having driven out the darkness in our minds by lighting the bright lamp of knowledge therein, even the Lord, who is capable of working wonders, cannot find any means of adequate compensation. All that the disciple can do to the Acarya by way of praising him, ever be thinking of him and singing his effusive glory can only be a trifle when compared to the benefits obtained by him from the Acarya.174

The doxological theology of Vedanta Desika remains incomplete so long as our observation is limited to the vertical application of the sesasesibhava. The full force of what counts as divine praise comes to light in view of Desika’s extension of the sesa–Sesin relationship horizontally to include attitudes, behaviors and service of sesas toward each other in community. Inter-sesa responsibility, and its properly theological impetus and logic, are the subject of §4.4, along with a comparison of this theme with the unity of loves in Karl Rahner and Karl Barth. But presently we turn to another polyphonic conversation with Rahner, Barth and Desika, this one concerning piety specified as (i) alterity, (ii) praise and (iii) gratitude. 4.3.1  Polyphony: Piety is Alterity Rahner and Desika espouse anthropologies prizing what can be loosely labeled the de-centered self. The human person is one for whom authentic existence can be had only in connection with a fundamental shift from self-centeredness to othercenteredness or to what John Hick and David Tracy call “reality-centeredness,” even if we encounter distinct grammars for the exact content of “reality.”175 Persons are authentic and real when they subjectively choose alterity over egoism, when they dispose themselves toward the other rather than to themselves narrowly. This motif of alterity in the three takes on a comprehensive character that stretches up to become piety, precisely as a person’s confirmation of her nature and acknowledgment of God. In Rahner and Barth, her orientation to the other takes shape as the commandment to love God and neighbor; in Desika the human orientation to the other likewise takes the form of kainkarya to the Sesin and to fellow sesas.   Vedanta Desika, Adhikara Sangraha, v. 38, cited in Ramaswamy Ayyangar, comments on Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, pp. 13–14. 175   David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago, 1987), pp. 89–90. Like “piety” and “responsibility,” these are but “vague categories” by which to commence interreligious comparison. 174

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Rahner’s transcendental anthropology is predicated on the human subject’s freely chosen exitus from itself in love of the other as the means to come to oneself in authentic self-disposal.176 The transcendental turn to the subject does not simply exalt the self’s native transcendence; it de-centers the self and directs it to God and neighbor. In Chapter 2, I argued that Rahner patterns this exitus from the self after a certain Christological commitment, namely, the historical reality of the cross as the symbol of Jesus Christ’s self-emptying obedience to the Father rendering him verus homo, participation in which is the summit of Christian discipleship. Human self-realization in Rahner’s system has a kenotic nature in which, paradoxically, the self is gained precisely in self-abandonment.177 That is, the human subject achieves herself when she, with Christ, dies to herself (Mitsterben), which is the essence of persons’ fundamental option before God.178 Rahner depicts such abandonment in emphatically positive terms. It counts as spiritual maturity, “since one cannot save even one’s soul except by losing it, human persons bring their existence to maturity by developing it in service, in selfless sacrifice, and in the spending of oneself for others.”179 Whether she knows it consciously or unconsciously, God is the object of her abandonment, the One whose speech she responds to with a person-forming and God-affirming ‘yes’ within her categorical and historical selfenactment. The historical and categorical agents whom persons encounter in the world are critical in advancement toward spiritual maturity, since all categorical relations mediate the subject’s transcendental orientation to God and present subjects their concrete opportunity to utter an existential “Yes” or “No” to self, neighbor and God. If human persons are to find their own existence, they need those who are human with them genuinely to be other, to be different, i.e., precisely not clones. Human beings find their own perfection only in the otherness of those who are human with them, an otherness acknowledged, affirmed, and sheerly loved.180

If piety is here understood as the human hearer’s affirmation of divine selfcommunication, then piety always expresses itself in categorical actions and 176   “Human beings find their own perfection only in the otherness of those who are human with them, an otherness acknowledged, affirmed, and sheerly loved. This applies also to Christ, indeed especially so” (Karl Rahner, Spiritual Writings, ed. Philip Endean [Maryknoll, 2004], p. 117). 177   Brian Linnane, “Dying with Christ: Rahner’s Ethics of Discipleship,” The Journal of Religion, 81 (2001), p. 237. 178   Linnane, “Dying with Christ,” p. 235; “Ethics,” in Marmion and Hines (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, pp. 161–5; cf. Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God (Burlington, 2004), pp. 90–91. 179   Karl Rahner, Spiritual Writings, p. 119. 180   Ibid., p. 117.

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relations. Rahner takes this point quite seriously, assigning to “the everyday” the potential significance of “wordless prayer.”181 Everyday life, the historical progression of one’s life in community with others, can be lived in such caritas that it becomes nothing less than prayer. In a manner analogous to Vedanta Desika’s linguistic theory of coordinate predication (samanadhikaranya), God, for Rahner, is the ultimate referent of the other to whom persons are directed in their fundamental option. We can thus say that in Rahner, alterity is piety inasmuch as persons exit themselves toward the categories mediated by their historical lives, and in so doing find themselves precisely as persons directed toward others and therewith to the supreme Other. Desika offers a strikingly analogous construal of the vertical significance of everyday life. Like Rahner, Desika suggests that actions, behaviors and responsibilities in everyday life stretch up vertically to become service (kainkarya) to Narayana. Desika conveys this by advocating the traditional class (varna) and stage (asrama) duties. In RTS, Desika appears weary of those interlocutors who might suggest misleadingly that class and stage duties (varnashramadharma) become unnecessary to the jiva truly devoted to the Lord. What use would class and stage duties be to one who has grasped and manifested her own essential nature as a bhagavata or prapanna of the Lord? Did not Desika in his tireless exposition of the three mantras insist that jivas surrender all dharmas? Yes, he did, yet his polemic against the dharmas associated with caste and stage differs from the present concern. In his recommendation to surrender all dharmas, Desika focused on the autonomous self who mistakenly assumed too much about her own resources and capacity to achieve moksa. His concern there was to clarify an anthropology of absolute dependence and corresponding doctrine of grace. In other words, he offered a soteriological clarification, indicating that means other than prapatti are extremely difficult if moksa is one’s goal in performing them.182 Here, however, Desika’s concern is different. He advocates caste and stage duties not as upayas contributing to one’s release but as ways to serve Narayana. Their function is not to replace prapatti but to foster kainkarya. To those who, with minds cleansed by knowledge, perform the several karmas (rites, etc., laid down in the Karmakananda of the Vedas) and to those who  Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 46. This description of prayer does not cancel out a thicker, more thematic appreciation of prayer as direct discourse or communion with God. Rahner maintains both senses of prayer. The former sense of prayer (the everyday as “wordless prayer”) is significant in Rahner’s judgment for an historical context marked by secularization and the decline of ecclesial influence in the West; by calling attention to the sacramentality of persons’ daily lives, Rahner’s “wordless prayer” creates the intellectual space for them to respond to their general, transcendental experience of God if impediments block the experience mediated by Church and Tradition. Cf. Linnane, “Ethics,” p. 163. 182  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 15, pp. 35–6. 181

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meditate on their own atma with minds disciplined by yoga, and to those others who do all karmas in a spirit of dedication to Thee—to all of them Thou, pleased by their respective acts, conferest the desired fruits.183

The distinction is critical. In this way, Desika rehabilitates the varnashramadharma as ways to serve the Lord after having polemicized against them as upayas to moksa.184 Such action corresponds to the truth of jivas and to the moral order of the universe of things.185 In performing their caste and stage duties, jivas confirm and correspond to the law of dharma set in motion and maintained preeminently by Narayana. Jivas do what should be done when they maintain their dharma, an Indian notion which finds much in common with the Western Christian tradition of Natural Law. Nor should the maintenance of caste and stage duties be shunned for their possible involvement of other lesser gods. One should not shun a particular dharma requiring one to acknowledge a god or gods. Desika’s rationale can be traced broadly to the Gita but specifically to his ontology, which recognizes the many constituents of the world as the prakaras or modes of Narayana; they are his body. Acknowledgment of the gods need not be considered idolatry if one conceives of them as the Lord’s body and not exhaustive of the divine reality itself. They are not substitutes for the Lord but rather his body and therefore sesas.186 As the Lord’s body, and thus as his sesas or accessories, they pose no competition or threat to him. As coordinate predication (samanadhikaranya) suggested earlier, words that denote ordinary things also denote Narayana by virtue of their participation in him, and he in them.187 The critical ingredient of Desika’s recommendation to maintain caste and stage duties is simply that one maintain them with detachment and without any desire for their fruit (phala). Specifically, the motivation to perform them in hope of personal gain should be eclipsed by the motivation to perform them selflessly as service to Narayana. Thus, alterity—the self’s orientation to the other—governs the performance of the most fundamental and practical of responsibilities in life. Her performance of these dharmas should be seen not merely as a horizontal task but as one directed to the supreme Other in a self-less gesture of acknowledgment and praise. In Rahner’s language, Desika’s caste and stage duties can be said to “mediate” a response to God by providing jivas with the categorical opportunity for such responses, namely, action in the world confirming one’s nature, the order of the universe, and one’s responsibility to contribute to the Lord’s delight (bhoga). It is scarcely possible to overestimate the way in which persons are other-directed in the theology of Karl Barth. Barth espouses the human creature’s orientation to  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 24, p. 87.  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 19, p. 41. 185  Jhingran, Aspects of Hindu Morality, p. 169. 186  Desika, RTS, ch. 24, p. 279. 187   Ibid., ch. 6, p. 77. 183 184

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God in a manner reminiscent of Desika’s construal of persons as dasas or servants. For Desika, the jiva is exhalted—rather than taken advantage of—by being sesa and dasa to the Lord. To embrace one’s nature consciously as dasa in some sense fundamentally actualizes the self before God. Barth recommends a similar movement out of oneself toward the other, and insists that doing so expands rather than compromises persons. For Barth, revelation quite naturally occasions the first instance of any such outward movement in persons. Revelation comes to persons and creates the possibility for them to offer a response to the One by whom they are opened up. Their own authenticity as creatures of God is at stake in their response. As Barth says, “the omnipotently working Word of God does not permit the creature to be self-contained and apart, to be itself without positing itself. The being of man is as it is claimed and engaged by this Word.”188 Barth characterizes this divine call to creatures in this way: “Arise, and come to Me. Come to be with Me and therefore to be a man [Mensch], to be saved and kept by Me from chaos. Come to live with Me and by Me.”189 Barth emphasizes the critical role of human freedom here much the way Desika does. That is, God constitutes creatures to be in correspondence and calls them to make this their own personal task in free obedience. The task of covenant partnership for which they are commissioned must be carried out on their side in freedom and in Christ.190 The fact that they do not discover this task for themselves but are given it in revelation, does not remove their responsibility to affirm this task as their creaturely correspondence to the divine gift—in Christ—of covenant partnership. Their affirmation at once demonstrates their obedience to God and constitutes them qua creatures of God. Their response to God is precisely their creaturely self-enactment, their subjective confirmation of their objective participation in the humanity of Jesus Christ. In this way, human being as a being in encounter occasions piety, or, in Barth’s terms, has the character of responsibility before God. The subjective pole of the partnership is but an echo of the divine “Yes” as the creaturely activity secondary to the divine activity, yet truly an echo, that is, a person’s real act (wirklich Menschlichkeit) in correspondence to her divine ground.191

 Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 180.   Ibid., p. 180; cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 372. 190   With respect to the connection between creation and covenant in Barth’s theology, it is clear that for Barth covenant is the primary theme, and that creation is secondary theme or stage on which covenant gets played out. Since the Word of God speaks not to creation abstractly, but to covenant directly, it follows that creation is the external basis of the covenant, or covenant is the internal basis of creation. That is, because God intends to enter into covenant partnership, God thereby also intends creation. Cf. Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 181. 191  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 188. 188 189

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4.3.2  Polyphony: Piety is Praise As a vague category uniting the diverse expressions of Rahner, Barth and Desika, we can see how “piety” occupies pride of place in each of the three theological programs. For Rahner, piety arises in connection with the significance of transcendental freedom, wherein persons affirm or deny their own natures as created by God in freedom for a dialogical end. Persons “consecrate” themselves in and by their use of freedom.192 Just how this transcendental freedom actually becomes vertical and issues forth a kind of piety is a feature in Rahner’s theology of freedom that sometimes goes unobserved. Nevertheless, to be sure, the personal exercise of freedom simultaneously achieves two things. First, in its horizontal application, freedom forms persons existentially and is linked to personal “achievement.” Second, precisely within this horizontal application is contained the vertical significance of either an implicit or explicit personal response to God; in the case of the former, the implicit longs for fulfillment in the explicit. The one transcendental freedom with which persons form themselves—by virtue of the prevenient grace enabling their self-formation—is also their response to God in God’s self-communication. Their use of freedom for the purpose of their own self-formation and achievement affirms freedom’s divine ground.193 In his more spiritual writings, Rahner suggests that freedom is meant to issue in one’s own evacuation of the heart, in the sense of dying to oneself precisely to achieve oneself, and that God is to be found precisely in this evacuated heart.194 Freedom properly exercised thus reduces the egoism of the heart in order to make room for an awareness of the abiding and immanent presence of God. Such evacuation of the self, with its orientation to alterity, is their response to God—even if unthematic—for the simple reason that it is their use of freedom in such a way that it corresponds with their natures qua creatures which is nothing less than a tacit acknowledgment of the One who in grace created them in and with freedom and empowered them in grace to use it. In making this connection between history and transcendence, Rahner’s theology begins to resist the often unnuanced and pejorative caricatures of being “from above” or “from below” that often become attached to theological programs as an accusation. Here his theology resists such caricatures along with the pejorative judgment they frequently entail. More significant perhaps is the fact that Rahner’s notion of piety entailed in transcendental freedom begins to look strongly analogous to the verb Barth employs to denote the human affirmation of its divine ground, the human “Yes” to its own nature and its assent to “humanity.” That powerful verb is “correspond” (entsprechen). In Rahner’s language, it is enough to say simply that freedom mediates piety and, indeed, has a teleological orientation toward the vertical affirmation and awareness of God. One underestimates Rahner’s theology of freedom if this  Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 60.   Rahner, “On the Theology of Worship,” p. 147. 194   Karl Rahner, Spiritual Writings, p. 74. 192 193

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teleological–theological orientation of freedom goes unacknowledged, since the significance of the horizontal response lies in its potential to give rise to a thematic vertical response. In this way Rahner, like Barth, occasionally grants significant weight to prepositions, and, in this case, the preposition “for” in the phrase “freedom for God” bears especially heavy weight. Moreover, we begin to see that what Rahner means by gaining a “thematic” or “conscious” or “explicit” awareness of God amounts to nothing less than praise. The theologies of freedom of Rahner and Barth stand to benefit mutually from dialogue and learning from each other, despite their reliance on distinct methodological strategies, as §2.1 and §3.2 observed. Despite their methodological distinctions, Rahner and Barth advance highly compatible theologies of freedom, most notably in the analogy drawn here between Barth’s understanding of “correspondence” and Rahner’s understanding of freedom as creaturely selffidelity in approximation to the humanity of Jesus Christ. Rahner repeats the logic of freedom’s orientation toward finding a vertical expression in a related discussion concerning anonymous Christianity. This theory for which Rahner is well known was discussed above in Chapter 2. It is enough here to note how the theory contains a vertical logic wherein unthematic and unconscious exercises of freedom—without the subject’s explicit awareness of God much less the God of Jesus Christ—strive for a thematic consciousness of the object and ground of freedom: God revealed in Jesus Christ. Even though Rahner’s theory of anonymous Christianity appears at first glance to be generously inclusive toward well-intentioned non-Christian neighbors, it nonetheless also contains a logic entailing the human subject’s striving for conscious awareness of freedom’s object, namely, the God revealed and experienced in Jesus Christ, an awareness that qualifies as the vague category “piety.”195 The theory holds Christology at its center, not its periphery. Transcendental freedom in Rahner thus entails both horizontal and vertical significations, perhaps especially the latter, in view of the former’s orientation to it. Freedom in Rahner thus really has to do with piety, and the logic of anonymous Christianity is such that the human subject is meant to praise God. In both cases, the human subject experiences her freedom as selfvalidating precisely as it reaches thematic consciousness of its object and end, in praise. Finally, another Rahnerian theme should be mentioned in connection with his understanding of piety, and unlike the first it connotes a theological negation concomitant with a strong respect for apophatic theological discourse. That is, Rahner was highly concerned with the temptation in thought and speech to align God with the familiar categories of historical human experience. This, for him and others, risks idolatry, a grammatical solution to which Rahner offers in his

195   Paul Knitter designates this “type” of theology of religions the “fulfillment model” (also dubbed “inclusivism”), of which Rahner’s is an exemplar (Paul Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religion [Maryknoll, 2002]).

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theological pseudonym for God: “absolute holy mystery.”196 Referring to God as holy mystery removes the threat of idolatry yet does so, Rahner thinks, while preserving a sense of divine intimacy, friendship and redemptive action pro nobis. Rahner’s doctrine of God intends nothing of the impersonal and removed god of deism; quite the opposite. On this point, it is perhaps useful to note a striking passage from Foundations of Christian Faith wedding apophatic restraint to Christian commitment to a doctrine of God as free and forgiving source of grace. A person who opens himself to his transcendental experience of the holy mystery at all has the experience that this mystery is not only an infinitely distant horizon, a remote judgment which judges from a distance his consciousness and his world of persons and things, it is not only something mysterious which frightens him away and back into the narrow confines of his everyday world. He experiences rather that this holy mystery is also a hidden closeness, a forgiving intimacy, his real home, that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life. It is the person who in forlornness of his guilt still turns in trust to the mystery of his existence which is quietly present, and surrenders himself as one who even in his guilt no longer wants to understand himself in a self-centered and self-sufficient way, it is this person who experiences himself as one who does not forgive himself, but who is forgiven, and he experiences this forgiveness which he receives as the hidden, forgiving and liberating love of God himself, who forgives in that he gives himself, because only in this way can there really be forgiveness once and for all.197

Many examples of the vague term “piety” can be recalled from the theology of Karl Barth. First, and in analogy to certain themes in Rahner, we see that Barth forecasts a particular response on the part of persons who in freedom assent to being impacted by revelation, the in-breaking Word of God. Like Rahner, Barth erects no competition between the divine freedom and human freedom in the determination persons exercise over themselves. Indeed, “it is the grace of revelation that God exercises and maintains his freedom to free man.”198 From Barth’s perspective the human role in this process is simply to assent to God’s freedom to free persons. That is the sense in which the grace of God holds precedence over human freedom; not opposition, but precedence. In other words, freedom is ordered to grace, and the person who submits to this ordering principle finds her life “newly posited by God” because ordered to revelation as the key determinant of creaturely being.199 Ordering one’s freedom to grace—which precedes and grounds human action—enables one to correspond to the partnership for which one is created, the  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 44–71.   Ibid., p. 131. 198  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 365. 199  Ibid. 196 197

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partnership which is the point of both creation and revelation. Barth, like Rahner, embeds a theme of acknowledgment within persons’ use of their freedom. Also, like Rahner, Barth believes partnership with God requires a movement out of oneself, and that in this movement one finally becomes “man” (Mensch— “human”). The characterization of such persons as “human” points back to “real humanity” and “co-humanity” consisting in one’s being with and for others as the horizontal demand revelation places on those it confronts. That is, being with and for others constitutes the horizontal demand of covenant partnership with God.200 Also like Rahner, Barth recognizes such freely willed human conformity with the divine intention for humanity as the acknowledgment of God and of God’s creation. It is their human “Yes”—as a subsequent echo—to the divine “Yes” of creation and reconciliation which preceded and made possible their “Yes.”201 In other words, being human, enacting the normative “humanity” (Menschlichkeit) for which persons are created and reconciled to partnership with God, is the human correspondence to the divine actions of creation and reconciliation. Being human, in the normative sense of the term (“real” or Wirklich), constitutes the praise creatures owe their creator within their creaturely sphere. As for Rahner, freedom for Barth serves the function of praise. Human creatures praise their creator when they conform to the natures for which they were created and, in so doing, embrace the order governing their lives, making them “real.” What more directly serves the function of praise in Barth’s theology is the theme of acknowledgment in response to grace. The related activity of gratitude will be discussed in the following section: at present we concern ourselves with Barth’s theme of acknowledgment. This theme is captured best by observing Barth’s remarks on human love for God. When persons love God, they do so for one simple reason: that God loved them first. Because we are loved, Barth says, we are able to love. Thus the creative and reconciling love of God makes possible—even generates—the human response of love for God. Perceiving this order or causation is partially what Barth means by “acknowledgment.” More concretely, however, Barth’s understanding of justification controls his subsequent theme of acknowledgment. That is, with respect to justification, persons praise God when they acknowledge that, properly speaking, they are not the subjects of their own humanity.202 This remark that persons are not the subjects of their own humanity is not meant to harm a genuine understanding of free human subjectivity. We noted above the serious role Barth assigns freedom.203 But he does intend to acknowledge an order of redemption in which God saves and reconciles persons rather than persons saving and reconciling themselves: an order in which persons know themselves truly precisely as members of the body 200

  Ibid., pp. 179–80, 188.   Ibid., p. 188. 202  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, pp. 373–4; III/2, p. 189. 203  Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, p. 121. 201

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of Christ, as persons who participate in his humanity and as persons whom God sees in Christ and thus with mercy. The correlative disposition of persons who understand themselves in this way is the refusal of autonomy (Eigenständigkeit). In place of autonomy is the humble acknowledgment of what God in Christ has mercifully done.204 If Barth grounds human acknowledgment of God in the latter’s justifying actions pro nobis, then he surely finds in Vedanta Desika a compelling conversation partner. Desika expounds an ontology that gives rise to praise; in fact it can at times be difficult to distinguish between ontology and doxology, the two being so intimately connected in Desika’s writings. One can characterize his theology as intensely theocentric. One need not read far and wide in Desika’s corpus to encounter the oft mentioned theme of praise. First, a doxological motif is deeply rooted in the sesa–Sesin (sesasesibhava) ontological relationship to which Desika and Srivaisnavism subscribe. The vocabulary derives its force from the original ritual context in which it was used. The Sesin is the principal constituent while sesas designate those who are accessory or subsidiary to the principal, those whose natures are to be for the Sesin. Desika provides his readers with helpful images to capture the force of the preposition “for” in “being for the Sesin.” He recalls the primordial serpent on whom Narayana physically rests as a bed and which shields him as an umbrella when walking about. The key motif here is service of the kind wherein the one serving values him- or herself only in terms of the desire to contribute something of worth to the principal who, in this case, is Narayana with Sri. While Westerners are highly likely to view such graphic imagery of the Lord resting on a bed and being shielded by an umbrella as hyperbole, myth or rhetorical flourish, Desika ascribes a literal and truthful significance to them. In these images the reader encounters a textured image of the service motif implied in being a sesa to the Lord.205 A striking parallel can now be drawn between Desika’s sesa–Sesin ontology and Rahner’s and Barth’s theologies of freedom. Recall that Rahner and Barth both view freedom as compatible with divine determination of the human subject. Human persons utilize their freedom precisely when they are in conformity with the divine will. Far from freedom being reduced to independence or the capacity for autonomous decision making, it instead is the capacity given and sustained in grace to become the person God created, to ratify the creative intent in the Creator’s activity of creating. Freedom is the capacity, in Barth’s language, to become a real human in correspondence to the humanity of Jesus Christ and, in Rahner’s language, to become the hearer of the Word for which one is intended as a creature characterized by a supernatural existential and obediential potency. Freedom for both Rahner and Barth fulfills and completes persons as they assent to their natures as created by God. Their freedom grows in proportion to obedience, not in opposition to it. Desika echoes this logic.  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, pp. 186–92.  Desika, RTS, Intro., p. 13.

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Desika’s sesa–Sesin ontology issues forth an anthropology predicated on the jiva’s objective identity—which she is invited to manifest subjectively—as dependent on and supported by Narayana. In making this claim, Desika crosses swords with significant authorities in the Hindu traditions, notably Shankara, Bhatta and Manu, the latter of whom was quoted above to the effect that service of and dependence on another produces in the servant only pain. These authorities simply disagree with Desika’s definition of terms, since the latter seeks to rehabilitate the notion of service as action that contributes profoundly to one’s self-actualization, since service is in one’s nature rather than an aberration thereof. Independence, in this context, dangerously flirts with conceit (ahamkara) by failing to recognize one’s existential helplessness or karpanya. Lest this appear to be a non-egalitarian imposition placed on the jiva but not others, Desika is quick to affirm that the entire universe (jagat) shares this ontological identity of being sesa to the Sesin. What marks the jiva off as distinct and, in this measure, noble is her capacity to assent to her ontological nature and serve her Lord consciously in thought, speech and action. The jiva is thus sesa in a particularly privileged way, namely, in her being a servant (dasa) in addition to being sesa. Desika appears to be quite serious in his advocacy of alterity when he states that “I am not my own,” “I am not mine” (Aham na mama).206 Because jivas are ontologically determined to be dependent on and supported by the Lord—who is merciful—their life enactment will consist of the conscious service (kainkarya) of the Lord in conformity with their nature. 4.3.3  Polyphony: Piety is Gratitude Intimately bound up with our authors’ comments on praise are their attitudes toward gratitude, which is an inseparable attribute of the former. Just as Barth’s voice came to the fore and occupied the melody line with his description of real humanity (§3.3.3), he, along with Desika, occupies it once again with the theological significance he assigns to gratitude. As noted earlier in connection with Barth’s thick description of real humanity, it is not the case, here, that he and Desika privilege the creaturely role of gratitude while Rahner comparatively ignores it. All three theologians regard it as the authentic creaturely response to grace and to the saving action unique to God. Yet Barth emphasizes it throughout his loci in ways Rahner does not—perhaps in ways that the latter assumes or takes for granted—assigning it the significance of correspondence within the human creaturely sphere to the free and reconciling grace of God or, in Desika’s language, the proper response to the Lord’s eagerness and liberality in accepting the surrender of prapatti, however vigorous or faint the gesture (vyaja) of the prapanna. Gratitude as expressed by Barth and Desika constitutes the natural human action corresponding to the operation of grace, particularly grace as reconciliation (Barth) or release from samsara and union with the Lord (Desika) in view of the fact that these are purely gratuitous realities bestowed and not earned.  Desika, RTS, ch. 27, pp. 364–5.

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The voices of Barth and Desika now surface as the more dominant voices in this polyphonic score of music. Once more, the metaphor of theological polyphony allows the reader to hear our three theologians collectively and dynamically rather than competitively. The earlier discussion comparing the three voices on freedom was conciliatory in nature by suggesting that the freedom properly utilized consists in obedience to the will of God. Freedom and obedience thus grow in proportion to each other. This pattern does not obtain, however, in Barth and Desika’s construals of gratitude for God’s gracious activity pro nobis, both of which feature a human subject receiving a benefit she was incapable of acquiring on her own. The reason for this, for Barth, is simply that human freedom is finite freedom; persons cannot save themselves. Nor are they ever exempt from the self-contradiction of sinning against God and their own creatureliness. Depravity marks her as a self-contradictory creature of God. For Desika, similarly, akinchanya or “helplessness” or “having no resources” characterizes the impotent jiva before Narayana. For Karl Barth, gratitude is the natural expression of real humanity, that is, humanity enacting in its own sphere the covenant partnership for which it is determined.207 He cleverly utilizes the word “only” in four distinct but related ways to indicate that gratitude is the only appropriate human response to the grace of God. The first two follow from a doctrine of God, the second two from theological anthropology. First, “only God deserves to be praised.”208 Barth continues his previously discussed theme of acknowledgment of the only “Benefactor” by whom the benefit of reconciliation could be bestowed upon creatures “living on the edge of the abyss of destruction.”209 Since God alone reconciles humanity to himself, God alone deserves to be worshipped and praised, lest one risk idolatry. The second suggestion flows from the first: human awareness of such unique divine action gives rise to her conviction that “God can only be thanked by man.”210 That is, persons are to accept the gift, recognize and honor the Giver and take responsible action. Thankfulness is the only action of which they are capable that does justice to God, and therefore is all God requires of them. The final two ways concern anthropology. The third echoes Rahner’s sentiments concerning persons’ self-formation in their supernatural existential (übernatürlich Existential). Barth writes: “only as he thanks God does man fulfill his true being.”211 The Word of God tells persons the objective truth concerning their being: they are participants in Christ reconciled to God and made capable of covenant partnership. The subjective enactment of this objective reality is what concerns Barth in this third principle of gratitude. Persons’ subjective enactment  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 168.   Ibid., p. 169. 209  Ibid. 210  Ibid. 211   Ibid., p. 170. 207 208

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of their objective reality is both born by grace and the only action of which they are capable that counts as “the essential and characteristic action which constitutes [their] true being. By doing this and this alone [do they] distinguish [themselves] as being from non-being.”212 Barth borrows the phrase “to be or not to be” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and retools it as “to give thanks or not to give thanks,” for that is the decisive question concerning oneself. Thanking God is the action whereby persons grasp what God has done for them and participate in the order ordained by their Creator and Reconciler. Fourth, “to thank God in this way is incumbent on man alone,” by which Barth means the human portion of created life is made capable of subjectively responding to its divine ground, even if all other creatures are thankful without the subjective element simply because they exist as creatures of God.213 Here Barth seems, if only briefly, to parallel a sentiment Desika renders more explicit and dominant. For Desika, the sum total of the universe and all its constituents are sesa to the Lord—they are his accessories and exist for him. They implicitly praise Narayana with Sri simply by existing as his prakaras or modes. The particular glory of a human sesa consists in the possibility that she will serve the Lord with conscious intent as a dasa (servant/slave).214 Non-human sesa, being ineligible for this conscious activity, possesses for Desika a significance parallel to what Barth assigns non-human creaturely life. He too elevates the human creature above all others on account of her potential to subjectively enact gratitude (Dankbarkeit) as a covenant partner, even if nonetheless asserting the doxological significance of the created order as the theater of God’s glory. The reasons Barth produces for gratitude find a Srivaisnava complement in Desika who, like Barth, grounds thankfulness in the operation of grace. Desika regards gratitude as a prerequisite for any student desiring to learn from the sacred teachings of an acarya.215 Earlier in this chapter I detailed Desika’s understanding of gratitude and observed how jivas are graced in three distinct ways: soteriologically with respect to their protection and release, doxologically with respect to their activity of praise, and spiritually with respect to the benevolent influence and teachings of acarya. They are to be grateful for each form of grace. The consonance between Barth and Desika becomes evident as we discuss these three in order. First, the jiva who surrenders to Narayana with Sri, confident (viswasa) of the Lord’s protection, finds herself emboldened to praise Narayana with Sri for their mercy and the eagerness with which they seek to shelter beings caught in samsara. Like Barth’s grateful Mensch, Desika’s prapanna offers her thankfulness as one protected by the sole means of which protection is possible, the Lord. In her enactment of the third mantra—the Caramasloka—she surrenders the burden of her protection 212

  Ibid., p. 171.  Ibid. 214  Desika, Devanayaka Panchasat, v. 6, p. 13. 215  Desika, RST, ch. 30, p. 568. 213

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to the Lord who “alone” (ekam) is her refuge and source of freedom. Conscious of her condition of helplessness or having no resources (akinchanya) the jiva who surrenders to Narayana with Sri is fully cognizant of the supreme appropriateness of her surrender and of the divine condescension which both accepts the surrender and antecedently capacitates the one surrendering. Because she has been saved by the only One capable of securing her salvation, she offers—and can only offer—the gratitude commensurate with the uniqueness of that divine action. Second, the same jiva experiences a subsequent desire to praise her Lord even as her capacity to praise Narayana is lame, impotent and like the feeble sounds of a parrot.216 Yet here too she becomes the object of the Lord’s condescending grace, which pays more attention to the simple fact that she praises than to its coherence, eloquence or appropriateness. This too she experiences as liberating, and it engenders yet more gratitude and more desire to praise Narayana. Third—and this makes her awareness of the first two possible—the protected jiva is grateful for the benevolent teachings and influence of the acarya in community, whose teachings “light up the imperishable lamp of sacred tradition (sampradaya),” making possible true knowledge of God and self.217 Much like Barth, Desika holds no hope of the jiva contributing to the Lord or his acarya, since their gift to her infinitely outweighs her best attempt at recompense. She was and is dependent; she did and continues to surrender; she has been and will be protected; she should and can only respond with gratitude. Just as her essential nature or svarupa is to be dependent, to surrender, to be saved by the divine couple, so too gratitude is constitutive of her essential nature. As Barth might say, her gratitude is the real or true human action which closes the circle of relationship God began and sustained by the Word of God. 4.4  Responsibility: The Sesa–Sesin Relationship Applied Horizontally The theme of this section is the deliberately theological way in which Vedanta Desika expands the sesa–Sesin relationship (sesasesibhava) into a horizontal relationship characterizing the responsible conduct of jivas in community. This expansion represents the key way in which Desika weds piety and responsibility into a single—and yet multi-dimensional—response to God. The divine–human relationship serves as the model for inter-sesa responsibility. A recurring pattern has surfaced once again, that of participation. Theologically, the goddess Sri is internal to and imbedded within Narayana and, moreover, is understood to be referenced and included by the name Narayana. Ontologically, sentient beings (cit) and non-sentient beings (acit) are the body of God and are included in any reference to Narayana (ayana [resting place, refuge or abode] of   Karur Srinivasacarya, commentary in Desika, Varadarajapancasat, p. 6.  Desika, RTS, ch. 30, p. 566.

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naras [living beings]).218 Linguistically, words participate in much more than the things to which they refer by reaching past them to the less obvious but decisive referent—Narayana—who must be acknowledged systemically in order for anything or self to be designated properly by words. Vedanta Desika’s system privileges the motif of participation in these ways. Consider this comprehensive statement: the common thread uniting these forms of participation is Desika’s commitment to acknowledge the divine, to praise God as God is fit (stavyah) to be praised in thought, speech, and interpersonal relations.219 Vedanta Desika’s argument advancing inter-sesa responsibility advances this same theocentric logic. Like Karl Barth’s exposition of the second love commandment vis-à-vis the first, one detects in Desika’s construal of inter-sesa responsibility a distinctly doxological impetus and governance. His comments on inter-sesa responsibility do not represent a separate locus, nor a kind of interlude to his doxological theology, nor does he intend it as an appendix disconnected from his comments on God. The responsibility he enjoins between bhagavatas (those who love and submit to the Lord) is methodologically internal to his theology. In other words, responsibility has become a constituent of piety. Expansion  While he sprinkles references to inter-sesa responsibility throughout the 32 chapters of RTS and in other smaller texts, the sustained treatment of this theme comes in chapter 16 of RTS, entitled “The Chapter on the Farthest Extent of Our Ultimate Object in Life.” The first two paragraphs set the methodological tone of the entire chapter. These paragraphs establish clearly the logic of inter-sesa responsibility as the natural and necessary product of service to the Lord. In the world of everyday life (a king sometimes uses his dependents and ornaments to serve the purposes of those who are dear to him like his sons, wives, etc.) and in the Vedas, it is declared that all the gods make their offerings to the devotee. Even so, the Lord of Lakshmi uses sentient beings and nonsentient things to serve forever the purposes of those who have won his regard, because He is independent and is their master. So, for us whose minds have been disciplined by the teaching of such as the prince of sannyasins (viz. Ramanuja), the service of the Lord extends as far as the service of those who are dear to Him (Bhagavatas).220

The rationale given for why jivas should behave in this way is simply that such behavior promotes the Lord’s glory and enjoyment or delight (bhoga). The Lord finds inter-sesa responsibility pleasing; therefore inter-sesa responsibility is part of their essential nature.221 Just as in the previous section service to Narayana 218

  Ibid., ch. 3, p. 28.  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, p. 50. 220  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 160. 221   Ibid., ch. 16, pp. 161, 164. 219

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was declared to be an enjoyable and fulfilling role on account of the jiva’s nature as sesa and dasa, so too service to fellows is in one’s best interest as actions by which the jiva can “not only promote the Lord’s lila rasa and bhoga [divine play, enjoyment] but incidentally attain his own desired objects.”222 Yet, while Desika does not diminish the subjective importance of inter-sesa responsibility—it is fulfilling because it accords with their essential nature—he nonetheless assigns it a secondary (though no less real) importance. The properly theological effects of inter-sesa responsibility are, for Desika, of primary importance. In other words, he employs a logic “from above,” conceptualizing social responsibility as service to Narayana and the delight it gives Narayana. Desika marshals a long series of quotations from various theological traditions to support his theocentric rationale for the delight inter-sesa responsibility gives to the Lord. “Of all forms of homage, the homage paid to Vishnu is the best, but superior even to this, is the excellent homage or adoration offered to Vishnu’s devotees” [Padmottaram]. “I have great affection to those who are devoted to my devotees. Therefore should one render devout service to them” [Mahabharata]. “Devotion to me is of eight forms—(1) love to my devotees without any thought of their faults; (2) rejoicing at the adoration offered to me by another; (3) delight in listening to stories concerning me; (4) a change in the voice, in the eyes and in the body, while listening to such stories; (5) trying to offer adoration to me; (6) freedom from hypocrisy in one’s relations with me; (7) meditation of me at all times; (8) and not considering me as one from whom worldly benefits can be had—if bhakti (which is of these eight forms) is found in a mlechha [foreigner], he should be respected as the best of Brahmins endowed with jnāna and bhakti; he is a real sannyasi, he is a wise man and he may be taught (the scriptures) and from him one may learn the truth. He is fit to be adored even like myself” [Garuda Puranam]. “They are my bhaktas or devotees who do not show devotion to any other deity, who love those that are devoted to me and that have sought me as their upaya” [Mahabharata]. “I offer adoration also to those who offer adoration to that yajna varaha, who is of boundless splendour” [Garuda Puranam]. “By seeking the protection of those who seek the Lord as their refuge and by rendering service to him who is devoted to the devotee, that is (in turn) devoted to the devotees of the Lord—by doing so, men are released from all their sins” [Garuda Puranam].223

The third of these quotations—from Garuda Puranam—accentuates the responsibility to be devoted to the devotees of the Lord, on account of the simple statement that the Lord has great affection for such ones. The final quotation, from Garuda Puranam, reveals the motif that will occupy Desika for the rest of 222

  Ibid., ch. 16, p. 161.   Ibid., ch. 16, p. 162; cf. ch. 26, p. 417.

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chapter 16. The quotation directs the reader’s attention to a now familiar motif over which Desika has already spilled considerable ink in RTS, namely, the sesa– Sesin relationship. In the context of RTS chapter 16, however, the sesasesibhava is extrapolated from its vertical moorings and applied to sesas in community with each other. If in previous chapters the job of sesas was to submit the burden of their protection to the Lord and to serve the Lord, they now find their job descriptions expanded outward and horizontally to include other sesas who self-consciously have become dasas of the Lord. In addition to seeking the Lord’s protection, one is to seek the protection of fellow devotees. Yet Desika does not intend such remarks to be read as injunctions separate from, or in addition to, his previous injunctions mentioned above concerning surrender and service to Narayana. By such remarks he intends the reader to appreciate the holistic compass of surrender and service to Narayana. In other words, chapter 16 supplies the reader with a holistic vision of service that brings to the center communal actions that might otherwise be thought of as peripheral. He does not introduce a new topic; he rather fills out and lays bare the full extent of his previous topic, namely, how jivas should understand themselves comprehensively as dasas. Both poles of service—to Narayana and one’s fellows—comprise the one sesasesibhava. This is made clear in Desika’s defense of the claim that “of all forms of service which a sesa of the Lord may render, that rendered to Bhagavatas is the most important and is the most pleasing to the Lord, in the same way as the fondling of a prince is most pleasing to the king.”224 The statement is not hyperbole. Desika intends with maximal seriousness that the Lord counts service of his devotees as the highest form of service rendered to him. Why? Two reasons account for this. First, he is systematic with his ontology. Bhagavatas (and all beings and things) exist as the Lord’s body, as his modes or prakaras: they participate in him, he is their inner self or ruler. Therefore, horizontal service to them not only mediates, but is also indirectly, service to Narayana. This move shares much in common with coordinate predication, since it too depends on the Lord as the inner ruler of all things and beings. Second, and in support of the first reason, Desika takes seriously Gita 7:18, interpreting it to mean that the Lord regards bhagavatas intimately as his inner self. Verse 18 can be heard best in the context of its surrounding verses 16–19: [16] Four types of men of good deeds worship Me, O Arjuna, These are the distressed, the seekers after knowledge, the wealth-seekers, and the men of knowledge. [17] Of these, the man of knowledge, being ever with Me in Yoga and devoted to the One only, is the foremost; for I am very dear to the man of knowledge and he too is dear to me. [18] All these are indeed generous (udarah), but I deem the man of knowledge to be My very self; for he, integrated, is devoted to Me alone as the highest. 224

  Ibid., ch. 16, p. 162.

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[19] At the end of many births, the man of knowledge finds refuge in Me, realizing that “Vasudeva is all”. It is very hard to find such a great-souled person.225

In view of this text, Desika declares that “the Lord would be pleased at service rendered to the Bhagavata, as if it were service rendered (directly) to His own inner self and not as that done to His body.”226 Yet Desika both employs and surpasses this notion. While he does not eschew the sesa–Sesin ontology, he nonetheless subsumes it under an even stronger motif gleaned from Gita 7:18, according to which the Lord in a special way counts as his own inner self those bhagavatas who surrender in service. Desika’s remarks in view of Gita 7:18 are stronger and more suggestive than the ontological comment by itself because the former apply to a particular kind of thing or being (the jiva) and a particular kind of jiva (selfconscious dasas or servants). Furthermore, Desika’s reading of Gita 7:18 also ratifies the Srivaisnava claim that bhakti and prapatti are definite forms of knowledge (jnana): in his dependence and surrender the prapanna is the “man of knowledge” to whom verse 18 refers. The Lord regards such ones intimately as his inner self. Cognizant of this, sesas serving each other in community engage in action undivided from their serving the Lord directly in kainkarya. Serving the Lord’s devotees—his inner Self—counts as service to the Lord. Moreover, as suggested in the quotation above, service rendered to bhagavatas is the most important and most pleasing service one can render to the Lord.227 Quite clearly then, even as Desika extends the sesasesibhava horizontally, he still conceives of it predominately in terms of kainkarya to Narayana and not to an adjacent field of human moral discipline predicated on, for example, humanistic, social or dharmic concerns.228 Desika’s theocentric pattern supplies his injunction for inter-sesa responsibility with a distinct doxological impetus and rationale, one that Karl Barth might laud. Desika’s description seeks to avoid misunderstandings concerning the motives behind inter-sesa responsibility. He is concerned that readers not construe his injunction as a value in competition with kainkarya to the Lord: if sesas become sesins to each other as required, does this not harm the uniqueness of the Lord’s being Sesin of all things and beings? Desika thinks not. He offers an example from his own South Indian culture meant to diffuse any concern over competing truth claims: “It is not wrong for a wedded wife to honour her husband and to honour his servants, whether in his presence or in his absence.”229 Likewise, it is not wrong for bhagavatas of the Lord to honor each other as sesins. What makes this analogy with South Indian culture successful is the idea that a man’s servants   Gita 7:16–19, in Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, pp. 256–8.  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 163. Cf. D. Ramaswamy Ayyangar in Desika, Saranagati Deepika, p. 103. 227  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 162. 228   Ibid., ch. 27, p. 368. 229   Ibid., ch. 16, p. 164. 225 226

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were considered his sesas, that is, they are at his disposal and for him. They are bound to him. Likewise, bhagavatas are bound to the Lord and exist for his sport (lila) and pleasure (bhoga); they are the Lord’s ontologically as his body and, even more deeply, as his inner self, as indicated in Desika’s reading of Gita 7:18.230 To be in the interest of one’s fellows in the sense of serving them as sesas serve their Sesin presents no occasion for idolatry. Desika jettisons the suspicion that sesas cannot also become sesins in a community of reciprocal service. They represent no challenge to the one Lord; thinking otherwise would be to misconstrue their nature and foundation. They are his inner Self. “Since the relationship of sesa to Bhagavatas arises from no other cause than the knowledge of our being sesa only to the Lord and to no other, this service to bhagavatas is not improper, (because it does not arise from other causes like the desire for wealth or power).”231 As objects deserving service, the Lord and bhagavatas comprise no opposition, first because they are his body and second because he elects to regard as his inner self those who love and submit to him. Desika’s theological imagination never veers far from the motif of participation. In this instance, he brings both the “body” and “soul” metaphors to bear on his elucidation of responsibility. An additional reason why service to bhagavatas posits no competition between them and Narayana is the simple fact that bhagavatas manifest qualities that are attractive, edifying and in genuine conformity with the truth of reality, that is, reflective of the way jivas should think, live and behave.232 This reason is secondary to doxology but real nonetheless. Bhagavatas display admirable character and wisdom. These are traits to which fellow bhagavatas could form salutary attachments; these traits could further empower their shared purushartha or goal in life to love and serve the Lord and each other. Indeed, the title of RTS chapter 16 is not unimportant, “The Chapter on the Farthest Extent of Our Ultimate Object in Life,” for it indicates the extent to which jivas are enjoined to go in pursuit of their goal in life.233 Direct kainkarya to the Lord, then, is a kind of first step. The second step is to direct similar service to fellow devotees—and to their devotees—knowing that such action is “immensely pleasing to the Lord” as the fullest expression of kainkarya.234 There is a further suggestion Desika makes in two different texts, according to which bhagavatas are enjoined to become “chattel whom the Lord’s devotees may 230   As a spiritual ideal derived from a highly specific cultural ideal that in history has been acutely non-egalitarian and even a source of structural sin, it may be neither possible nor desirable to hear the service motif today without suspicion. 231  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 165. 232   Ibid., ch. 16, p. 164. 233   This chapter title likely echoes Katha Upanishad 3.11, which reads: “Higher than the immense self is the unmanifest; higher than the unmanifest is the person; higher than the person there’s nothing at all; That is the goal, that is the highest state” (Upanisads, p. 239). 234   Ayyangar, in Desika, Saranagati Deepika, p. 104.

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dispose of as they like,” even if this means being sold.235 Just as the prapanna is to have great trust in the Lord, so too is she to have great trust in those submitted to the Lord. Just as the prapanna places himself at the disposal of the Lord, so too he places himself at the disposal of his fellows. Lord! Ocean of excellent qualities! Those who have a correct knowledge of Thy gunas (qualities), disregarding even the state of being Thy servants fit to be disposed of by Thee as per Thy inclinations, desire the state of being slaves to Thy true devotees in such manner as to be bartered away by them by way of sale or purchase (as in a marketplace).236

The farthest extent of the ultimate object in life is far indeed. Sesas placing themselves at each other’s disposal in community stems from Desika’s reading of the Tiru mantra—“Om, reverence to Narayana”—as informing sesas that, in the spirit of the phrase Aham na mama (“I am not my own”), they do not belong to themselves.237 What the Lord as Sesin shares with sesas—who in community have themselves become sesins—is the fact that sesas are to serve both and place themselves at the disposal of both their ultimate Sesin and their proximate sesins. Restriction  Thus far we have seen the vertical service motif expanded horizontally. Yet a motif of restriction has surfaced. Bhagavatas are to be discriminative in the company they keep. Not all jivas are worthy of the kind of submission recommended in the above verse from the Saranagati Deepika. Bhagavatas are worthy because of their peculiar properties and qualities, just as the Lord himself, because of his peculiar properties and qualities, is one to whom jivas can surrender without expecting to suffer in the way Manu and Bhatta indicate (see §4.2 above). In the following verse Desika suggests that bhagavatas should regard sinners and those devoted to lesser gods as lethally poisonous. Bhagavan! The courageous ones who look upon the true men of God to whom Thou art the sole refuge, as their chiefs, who run away to a distance on seeing people who sin against Thee, as if they have seen serpents, and who treat with contempt Brahma, Indra and their like, and who are steadfast in faith and behaviour, they spend their time in such a manner that all their senses and faculties are put to the best use (and not dissipated or wasted).238

In RTS, Desika reiterates similar sentiments in a statement from the tradition meant to discourage remaining in the company of those holding heterodox  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 35, pp. 102–4; Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 164.  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 35, p. 103. 237  Desika, RTS, ch. 26, p. 365. 238  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 36, p. 104. 235 236

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religious convictions.239 The verse quoted above from Saranagati Deepika renders the instruction with considerably more verve, however. The image of fleeing sinners as if from a serpent is strong language, likening the company of sinners to the dangers associated with the company of presumably poisonous snakes. Thus, while the overall agenda of RTS chapter 16 expands the reader’s appreciation of the full horizontal scope of kainkarya to the Lord, there nonetheless appears to be a motif of restriction as well. This restriction might appear somewhat troubling to the reader. Why does Desika enjoin selfless devotion to bhagavatas yet in an exclusionary manner? To be sure, Ayyangar’s commentary on the same verse in the Saranagati Deepika insists that “a true Vaisnava cannot bring himself to hate anybody or anything, for everybody and everything is his Vibhuti (Property). It is indifference and not any positive dislike” that is recommended.240 That is, at any rate, the interpretation of one recent Srivaisnava commentator on Desika. Ayyangar’s amendment notwithstanding, what does the vague term ‘responsibility’ now mean for Vedanta Desika, who simultaneously enjoins service to fellow bhagavatas (i.e. those ostensibly like oneself) and excludes it from those who fail to meet this description? What is the status of “the other”? Does Vedanta Desika proffer a deficient or ambivalent notion of responsibility? Expansion  This question is not addressed directly in RTS chapter 16. Desika takes no pains to explain, much less rehabilitate, the exclusivity of service directed to bhagavatas and not others in that text. One direction in which speculation might turn is the simple testimony he finds in Gita 7:18 cited above, which characterizes Krishna (by the name Vasudeva) as having particular fondness for those who know him best, implying that Krishna is less fond—even not fond of—the ignorant, idolatrous or sinful. This is a plausible place to being to explain Desika’s restrictive remarks, particularly since it maintains his theocentric methodology. Taken out of context from other important passages in the Gita, the reader might find Gita 7:18 suspect for its apparent sanction of exclusivity. That interpretation, however, fails both the Gita and Desika. The overall text of the Gita and, to be sure, RTS and Desika’s other works, renders that interpretation untenable. We turn now to this additional testimony in Desika’s works, but do so without answering why these comments are absent from chapter 16, a highly significant chapter in RTS for the responsibility toward others implied in piety. The apparent exclusivity implied in Desika’s horizontal application of the sesasesibhava is best understood in view of more universalizing injunctions in RTS, Nyaasa Vimsati and Saranagati Deepika to be responsible toward all beings and things. We take these counter-examples in order. First, in RTS, Desika lists a series of traits or signs functioning as test cases for whether or not one has performed prapatti properly and is consequently in the proper state. These signs present themselves as symptoms of the valid performance  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, pp. 163–4.   Ayyangar, in Desika, Saranagati Deepika, p. 106.

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of prapatti. One such sign is that the prapanna appreciate the difference between her, as cit or conscious being and acit or things lacking consciousness. The specific shape this consciousness takes should “enable [her] to act beneficially toward all beings,” to act toward all beings in the same way (sarva bhuta anukula) without thought of their distinctions.241 The distinctions between beings are merely superficial and outward with no bearing on their essential nature, even if class distinctions in ordinary life can be respected.242 The prapanna should predicate her conduct toward them on their essential nature and not on accidental features. Desika’s sentiment here echoes the consistent recommendation in the Gita to see all beings with an equal eye and to behave with equanimity toward all.243 Second, the Nyaasa Vimsati assigns four traits to acarya that further specify the equanimity motif. One is ineligible to be considered an acarya without them. They are deerghabandhum or regard for the entire race as one’s near relations and the spiritual talent to appreciate the profound responsibility associated with seeing the entire world as the Lord’s body, dayalum or an active mercy and compassion toward all beings, skhalitye sasitharam or concern for others in the sense of correcting them when they swerve from the right path, and svaparahitaparam or being intent on the welfare of oneself and others.244 These four traits commend acaryas for their expanded vision of others with whom they have a felt sense of identification. Third, the Saranagati Deepika praises certain divine traits, ones that Nyaasa Vimsati just suggested should be refracted in all good acaryas. Those peculiarly divine—and perhaps imitable—traits are summarized well in this verse: Mukunda! Thou art the same unto everyone and Thou art imbued with Daya. In the midst of originless and adverse (unfavourable) karmas (deeds) of men, Thou dost pitch upon some pretext (some act or omission) as a favourable one and

 Desika, RTS, ch. 14, p. 142.   Ibid., ch. 14, p. 141. Two specific examples Desika cites to underscore the irrelevance of differences is ugliness of the body and low birth; such traits might obtain outwardly but have no bearing on the essential nature of the jiva, which is the same in all. 243   Gita 5:18; 5:25: 6:9; 6:29–30; 9:29; 10:20; 11:7; 11:55; 12:4; 12:13; 12:18; 18:20; cf. John N. Sheveland, “The Gita’s ‘Equal Eye’: Resourcing a Christian Concept of Neighbor Love without Limit,” Louvain Studies, 32 (2007): 408–21. 244  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 1, pp. 3–8. Ramaswamy Ayyangar’s interpretation of deerghabandhu is problematic here. Desika seems to import the term from Ramanuja’s commentary on Gita 1, which Desika in his own commentary interprets as “one of enduring relationship.” In the Gita’s context the term seems to suggest that Krishna, as deergabandhu, does not break off relationships with those who do wrong. So while Ayyangar’s interpretation is attractive in its universality, it may be the product of interpretation more than translation. 241 242

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hasten the process of those persons attaining Thee. This trait of Thine is said (by the great ones) to be Thy innate friendliness (to all beings).245

These traits—sameness and innate friendliness toward all—which in the first instance characterize Narayana’s comportment with the world of beings as his prakaras, should be extended to include a prescription for inter-sesa responsibility regardless of the perceived orthodoxy or heterodoxy of the other. While Desika himself does not make this explicit leap, the leap is nonetheless wholly consistent with his discussion of the ways sesas in community become sesins to each other. If sesas imitate their Lord in one respect, namely, becoming in effect sesins themselves by being served by their fellows, then there is no reason why the Lord’s sesins cannot also imitate or approximate divine features of equanimity and friendliness in their interaction with each other. If they are sesins in the limited sense of receiving each other’s kainkarya in community, then it makes sense for them to approximate the role of sesin as thoroughly as possible. As one is served in community, so should one serve others and manifest a corresponding responsibility unencumbered by the accidental and ultimately irrelevant qualities of one’s fellows, foreigners and of all beings. Desika’s writings contain the requisite resources to advance his cause in the direction of an imitatio Narayana even if he, for whatever reason, did not. 4.4.1  Polyphony: Participation Radicalizes Responsibility As we move into the final three polyphony sections of comparison, it makes sense to recall a strategy all three authors utilize in various ways and toward various ends. This is the theme of participation. The current section, however, narrows the focus to the participation theme as it directly impacts upon the authors’ comments on responsibility. In what ways do Rahner, Barth and Desika enlist their theologies of participation to buttress their concepts of responsibility? The theology of Karl Barth, for example, exudes participation, but the theme is absent in his comments on love of neighbor and co-humanity (Mitmenschlichkeit). The participation of humanity in Christ which Barth endorses time and again, applies, in his mind, to justification and related issues rather than to “ethics” or “love of neighbor” proper: indeed, he sees Matthew 25 as a curious passage requiring explanation to avoid misunderstanding. The voices of Rahner and Desika will therefore take the lead here, since their theologies of participation figure prominently in their defense of “responsibility.” Just as Barth earlier occupied the melody line while Rahner’s voice somewhat receded, now Barth recedes as the voices of Rahner and Desika move toward theological consonance, both of whom posit the coincidence of God and neighbor in the act of loving the neighbor. As observed above in §2.3, Rahner deploys the theme of participation to radicalize his theology of love of neighbor. Specifically, his reading of Matthean and  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 14, p. 70.

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Johannine literature impels him to lodge participation at the center of his argument concerning love of neighbor. He also deploys speculative thought concerning the categorical mediation of the transcendental. And he argues for the unity of the two loves by employing the same logic stipulated in the incarnation: that in the one person Jesus of Nazareth true God and true man cohere and are reconciled, that the two are no longer in opposition. This Christological principle of unity or coherence or reconciliation informs anthropology in a fundamental manner, so that persons who achieve themselves by grace in the self-abandoning risk of love (of God, of neighbor) achieve nothing short of “the single and all-encompassing actualization of existence.”246 The absolute and historically irreversible instance of this actualization is called Jesus Christ. It is in history and categories that persons actualize their existence, not despite them. Rahner takes with utter seriousness the teaching of Matthew 25— a parable of judgment—wherein the evangelist portrays Jesus as identifying himself with those in need, such that actions done to them are likewise done to him, and what one leaves undone to them is likewise left undone to him. Rahner’s elaboration of the love commandments takes this passage with utter seriousness. It is neither rhetorical, hyperbolic nor suggestive of an imaginative “as if.” Instead, the passage posits a real and self-willed identification of the Son of Man and those in need.247 As one commentator helpfully suggests, the significance of Matthew 25 for Rahner consists in its perichoretic commingling of theology and anthropology, of piety and responsibility, of the Son of Man with those in need.248 The second biblical source informing Rahner’s theology of participation is the First Letter of John, from which Rahner gleans three principles. First, the letter insists that those who see and love their neighbors see and love God (1 Jn 4:20). The reverse is also true: one cannot love the invisible God if one fails to love the visible neighbor. Second, the letter suggests that God “abides” in those who love, so that one’s love of neighbor within the Christian community of love and fellowship is love of God directly, who is in the neighbor. Third—and this is where he is at clear odds with Barth—Rahner’s reading of the letter suggests that persons are first loved by God not so that they may love God in return, though they may do this, but that they may love one another. God’s love for all grounds and empowers persons to love each other as the precedent to their subsequent loving. Karl Barth’s assertion that the significance of the neighbor consists in her being an opportunity for others to praise God finds no ally in Rahner’s construal of love of neighbor: indeed Rahner explicitly rebuffs the suggestion.  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 309.   Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York, 1982), p. 234; Everyday Faith, trans. W.J. O’Hara (New York, 1968), p. 114. 248   Declan Marmion, “Rahner and his Critics: Revisiting the Dialogue,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 68 (2003), p. 196. 246 247

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Love for God’s sake—to be precise—does not mean love for God alone in the “material” of our neighbor merely seen as an opportunity for pure love of God, but really means the love of our neighbor himself, a love empowered by God to attain its ultimate radicality and a love which really terminates and rests in our neighbor.249

Vedanta Desika posits an entire ontology of participation that grounds his system and, to a large extent, spells out much of the subsequent theological detail he discusses in RTS. Three particular manifestations of the theme of participation were discussed above. First, Desika affirmed the participation of Sri in Narayana so that the two constitute the one inseparable divine reality. Second, with respect to ontology, both sentient (cit) and non-sentient (acit) beings are the body or modes (prakaras) of Narayana, a proper name for God meaning “resting place” of living beings or naras. Third, according to coordinate predication, words referring to things and beings in the world refer to much more than those things and beings themselves: they denote Narayana, whose internal immanence to all of reality must be acknowledged in order for things and beings to be designated properly by words. Desika’s elaboration of “responsibility” or the service of kainkarya among devotees follows his well established logic of participation, bearing a family resemblance to Rahner’s. He makes explicit use of the theme in RTS chapter 16 to authorize service (kainkarya) to one’s fellow devotees (bhagavatas). The argument is both similar to and different from Rahner’s and in that measure both similar too and different from Barth’s. First we consider how it is similar to Rahner’s appreciation of love of neighbor, in particular the role of Matthew 25. The central reason Desika sees no competition between sesas serving the Lord and each other has to do with the seriousness with which he appreciates the ontological participation just mentioned. Rather than erecting a scenario wherein sesas find themselves torn between two masters or sources of allegiance, Desika’s theology of Narayana features the Lord himself requiring his devotees—who are most dear to him—to be devoted in service to each other. They are to envision themselves as sesas once more, this time to their fellows who because of their own devotion to Narayana have become sesins. Such service to one’s fellows in community, one’s sesins, delights the Lord, even if it reaches him mediately through his servants who, ontologically speaking, are his body. The ontology of participation accounts at least in part for why Desika perceives no conflict in having the Lord as one’s Sesin and fellows in community one’s sesins. The latter are, afterall, the former’s body. Serving them is not different from serving him. In addition, Desika seems to be more comfortable than Karl Barth in ascribing to God pleasure at the sight of his devotees surrendering to and serving each other in community. He attaches a concept of dignity to sesas precisely because they 249   Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” p. 244.

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confirm their natures as dasas and do what ought to be done: they surrender to and serve both Narayana and their fellows in community. A direct consequence of such dignity attaching to sesas is the fact that Narayana receives service done unto them as service done directly to himself, due precisely to his esteem for them. Thus, while Desika always prioritizes the doxological significance of inter-sesa responsibility, he nonetheless attaches to dasas a dignity and corresponding fitness for service of which Barth, for example, would be far more reticent. A more directly ontological reason accounts for why sesas themselves must be served. They are, as modes or prakaras of the Lord, literally non-different from the Lord himself. Gita 7:16–19, cited above, underscores from a theological perspective how the Lord appreciates bhagavatas as his very self. For they are the ones who see the Lord in all things, including, Desika almost assuredly would say, one’s fellows. Desika and Rahner both ground responsibility in striking theologies of participation. Doing so lends distinctly theological and doxological qualities to the horizontal dimension, since both theologians envision their God united to the neighbor in need (Rahner) or to the fellow devotee surrendered in service of others (Desika). In this way, horizontal actions of responsibility simultaneously possess an abiding vertical dimension confirming one’s love of God, striking an integral unity between the two love commands (Rahner) or a holistic compass of the sesa– Sesin relationship (Desika). All this follows as the consequence of a theology of God featuring a self-willed character trait to be united to persons and to have them participate in his own reality. 4.4.2  Polyphony: Love is Ordered from Above The preceding polyphonic comparison flows directly into the present one, which observes how the love of God and neighbor articulated by all three theologians accentuates, or gives precedence to, the vertical dimension, albeit within the environs of the authors’ distinct grammars, priorities, and emphases. Perhaps most surprising to readers will be the assertion defended above in §2.3 concerning Rahner’s intention to prioritize the love of God even while elevating the nobility of neighbor love as an inchoate affirmation of God. It is both safe and necessary to say that love is ordered from above in Rahner, Barth and Desika. First, in Rahner we noted that his elevation of love of neighbor to an unthematic or unconscious affirmative response to God’s self-communication and offer of dialogue entails a teleological ordering principle in which all unthematic responses can and should ultimately give rise to the conscious and deliberate love of God in Jesus Christ. His commitment to a global understanding of human existence and to what he calls “antecedent grace” operative in the lives of all persons is expressed perhaps nowhere more eloquently than in one of his postwar sermons in Munich: “the flame of the impulse to forget oneself, to devote oneself to the higher, burns always somewhere on the altar of the heart of every

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human being.”250 His commitment to a supernatural existential and anonymous Christianity notwithstanding, Rahner’s supernatural existential finally intends a personal commitment: love of the God made known in Jesus Christ and, indeed, love of the person of Jesus Christ, the person in history who can be loved with the absoluteness with which all persons desire to love and be loved.251 Rahner insists that without persons’ conscious love for the God who antecedently made their love possible, their love of neighbor can never achieve its true height and depth.252 It never becomes “absolute,” nor does the lover fully achieve herself.253 For this reason all reductive caricatures of Rahner’s theology as consisting of mere anthropology or of his method being merely from below—where it remains— distort both the transcendental method and its theological content. The teleological ordering principle controlling love of neighbor resonates with Barth and Desika more than one might initially think. The critical roles occupied in his system by history, categories, mediation, freedom and anonymity in no way preclude an endorsement of a vertically ordered concept of love. Karl Barth takes pains to eliminate any such misconception in his construal of the love commands. Whereas Rahner happily invests the neighbor with dignity such that she herself becomes a valid object of personal love—and therewith of persons’ self-abandonment or dispossession—Barth painstakingly denies her any such dignity apart from the dignity associated with representing in her person the concrete opportunity for others to praise God.254 God alone remains the focus in love of neighbor; humanisms and the language of dignity and rights would risk what Barth refers to as “abstract” conceptions of human personhood. Indeed, if one were pressed to locate Barth’s construal of love of neighbor on a theological map, its home would reside in doxology rather than ethics or moral theology or even anthropology. He conceives love of neighbor in the same way he conceives love of God, namely, as persons’ concrete response to and acknowledgment of God’s prior justifying and reconciling love for them. A passage cited earlier succinctly captures his point: The whole meaning and content of the command to love our neighbor is that as God’s children, and therefore as those who love him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, we are summoned to be claimed for the praise of God as the activity and work of thankfulness [Dankbarkeit] which, by reason of our being as those who love, we cannot avoid. The second commandment has no other

 Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 31.  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 295. 252   “Antecedently” in the sense of the unprovoked and gratuitous operation of the Holy Spirit pouring the love of God into the hearts of all (Rahner, On the Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 32). 253  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 296. 254  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 401. 250 251

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meaning and content apart from and in addition to: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name.”255

This remark clearly subsumes love of neighbor under the rubrics of gratitude and doxology by locating its motivation not in the neighbor’s dignity or rights but in the need for the children of God to acknowledge and thank God for his gratuitous ways of love, partnership and reconciliation. This accounts, afterall, for why he treats the unity of love commands in his second volume of the Word of God (Church Dogmatics I/2) and not in the volume on theological anthropology (III/2) or any of the several sections on ethics in Church Dogmatics II/2 and III/3. Theological reflection is theological only to the extent that it is controlled and governed by the subject matter of the in-breaking Word of God which informs persons what God has done for them in Jesus Christ and, implicitly, of their inhumanity exposed by the revealed verus homo in Jesus Christ.256 Legitimate human responses to the Word of God can only be praise, acknowledgment or more generally, love. These responses correspond in the human sphere to what the Word of God reveals of God’s determining action. “The commandment of love to the neighbor is enclosed by that of love to God. It is contained in it. To that extent it is inferior to it. But for that very reason its shares in its absoluteness.”257 This remark is the shorthand reason why love, for Barth, is unmistakably ordered from above. The second love command is enclosed in the first and is absolute because of its enclosure within the first. His very construal of the neighbor’s identity is telling. Rather than signifying Everyman, the neighbor for Barth is one’s benefactor in that she presents herself as the bearer of divine mercy and compassion. Note that the parable of the Good Samaritan controls Barth’s comments here. He interprets the wounded man laying half dead in the ditch along the side of the road as a parable of the human condition: all are dependent on God for mercy, and all must realize that they stand in need of being found and treated with gratuitous compassion. Rather than interpreting the parable, as many have, as a prophetic challenge to embrace a concept of neighbor without limit, Barth instead interprets it from the perspective of the ditch wherein human persons experience a neediness they cannot themselves satisfy. They are dependent and receptive. The Samaritan neighbor in all of this mediates divine compassion and functions as a window onto God, sacramentally mediating in her person the compassion of God in Christ. She confronts the wounded man in Christ’s stead. To be sure, lest one be tempted to esteem the neighbor for her magnanimity and invest her with dignity, Barth quickly reminds his readers that the neighbor also functions as a mirror onto oneself reflecting in her person the same sin and self-contradiction which infect one’s own life. To see her is to see “a 255

  Ibid. (Ger., p. 442).  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 275; I/2, pp. 403–4. 257  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 411. 256

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suffering fellow creature in need of help,” just as oneself.258 Barth’s interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan posits a “known solidarity of need” both from the perspective of the ditch and of the neighbor herself. His exegesis, and the Word of God generally, exposes humanity’s sin and need for mercy on the one hand, and on the other promises compassion by way of the neighbor standing in Christ’s stead. All of this Barth intends as a narrative strategy to motivate persons anew to the love and praise of God. While he indicates that the church fails to be church when it refuses the neighborly exercise of compassion, nowhere in his exegesis does he prioritize an ethic of unlimited personal responsibility toward others such that a concept of neighbor without limit is the parable’s point. At strategic places in the narrative, his exegesis directs the reader’s attention back onto God who in Jesus Christ responds to one’s neediness and who, because of such response, should be acknowledged, praised and loved by those for whom he acts as benefactor. God’s action of reconciliation has its human correspondence in just these activities, which alone respond appropriately to being lifted out of need and shown compassion. Barth’s construal of neighbor love is thus unapologetically from above in its redirection of attention back onto the doctrines of grace and justification and onto their corresponding human activities of gratitude (Dankbarkeit) and love, which together for Barth makes truly theological discourse an “address of adoration.”259 While all three theologians order the unity of loves from above, Barth and Desika achieve this with certain emphases Rahner elected not to appropriate. Interestingly, this lack will be Rahner’s strength below in §4.4.3. Barth and Desika therefore have assumed the lead melody line in this comparison, even though Rahner too, in his own way, renders love of God indispensable to neighbor love and emphatically resists reductive caricatures from below. As noted earlier in §4.3.1, Desika and Rahner offer analogous construals of participation to radicalize their concepts of love of neighbor—Rahner with his reading of Matthew 25 and Desika with his ontology concerning sesas being prakaras or modes of the Lord who quite literally compose his body. Both posited the coincidence of God and neighbor in the love of neighbor. However, in this current section on the ordering of love from above, Desika’s position is more akin to Barth’s than Rahner’s. More like Barth, and less like Rahner, Desika endorses kainkarya or service to and among devotees on account of the doxological significance of this activity and not on account of devotees’ personal rights which others are obliged to secure, rendering the former worthy of love. For Desika, inter-sesa responsibility or kainkarya finds a proper home in the locus of praise or doxology, not in ethics, and certainly not in a non-theological ethics detached from a theology of Narayana. Like Barth’s theology of the Word of God, Desika derives his theological claims from the theology of Narayana. In this way, theology, for Desika, remains truly theological. This obtains even with 258

  Ibid., p. 428.   Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 141.

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the ostensibly anthropological and soteriological portions of RTS, most notably his exposition of the three secret mysteries or rahasyas. The immediate concern in this chapter, however, was to demonstrate how the service expected of bhagavatas is methodologically internal to his theology per se. The primary impetus for bhagavatas serving their fellows is theologically derived. Desika recommends serving them because they are dear to Narayana. Those who surrender to and love the Lord are dear to the Lord because they have done what ought to be done; they have subjectively confirmed their objective identity as being “for the Lord”; they have become dasas. Therefore, serving them evokes delight (bhoga) in the Lord. Just as their essential nature entails serving the Lord, it likewise entails serving their fellows, on account of the holistic compass of being dasa. Moreover, service fulfills the one serving precisely as activity confirming one’s essential nature. One might think of Desika’s logic here in light of Rahner’s remarks on persons achieving themselves precisely as they exit themselves in selfabandonment on behalf of another. For Desika, it makes eminent practical sense to serve one’s fellows since it confirms and expresses the objective truth of one’s own being. That practical sense notwithstanding, the properly doxological intentions surrounding inter-sesa responsibility are, for Desika, of primary importance. The doxological intentions are of primary importance because, with respect to method, inter-sesa responsibility is internal to the vertical service of Narayana. Just as Barth characterized the second love command as a smaller circle enclosed by a larger one, Desika means to speak of just one service, a holistic service encompassing first Narayana and secondly those with whom Narayana is particularly pleased, bhagavatas surrendered to him whom he regards as his very self.260 The sesa–Sesin relationship in its purest form intends to express, the state of serving and existing for the principal Sesin—whether the Lord with Sri or fellow sesas in community—gives rise not to exploitation or debasement but to personal achievement, presence to the Lord, and release. Desika’s phrase Aham na mama – “I am not my own” – is not meant to be experienced as personal impoverishment. To be sesa and dasa—to be subsidiary to and servant of the principal—is good and pleasing because it is good and pleasing to the Lord.261 It conforms to the natures of both the jiva and Narayana. As sesa, one is to have confidence, trust, or faith in the Sesin when placing oneself at the latter’s disposal since, as the final words of the Charamasloka indicate, there is no cause to grieve when surrendered at the feet of the Lord.262 One becomes attractive and in genuine conformity with the truth of reality by self-consciously actualizing one’s subsidiarity and becoming a dasa or servant to the Lord in both the vertical and horizontal compass of that activity. Barth’s understanding of humanity as dependent, receptive and grateful is thus thoroughly analogous to Desika’s understanding of jivas as subsidiary, receptive  Cf. Gita 7:18; Ramanuja, Gita Bhasya, pp. 256–8.  Desika, RTS, ch. 16, p. 164. 262  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 35, pp. 102–4. 260 261

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and service-oriented. The structural parallels between the two are indubitably present and illumined in their respective manners of ordering love from above, even if their grammars and theological nuances are distinct. 4.4.3  Polyphony: Responsibility In and Out of Community The preceding two polyphony sections have set the stage for this final comparison. This section asks whether and how the theologies of Rahner, Barth and Desika can be marshaled to advocate a theologically buttressed concept of responsibility; one that is universal in scope and which today is often brought under the banner of human rights. More pointedly, can our theologians educate us toward what Nicholas Lash has called a “‘global imagination’, a sense of solidarity with the whole of humankind: past, present, and future”?263 To what degree do these theologies of responsibility give rise to an unencumbered or limitless concept of neighbor, the one to whom and with whom persons are to be responsible. In other words, exactly who is the object of love of neighbor (Rahner, Barth) and the service of kainkarya (Desika), and what resources do our theologians provide their readers to envision responsibility not merely within one’s community but outside it as well?264 The ultimate object of all love of neighbor is God, our authors insist, but on the horizontal level, who counts as my neighbor, and why? At this point we can consider a question that has percolated throughout earlier pages: how should love or service be concretely practiced or enacted within one’s community—religious or otherwise—and indeed the world? Further, how can the theologies of Rahner, Barth and Desika provide the resources to recommend such responsibility—critical in today’s world—even if they, for whatever reason, did not punctuate it as adamantly as they might have? We put these questions to our authors now in reverse order, beginning with Desika. This section began with a discussion of the holistic manner in which Desika recommends the service of kainkarya—to both the Lord and those surrendered to him—and this discussion raised the question of who, exactly, is eligible for service on the horizontal level. The thoroughly doxological manner in which Desika explains inter-sesa responsibility—i.e. as action pleasing to the Lord—seems to risk the impression that one’s fellows in community function as means to ends of which they are not a part. Does Desika recommend the same instrumentalization   Lash, Holiness, Speech, and Silence, p. 52. For more on the impact of globalization on the theological imagination, see Roger Haight, “Outline for an Orthodox Pluralist Christology, The Future of Christology (New York, 2005), pp. 149–50. 264   I do not pose these questions as “abstract” in Karl Barth’s sense of the term, that is, as derived artificially from subject matter external to the theologies of our authors. It is precisely our authors’ theological resources and traditions that allows me even to pose the global or universal question. In posing the question, and proffering some answers from these theologians, I simply intend to appropriate their theological programs constructively in ways that are faithful to their programs even if I underscore new emphases. 263

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of the neighbor that Rahner sought to avoid, namely, serving one’s fellows in order to serve the Lord in the “material” of our neighbor? As noted earlier, Desika does not think all jivas are worthy of service. Bhagavatas—those surrendered to the Lord in love and service—distinguish themselves with their attractive qualities. Chief among these qualities is trustworthiness (viswasa); one can serve them without concern of being abused or debased. They would not cause fellow sesas to suffer in the way indicated by Manu, whereas this apparently does not obtain with sinners and idolaters who Desika suggests should be avoided like poisonous snakes.265 Members of one’s own community merit service, but others do not. Thus, the service of kainkarya entails a motif of restriction, of non-application for certain persons. What had seemed like an impressively holistic compass of service now seems to suffer from restriction. Yet, as mentioned above, this motif of restriction is not the last word in Desika’s writings. While the restriction motif cannot be removed from the specific activity of kainkarya or service—which in the first instance is irreducibly doxological— Desika nonetheless offers his readers additional resources to establish a rich, even universal, appreciation of responsibility. Three such examples were mentioned above. First, in RTS, Desika mentions that one particular trait in those who have surrendered to the Lord functions as a kind of litmus test for whether or not they have truly surrendered and are in the proper state. The valid performance of prapatti includes the ability “to act beneficially to all beings” and to treat all beings in the same way.266 Distinctions between beings are merely outward or superficial and have no bearing on their essential nature, even if class distinction in ordinary life can be respected. Their essential nature—common to all—should determine one’s conduct toward them. Second, the Nyaasa Vimsati cites four traits that should be evident in all acarya or teachers, without which one is ineligible to be considered an acarya. Deerghabandhum is the regard for the entire race as one’s near relations, since ontologically all are members of the same body; dayalum is the active and unrestricted compassion toward all beings; skhalitye sasitharam is a corrective moral concern for others who veer away from the proper path; and svaparahitaparam is being intent on the welfare of others and of oneself.267 Third, Desika’s Saranagati Deepika foregrounds one particular divine trait—sameness and innate friendliness to all beings—as imitable by those who surrender to Narayana in love and service.268 As innate friendliness is the Lord’s trait, so too it should be their own, in an imitatio Narayana. While Desika himself  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 36, p. 104.  Desika, RTS, ch. 14, p. 142. 267  Desika, Nyaasa Vimsati, v. 1, pp. 3–8. 268  Desika, Saranagati Deepika, v. 14, p. 70. 265 266

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does not make this connection explicit, it nonetheless is wholly consistent with his recommendation that sesas in community should becomes sesins to each other. These four traits expand one’s imagination outward into a rich and comprehensive description of responsibility. Desika himself never resolved the apparent tension between the motif of restricting kainkarya from those who are sinners and idolaters with his other motif of universal responsibility and sameness toward all. He gives no indication of needing to resolve the tension. In particular, deerghabandhum or regard for the entire race as one’s near relations, would seem to nullify any suggestion of quarantining oneself from those who are morally different from oneself: sinners and idolaters.269 A constructive and creative reading of Desika on these themes can prioritize the one over the other and resolve the apparent tension between them, even if he, for whatever reason, did not. In some sense Karl Barth’s interpretation of love of neighbor stands in need of rehabilitation in view of the central question put forward in this polyphonic comparison: which resources in our authors provide a theologically buttressed and universal concept of responsibility? For his remarks on love of neighbor belong, thematically, to subject matter other than responsibility. They belong to the subject matter of revelation, justification and praise, which, to be sure, bear a relation to responsibility since ethics is always internal to dogmatics. But that relation is secondary.270 For Barth, the neighbor functions as one who stands in Christ’s stead as the bearer of mercy to those standing in need of it, and also as a window through which one sees in the neighbor a reflection of one’s own sin and neediness. A rich concept of interpersonal responsibility is communicated the themes of real humanity and co-humanity (wirklich Menschlikeit and mitmenschlikeit) in Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/2, which posits human personhood as irreducibly relational and intended for I–Thou encounter, pre-eminently symbolized in marriage. Barth in fact uses the term responsibility with some frequency in Church Dogmatics II/2 and III/2 to denote persons’ free consent to their creatureliness, or their “activity that does not forsake the grace of God in order to transition into its own work, but rather relies upon that grace and responds to it.”271 Responsibility, as Barth uses the term, has a vertical meaning attaching freedom to obedience and grace, such that responsibility to God is the making of oneself in grace accountable to God. Barth’s construal of interpersonal responsibility is especially evident in remarks on humanity as a being in “encounter” (Begegnung), discussed above in §3.3.3. That discussion revealed the constitutive relational quality of human being; persons are per definitionem relational and meant for encounter with their fellows; they are meant to have and be comrades, associates and friends. Inhumanity designates the   If Ayyangar’s interpretation of deerghabandhu is too generous here, the meaning of the term in Ramanuja’s Gita Bhasya 1 as persistence in relationships with those who do wrong can also be instructive for those interested in Lash’s global imagination. 270  Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, p. 793; John Webster, Karl Barth (New York, 2004), p. 154. 271  Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/4, p. 22, cited in Busch, The Great Passion, p. 167. 269

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lack of these relationships, a narrow isolation or autonomy that wills to be alone and independent. To be truly “human,” then, is to concur subjectively with the objective truth of oneself: that one is human only and really as one is in encounter and fellowship, pre-eminently with God but also with other persons. There is an “inner material connection as well as a formal parallelism” between being for God and being for others, in direct analogy to the commingling of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.272 The targets against whom Barth polemicizes in his eloquent treatment of humanity as beings in encounter are those who, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch or Zarathustra—the anti-types to Jesus Christ—exist above the regrettable mass of humanity, allegedly but falsely “free” from its inconvenient and disgusting imposition. Such “freedom from” and the “waste of isolation” (der Wüste dieser Einsamkeit) it achieves is but an illusory and self-alienating freedom because revelation reveals to the human person that she with her fellows are the objects and partners of the covenant—she is determined for covenant partnership—which means her being is a being in co-existence.273 Her real freedom is found only in connection with such determination, rendering suspect the reductive notion of freedom as liberty from constraint or demand. Co-humanity, not misanthropy, is “an inviolable constant” of human existence.274 She is to be with and for her fellows. Barth is concerned to show the objective untruth of humanity without its fellow man. In so doing, he raises a slightly different question than that of this polyphonic comparison. That is, he seems more interested to impress upon his readers that human being is a being in encounter and the several manifestations of that objective reality than, for example, the “extent” or “who counts” of the encounter. Yet his construal of “being in mutual assistance”—the third form of being in encounter discussed above—opens the door for a radically solidaristic construal of humanity, one that begins to satisfy the questions with which this section opened. Being in mutual assistance builds on the prior two forms of encounter: seeing one another eye to eye and being in mutual speech and hearing. These three constituents of being in encounter endorse co-humanity and criticize isolation. In his remarks on mutual assistance, Barth opens the way for a robust solidarity that cannot and will not rest content with isolation, neither for oneself nor one’s fellows. “Humanity” occurs when persons together summon each other and assist each other and, in this activity, commingle their lives. A human being is “human”— in Barth’s normative or Christological sense of the term—only in summons and response, taking part in the burdens of the Thou and having one’s own burdens shared by her. The reciprocity of summoning and responding is critical here,  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 217.   Ibid., III/2, p. 320. Rahner offers a parallel insistence with his language that “man is a social being,” and hence always oriented toward ecclesial communion, consciously or unconsciously (Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 323). 274  Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 289. 272

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for it means that one is “inhuman”—again, in the normatively Christological determination of this term—when either withholding or rejecting assistance. Barth never alleviates the demand this places on persons with qualifications: he does not delimit the application of assistance to one’s immediate circle of relations while passing over distance circles of relations. He simply asserts that my being is human when it responds in assistance to the Thou summoning me, and that I falsify both the humanity of the Thou and my own when withholding assistance. The Thou could feasibly be a distant neighbor just as easily as a proximate neighbor. But the humanity of us both hangs on whether I respond in assistance to her summons, and vice versa. This sphere of encounter is where I confirm or reject my personal responsibility before God. It is useful, once again, to recall an eloquent and provocative quotation cited earlier. If our action is human, this means it is an action in which we give and receive assistance. An action in which assistance is either withheld or rejected is inhuman. For either way it means isolation and persistence in isolation. … Assistance is actively standing by the other. It is standing so close by him that one’s own action means help or support for his. It thus means not to leave him to his own being and action, but in and with one’s own to take part in the question and burden and anxiety of his, accepting concern for his life, even though it must always be his and we cannot represent him. … In the very fact that he lives, man calls to his fellow not to leave him alone to his own devices. He knows well enough that he has to live his own life and bear responsibility for it. But he also knows that he cannot do this if his fellow does not spring to his side and give him his hand and actively stand by him.275

No doubt Barth’s construal of being in mutual assistance can potentially open up his enormously rich theology of encounter to a more universal or global compass than is suggested by vision, mutual speech and hearing. These latter forms of encounter, enormously rich and important in their own right, may yet run the risk of confining the sphere of personal responsibility to those immediately or proximately present. But the requirement of being in mutual assistance—summoning the Thou to my assistance and responding with assistance to her summons—has an expansive logic to it, one that can be clarified and enhanced constructively, even if Barth himself, for whatever reason, did not raise to his readers’ attention the latent universality of the theme as pointedly as he might have. His construal of humanity as an irreducible being in encounter can contribute much to the “global imagination” of which Nicholas Lash spoke. Rahner, it may be said, seems to have been occupied from the start by a concern for a theologically buttressed concept of responsibility that is universal in scope. He does this in at least the following three ways: by appealing to a global human existence; by appealing to a searching Christology; and by embracing the Ignatian 275

  Ibid., p. 262.

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spirituality of finding God in all things with its attending human participation in God’s loving descent into the world. This chapter closes by taking these themes in order. First, the fact that Rahner emphasizes the increasingly global character of human existence speaks volumes, not least for the reason that the insistence was, in his historical context, new, prophetic and, in light of present historical knowledge, eminently appropriate. His theology of universal election and its notions of antecedent grace and anonymous or implicit faith erect a theological meta-narrative which takes seriously the theological and moral demands the existence of religious neighbors places on Christian theological construction.276 Universal election and antecedent grace, as controlling features of his theological construction, acknowledge the moral implications of doctrinal claims and express both a concrete love of neighbor and an expansive appreciation of who counts as neighbor. These methodological points of departure are not unrelated to neighbor love. Second, and in relation to his theology of universal election, Rahner proposes a “searching Christology” to contextualize the event and person of Jesus Christ in world history. Because of their supernatural existential, all persons live out a searching Christology, that is, they are, even if unthematically, probing their own histories for a love that has achieved “absoluteness.” The one who has achieved absolute love could in turn be loved by others with an absolute love reserved for God: to love and be loved absolutely is what all ultimately desire and pursue. This is the one after whom all persons seek, the “God-man,” Jesus Christ.277 A searching Christology makes explicit something universal election implies, namely, “that the human race forms a unity, and that true love is not individualistic and exclusive, but rather that with all of its necessary concreteness it is always ready to encompass everything.”278 Thus the love in and for which all are created is irreducibly inclusive and expansive: the human community is fundamentally unified and endowed with a transcendental desire for absolute love that encompasses all things. Moreover, with respect to the eschatological implications of Rahner’s Christology, because of God’s victory in Jesus Christ the world as a whole is redeemed and will reach a positive conclusion, even if individual histories of freedom are still “running out in the open.”279 Rahner’s Christology thus affirms the world and its persons and breaks down the distinctions between sacred and 276   “First of all, we shall presuppose a universal and supernatural salvific will of God which is really operative in the world. This implies the possibility of supernatural revelation and faith everywhere … we are making a second presupposition: when a non-Christian attains salvation through faith, hope, and love, non-Christian religions cannot be understood in such a way that they do not play a role, or play only a negative role in the attainment of justification an salvation” (Rahner, Foundations of Chistian Faith, pp. 313–14). 277   Ibid., p. 296. 278  Ibid. 279   Ibid., p. 413.

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profane, characterizing the dialogue between God and the world as “triumph” and “victory.”280 Third, Rahner’s spirituality of everyday life and his categorical mediation of the transcendental are marked by his Ignatian roots, particularly the theme of seeking and finding God in all things. This theme gives rise to an empowered capacity in persons for love. Rather than advocating human striving—as the well-known Ignatian phrase may suggest—this theme actually comments on a doctrine of revelation and couches human love under the rubric of God’s antecedent love. That is, the presupposition behind the possibility of finding God in the world is the fact that, according to Rahner, God has eternally descended into the world, lost himself in the world, permanently embedding himself in it in love and self-communication. To experience God through the world is really, Rahner thinks, to be appropriated by God into God’s loving ways, especially his divine “Yes” to the world. In turn, human love for world and neighbor achieves its superlative expression only as it is brought into participation with divine love. “The Christian who participates in God’s action of descent to the world and of love for this world … can, in this love, love with a radicality that would not otherwise be possible or imaginable for a human being.”281 To love from the position of participation in divine love enables one to love truly, that is, to love in radical alterity. “This love, therefore, is always looking away from itself. It does not lose self-awareness, but neither is it an awareness marked by sublime spiritual introversion; rather, people find their own selves by serving, laboring, going outward—losing oneself in the service of others.”282 What recommends these remarks on love as relevant for a global concept of neighbor is their fusion of two realities. First, because interpersonal love is rendered transcendental by grace in its participation in divine love—always already embedded in history—it creates the conditions for persons to love deeply and radically into otherness. It looks away from itself in service of others in ways that otherwise would be impossible. Because of its vertical mooring, in other words, human love is well equipped not only to love selflessly but to expand far and wide into an inclusive appreciation of who counts as love’s object. Second, because of the coincidence or proportionality of freedom and obedience in Rahner’s theology of freedom which, to be sure, Barth shares, the notion of “losing oneself” takes on an unmistakably positive—not detrimental or dangerous—valence. To lose oneself in love and service of others radically consummates one’s personhood (fundamental option) as an existentially definitive “Yes” to God and oneself through the categorical reality of the neighbor, in whom God is categorically present, according to Rahner’s reading of Matthew 25.283 In direct analogy to the incarnation of the Word and, in general, the embedded immanence of God in the world, human persons achieve themselves paradoxically 280

  Ibid., p. 412.  Rahner, Spiritual Writings, p. 59. 282   Ibid., p. 60. 283  Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 410. 281

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in their “kenotic self-disposal”; they gain themselves by losing themselves.284 Radical self-dispossession in love of others thus recommends itself as radical self-achievement. Here Rahner seems to parallel Desika’s desire to rehabilitate the notion of being a dasa or servant, since doing so is doing what ought to be done. Neither kenotic self-disposal in Rahner nor servitude in Desika contain undesirable elements of personal subtraction or loss. Finally, because Rahner grounds the logic of love of neighbor in certain Christological commitments, namely, the crucifixion, love of neighbor “does not keep accounts, expects no return, and ultimately welcomes the “folly of the cross” on the neighbor’s behalf.”285 This is where Rahner’s sober Christian realism enters the scene. [One] is a Christian only if he believes that everything positive and beautiful and everything which blossoms has to pass through what we call death. Christianity is the religion which recognizes a man who was nailed to a cross and on it died a violent death as a sign of victory and as a realistic expression of human life. … Christianity forbids us to reach for an analgesic in such a way that we are no longer willing to drink the chalice of the death of this existence with Jesus Christ.286

Rahner’s Christian understanding of love of neighbor, while often criticized for its lack of substantive actions associated with the fundamental option, nonetheless contains several merits. Because it hangs on theological commitments concerning participation and Christology, it manages to recommend a concept of love of neighbor rich in both existential development and global application. Yet it also hastens to add a soberly realistic expectation that, on this side of the eschaton, the reality of sin and death colors existence in the world, renders human action ambiguous and suggests that the absolute love persons desire to give and receive may lead them to the council of the cross.

284

  Linnane, “Ethics,” p. 164.   Ibid, p. 61. 286  Rahner, Foundations of Chrsitian Faith, p. 404. 285

Chapter 5

Postlude What have these chapters and their comparisons accomplished? Two theses have been pursued, one material and the other methodological. The material thesis argued that the “vague categories” of “piety” and “responsibility” find integral expression in the theologies of Rahner, Barth and Desika. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 argued the thesis comparatively. The methodological thesis aimed to demonstrate, by way of the same concrete comparisons, that the musical metaphor of polyphony can be imported effectively into theological discourse as a strategy to control and evaluate ecumenical and interreligious theological comparisons. Now some concluding remarks are in order. They are presented below as a summary of findings. 5.1  Freedom, Sin, Grace Rahner, Barth and Desika each privilege the role of grace—of prevenient grace in particular—in their elucidation of the human person in correspondence with her nature and divine ground. Likewise, all three contribute parallel understandings of the sin preventing creaturely authenticity, namely, egoism, isolation or the conceit of autonomy. This subject matter directly impacts upon the authors’ conceptions of the vague categories “piety” and “responsibility.” One significant point of consonance emerging from the three voices was their mutual insistence that the freedom of persons grows in direct proportion to their dependence on and obedience to God. In short, their theologies of freedom underscored a “freedom for” logic over against a “freedom from” logic. Indeed, all three incisively criticize the latter as contrary to human nature, development and fulfillment. Freedom is created for correspondence with grace; freedom and grace are allied.1 Thus, rather than juxtaposing freedom and obedience as alternatives, they not only are compatible but truly united in and requisite for persons’ authentic self-disposal. Another point of consonance emerged in their emphasis on prevenient grace empowering persons’ response to God (piety) and their responsible action toward neighbors (responsibility). This is a direct consequence of persons’ radical   Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech, and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God (Burlington, 2005), pp. 90–91; John Webster, Karl Barth (New York, 2004), pp. 156, 158; Eberhard Busch, The Great Passion: An Introduction to Karl Barth’s Theology (Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 168; Vedanta Desika, Srimad Rahasyatrayasara, trans. M.R. Rajagopala Ayyangar (Kumbakonam, 1956), ch. 2, p. 19. 1

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dependence on God. In Barth’s parlance, their being in responsibility is more of a following than a leading, of responding to a precedent than creating a precedent. In Rahner’s parlance, persons’ responsible action consists in their free hearing of the Word spoken to them and in their freely spoken reply, by which genuine dialogue arises characterized by freedom on both ends. In Desika’s parlance, the surrender of prapatti requires a pretext or vyaja from the jiva—her own effort—which itself is made possible by grace. In all three, the fact that human action is made possible and borne by grace in no way diminishes the genuinely human character of the action. Action which is both grounded in prevenient grace as the condition of its possibility and born out in grace remains genuine human action, since freedom experiences itself truly as its grows in proportion to or correspondence with grace. 5.2  Piety and Responsibility are Integral In their respective ways and grammars, Rahner, Barth and Desika assign a vertical or doxological significance to the neighbor in love of neighbor, so that the distinction between love of God and love of neighbor is logical but not substantial. The two loves—“piety” and “responsibility”—are both integral and ordered such that the one (piety) controls the exposition of the other (responsibility). The three theologians each confirm this unity and its vertical articulation even as they give voice to different and sometimes antagonistic priorities and principles of organization, and these chapters supply the reader with multiple and yet distinct attestations of this critical theme. The exposition of this theme has also opened windows onto these three systems; since each author wrote systematically, learning one theme enables one to anticipate and foresee much of the overall fabric of the system. 5.3  Polyphony is a Useful Theological Method The usefulness of polyphony as a theological method in this study consists in (i) its constitutive complexity bearing out both tension and resolution of theological voices, (ii) its prioritizing theological aesthetics over antagonism, (iii) its facilitating the sounding and hearing of texts as a mode of doing theology with focused description and concreteness, (iv) its observation and contextualization of the real distinctions in these three theological voices, as well as (v) their revolving occupation of dominant melody lines, so that the three become reading guides to each other and are heard and comprehended best when heard together, alongside each other with a reflexive consciousness. Rather than construing these theologians polemically, this comparison has shown that, like any score of music, any of the three melody lines is capable of surging forward to give particular voice to a theme, and that, moreover, the differences between the voices assist listeners

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to hear the individual particularity of each. Because consonant voices depend on difference and distinction to achieve consonance with each other, the aural effect for the reader or listener was richer than would have been possible in a single hearing. More was heard. Emphases and nuances in each of the authors were lifted out simply on account of their proximity to the other authors.2 Where one voice gave way or subsided or rested, another voice stepped into prominence, and vice versa as the chapters progressed. The polyphonic sections of Chapter 4 made this especially evident. First, in Chapter 4, Rahner and Desika occupied the lead voices expressing an inclusive understanding of soteriology; then Barth and Desika occupied the lead voices by emphasizing gratitude; next Rahner and Desika once again came to the fore to elaborate an understanding of responsibility predicated on the theme of participation; and finally Barth and Desika resumed the lead in their common insistence on the vertical ordering principle governing the two loves. As a methodological strategy, polyphony enables the reader to allow these variations in emphasis to become explicit. It was not the case that when two voices took the lead on a given topic, the third was silent. While all three authors, in their respective ways, commented on roughly parallel subject matter, polyphonic listening allows the hearer to organize differences in emphasis between the three authors without forcing silence on any one of them. In this way, polyphony, in addition to being aesthetically useful, creates the conditions for honest theological description, comparison, and perhaps reconciliation. This consequence can be important in establishing courtesy and charity between theological speakers. This last remark on theological reconciliation should be properly distinguished from a non-critical pluralism. Reconciliation of texts, persons or traditions is a far more difficult and nuanced task than accepting them casually or noncritically. Reconciliation presumes difference and proceeds only on that basis. It also establishes a more significant principle of unity within which differences reside. Rather than allowing voices to be heard so as to give rise to cacophony or discord, polyphony as a theological metaphor utilizes a textual reading of the authors to allow their voices to surface regularly, distinctly and with the avoidance of caricature. This resistance of caricature is no small attribute, in view of contemporary ecclesial and global exigencies. The first example of the resistance of caricature came in Chapter 1 where Rahner’s transcendental anthropology, with its supernatural existential, obediential potency and freedom, was shown to hang unambiguously on prevenient grace. Prevenient grace is a theme for which Rahner is seldom celebrated, yet Chapter 1 provided good cause to reevaluate and appreciate the theme in his system. Second, Chapter 2 protected Barth from a caricature frequently made of his theology, 2

  For a longer description of polyphony as a comparative theological method, as well as an additional case study, see John N. Sheveland, “Solidarity Through Polyphony,” in Francis X. Clooney, SJ (ed.), The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (London, 2010), pp. 171–90.

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namely, that his theology of freedom is vacuous and oppressed by the in-breaking Word of God which, it has been said, makes no real provision for authentic selfdisposal in freedom. His rich notion of correspondence, however, when properly understood, renders the caricature null and void, since both he and Rahner envision freedom’s consummation consisting in relationships of proportionality with grace and obedience. So too, Desika, like Rahner, has been misunderstood in connection with the role he assigned the human pretext or vyaja, exemplified in the Dvaya mantra—“I take refuge at the feet of Narayana with Sri”—in the action of prapatti. While Desika insists human work or effort must be a prerequisite for divine saving action, he also gives voice to the privileged role of prevenient grace in establishing the conditions for the possibility of the human utterance. Finally, the air was cleared concerning Rahner’s defense of the unity of love of God and neighbor. While his defense of the unity of loves is often lumped with the theory of anonymous Christianity and both together criticized for being excessively from below, an undeniable teleological ordering principle surfaced in Rahner’s defense, by showing how the vertical response of piety or love of God is the real, natural or teleological end of any horizontal, categorical or radical acceptance of others—and thus of oneself—in a love that dialectically selfabandons and self-achieves. Polyphony can also train the theologians’ ears to hear theology more complexly and to appreciate the overall structure of unity incorporating diverse theological voices. If it makes sense to read traditions as complex wholes rather than monolithic singularities, it likewise makes sense to read the traditions themselves side by side. One learns more subject matter, learns it more effectively and derives more satisfaction from the proliferation of dialogue partners: texts and persons. As polyphony requires and indeed demands complexity, so too Christian theologians should appreciate—not obfuscate—the complexity marking ecclesial and global existence today. Note that this usage of polyphony does not endorse the “relaxed univocity” or “facilely affirmative harmony” of which David Tracy and many others are rightly concerned.3 Polyphony endorses pluralism precisely as an appreciative acknowledgment of religious complexity and as an aesthetic mode of hearing such complexity, not as a presumption or defense of relativism. Rather than recommending relativism, polyphony solicits an inclusive style of thinking and doing theology, which in turn opens readers’ imaginations to an aesthetic appreciation of the theologians, texts and traditions under consideration. It need not, as I do not in the preceding, decide specific questions concerning truth claims. Polyphony in the present context recommends a theological method giving rise to   The phrases are David Tracy’s. See David Tracy, Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York, 1981), p. 401; Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago, 1987), p. 90; John N. Sheveland, “Interreligious Momentum in David Tracy’s Postmodern Christian Theology,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 12 (2002), p. 211. 3

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description which in turn provides the imaginative space for aesthetic appreciation. It conditions the theologian’s imagination and facilitates the perception of broad structures in which voices are discovered, situated and distinguished. Accordingly, polyphony encounters a kindred sensibility in, for example, Nicholas Lash’s conception of religious traditions as “schools of wisdom” from which nonmembers can potentially draw, learn, challenge or criticize.4 If Christian theology is to continue to progress down the road of inclusion and reconciliation both within its own communities and as it interacts with its religious neighbors, polyphony as a methodological strategy for organizing theological differences may prove very useful indeed. For at the heart of any genuine attempt at inclusion there must be an appreciative judgment of the other to serve as the motive for inclusion. There must be an aesthetic appreciation and affirmation of the other precisely in terms of the other’s dialectical difference from and unity with oneself. Polyphony represents one interdisciplinary model for doing so.

4   See Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and End of “Religion” (Cambridge, 1996); Holiness, Speech, and Silence. Lash’s explanation of a school of wisdom evokes the subject matter rehearsed by our three authors: “Every tradition comes up with ways to distinguish the worship due to the Creator and Redeemer of the world from the various forms of reverence, estimation, and acknowledgement of worth (‘worth’-ship) differently due to creatures. The worship due to God, of course, goes far beyond reverence. It is, in its ambition, the total and absolute surrender of the self, acknowledgment of sheer contingency: ourselves and all things given back to the eternal giving which they express and celebrate. I would go so far as to say that the great religious traditions of the world are best understood as schools, contexts of education, the participants in which help each other thus to worship, while yet not worshipping any thing” (Lash, Holiness, Speech, and Silence, p. 11).

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Index

Acarya  9, 113–15, 120, 129, 136, 141, 161, 173, 182 Advaita 117–19 Akinchanya 136, 144, 156, 158, 172, 174 Alvar 116 Analogia relationis 95–6 Analogy 116 Anonymous Christianity 32–36, 78, 103, 109, 149–51, 167, 186–7 Anthropology Christological 93–4, 194 metaphysical 7, 13–25, 45, 106, 162, 187 Word of God 66ff. Apophatic 107, 118, 118n26 Aquinas, Thomas 14 Aristotle 14 Atheism 32 Atman 117 Avidya 118, 136, 139 Bhakti 114, 126, 132–6, 139, 176 Brahman 116–18 Caste 134, 140, 149–51, 164 Chalcedon Christology 24, 46–7, 70, 85–6, 88, 183–4, 193–4 Christian life 5, 8, 10, 106 Christocentrism 63, 82, 88, 108–9 Christology 13, 40–41, 48, 57, 106, 108–9, 167, 196 Classics, religious 6–7 Comparison, theological 1, 6–7, 59 Confessing Church 63 Consonance 4, 11, 106, 110, 127, 143–4, 147, 148, 173, 183, 199 Coordinate predication 129–31, 163–4, 177, 185 Covenant 93, 95–7, 101, 109, 145, 149, 165, 194

Cross 40, 198 Culture 63–4 Dasa 155 Death 30–31 Dependence 2, 32, 68 Dharma 112n4, 164 Dissonance 103, 106, 184 Dominus Iesus 4n5 Doxology 3, 10, 87, 90, 93, 109, 126, 128, 131, 144–5, 153, 156, 170, 187–9 Ecumenism 4–6, 11–12, 60n1, 61, 101–2, 201 Encounter 97–101, 165, 193 Faith 1, 68–9, 73 Finitude 2n4, 20–21 Freedom 7, 17–18, 22, 25–44, 67–9, 72, 80–81, 83, 94, 96–8, 103, 108, 144, 165, 166–8, 199–200 Fundamental option 162–3, 197 German Idealism 61, 102 Grace 2, 13, 17–19, 22, 29–30, 33, 91, 122, 138, 145, 146–9, 168–9, 196, 199–200 prevenient 8, 14, 18, 67, 71–2, 123, 138, 142, 144n132, 150, 199–202 sanctifying 41–4 Gratitude 2, 87, 93–4, 160–61, 171–4, 188 Harmony 6, 59–60, 71, 77, 101–10, 111, 143 Hearer of the Word 14–21, 71, 143–5 Holy mystery 37, 42, 107–8, 168 Holy Spirit 73, 79, 81 Hope 150 Humanity co- 87, 93–101, 146, 169, 194

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real 87, 93–101, 108, 162, 169, 188 Hypostatic union 23–4, 35, 37, 53, 76 Idolatry 36, 82–4, 107–10, 164, 168, 172, 179, 203n4 Imago dei 95 Incarnation 23, 47n120, Israel 82 Jesus Christ 3, 5, 22–5, 35, 37, 41, 48, 62n4, 66, 76, 90–92, 95–7, 148, 183–4 Jiva 127–8 Jnana 128 Justification 9, 90, 94, 169 Kainkarya (service) 10, 94, 132, 143, 154, 156–7, 161–4, 171, 176–83, 190, 198 Kenosis 162, 197–8 Krisis 65, 67 Liturgy 35 Love 7, 45, 79 of God 50–57, 82–87, 88, 106 of Neighbor, 48–49, 51, 54, 56, 87–92, 109, 126, 183, 197 Luther, Martin 1, 122, 142n126 Manipravala 113, 121–2 Mantras 124–6, 131, 143–4, 158, 174, 180, 189, 190, 202 Melody 5, 59, 94, 111, 171 Method 4–10, 59–61, 64, 105, 109–10, 181, 200–203 Moksa 118, 128, 133 Monophysitism 19, 21 Narayana 3, 119–24, 130–31, 144 Neville, Robert Cummings 1 Nostra Aetate 4n5 Obediential potency 7, 21–5, 31, 41, 48, 76, 170, 201 Ontology 13, 21, 62, 71, 72, 96, 102, 115, 119, 124, 126, 129, 138, 143, 151–2, 155–6, 170, 176–7, 185 Origen 27–28

Parable of the Good Samaritan 53–5, 90–92, 92n109, 92n111, 100, 188 Participation 68, 71, 80, 103–5, 109, 115, 120, 126, 128–9, 130, 138, 148, 162, 164, 173, 174–5, 179, 183–6 Perichoresis 52, 102, 184 Piety 1–3, 1n2, 31, 34, 36, 50, 111, 126, 151, 161–74, 199–200 Pistis 142n126 Pluralism 202 Polyphony 4–7, 10, 44–5, 59–60, 77, 94, 111–12, 124, 143–51, 161–74, 183–98, 200–203 Praise 71, 83, 87–92, 105–7, 126, 158–9, 166–71 Prakara (body, modes) 116, 127, 129, 143, 151, 155, 176, 183, 185–6 Prapatti (surrender) 119, 122–4, 126–41, 149–51, 158, 176 Protestantism, liberal 61–4, 74 Ramanuja 9, 113–15, 129, 141, 151, 152–4, 175 Realism 40–41 Reconciliation 63, 66, 73, 81, 86, 173 Responsibility 1n2, 1–3, 79, 100, 111, 126, 165, 174, 183, 193 Revelation 20–21 Samsara 114, 118, 128, 135, 139n111 Sankara 114, 116 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 75 Second Vatican Council 4, 45, Sesa 124 Sesin 124 Sin 2, 37, 43, 90–93, 96, 101, 109, 134–5, 136–9, 139n107, 142, 145, 146–9, 188 original 37–40, 147 as guilt 38 as concupiscence 39n93 Spirit 14, 19 Sri 119–21, 144, 185 Srirangam 112 Srivaisnava 9, 111, 121, 178 Sudra 134 Supernatural existential 170, 172, 186–7, 201

Index Svarupa (essential nature) 127–8, 131, 139, 151, 174, 176, 182, 192 Theology, systematic 44–9, 64, 102, 102n150 Transcendental method 5, 48, 74–5, 105–6 Trinity 81, 95 Übermensch 145–6, 194 Unity of love commands 7–10, 46–57, 77, 88–9, 101–10, 186, 202

Vague category 1n3, 10, 111, 161n175, 166, 199 Visistadvaita 11, 113, 115–16, 119, 127–9 Vorgriff 15–19 Vyaja 122–3, 138, 147, 149 Word of God 5, 23, 64, 172, 188, 202 Worldview 63–4, 66 Zarathustra 100, 194

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