David Steward

EXPLORING THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
SEVENTH EDITION
EXPLORING THE
PHILOSOPHY OF
RELIGION
David Stewart
Ohio University
First published 2010, 2007, 2001, 1998, 1992 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Exploring the philosophy of religion/[edited by] David Stewart.-7th ed.

p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-205-64519-0 (alk. paper)
1. Religion-Philosophy. I. Stewart, David, 1938-
BL5l.E96 2010
210-dc22
2009002663
ISBN 13: 978-0-2056-4519-0 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-1384-6520-6 (hbk)
Contents
PREFACE xi
CHAPTER ONE
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 1
INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 1
Mystical Experience 6
Mysticism, William James 9
Intuitive Ways of Knowing 16

Personal Experience of God, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan 17
Critique of Mysticism 28
The Core of Religion, Walter Kaufmann 29
Varieties of Religious Understanding 36

The Pluralistic Hypothesis, John Hick 38
RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 47
ADDITIONAL SOURCES 48
v
vi Contents
CHAPTER TWO
RELIGION AND LIFE 49
INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AND LIFE 49
Life’s Goal Is to Obey God’s Will 53

Moral Obligation, William Paley 55
Life’s Goal Is to Achieve Greatness 58

The Joyful Wisdom, Friedrich Nietzsche 60
Life Is Not Meaningful Without God 64

A Confession, Leo Tolstoy 65
Life Is Meaningful Without God 71

Ethics Without Religion, Kai Nielsen 74
RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGION AND LIFE 82
CHAPTER THREE
RELIGION AND HUMAN DESTINY 85
INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AND DEATH 85
The Immortality of the Soul 88

Phaedo, Plato 89
The Finality of Death 96

Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus 98
The Hope for Resurrection 101

The Death of Death, Neil Gillman 102
Death in Buddhism 112

The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta, Walpola Rahula 114
Contents vii
RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGION AND DEATH 117
CHAPTER FOUR
ARGUMENTS FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE 119
INTRODUCTION: THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 119
The Ontological Argument 123

The Most Perfect Being, René Descartes 128
The Cosmological Arguments 132

The Kalām Cosmological Argument, William Lane
Craig 136
The Design Argument 142

Natural Theology, William Paley 144
The Moral Argument 151

God as a Postulate of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant 153
RETROSPECTIVE: THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 158
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 161
INTRODUCTION: GOD AND EVIL 161
Evil and the Power of God 168

Divine Omnipotence, C. S. Lewis 171
Theodicy in Process Thought 177

God in Process, David Ray Griffin 180
viii Contents
Karma and Evil 188

Karma in Hindu Thought, Wendy Doniger 190
The “Vale of Soul-Making” Theodicy 195

Evil and the God of Love, John Hick 198
RETROSPECTIVE: GOD AND EVIL 204
CHAPTER SIX
FAITH AND REASON 209
INTRODUCTION: OPINION, BELIEF, AND KNOWLEDGE 209
Belief and Falsification 214

The Falsification Debate, Antony Flew, R. M. Hare,
and Basil Mitchell 218
Will and Belief 227

The Will to Believe, William James 233
No Rational Basis for Faith 245

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume 246
The Leap of Faith 253

Objective and Subjective Reflection, Søren Kierkegaard 256
RETROSPECTIVE: FAITH AND REASON 260
CHAPTER SEVEN
RELIGION AND CURRENT ISSUES 263
INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AND SOCIETY 263

Contents ix
Religion and Government 266

A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke 269
Religion and Women 275

The Female Nature of God, Rosemary Radford Ruether 277
Religion and World Origins 284

Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson 291
Religion and Human Origins 300

Life’s Dominion, Ronald Dworkin 302
RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGION AND CURRENT ISSUES 311
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARIES 314
GLOSSARY 318
INDEX 324
Preface
This new edition continues the plan of previous ones of providing a book that
combines the best features of a text and a reader by giving both clear and under-
standable analysis coupled with important primary-source readings. The topics
included have a permanent place in the philosophy of religion, but users of the book
do not need to follow the order of the chapters as they are presented here.
As is always the case, a new edition allows for the inclusion of material
that reflects current topics of interest. The selection from Rosemary Ruether in
Chapter 7 on the female nature of God, continued from the prior edition, allows
readers to discuss why so many religious traditions have suppressed the role of
women. This is but one of the series of current issues that this chapter highlights,
beginning with the topic of the separation of religion from government. While
those of us in the West might think this has been settled in favor of a secular-state
model, the issue is by no means dead in the rest of the world, where powerful forces
are at work to replace the secular-state model with a theocratic one. Even in
our nation, committed in its constitution to the separation of church and state,
advocates of the majority religion continuously campaign for governmental recog-
nition and support of religious activities and symbols. The reading from John Locke
provides a philosophical context for this issue.
Also in chapter seven, in a section entitled “Religion and World Origins,” the
reading from Henri Bergson offers an alternative to the naturalistic assumptions
behind Darwinian evolution. The ideal of a developmental model of world origins,
including the origins of life, need not be seen as a threat to a religious view of reality
if it is isolated from the naturalistic assumptions that some bring to an evolutionary
view. The reading from Bergson will allow for a discussion of evolution apart from a
naturalistic metaphysics.
The final new selection in this chapter is from the legal and moral scholar
Ronald Dworkin and discusses the contentious issues surrounding abortion. Just as
Dworkin searches for a new way of framing the issues, this section is entitled in a
neutral way as “Religion and Human Origins.”
xi
xii Preface
Brought back to this edition from prior ones are two authors that reviewers sug-
gested should be reinstated: C. S. Lewis on the problem of evil and Radhakrishnan
on religious experience.
Sincere thanks are in order to former Prentice Hall philosophy editor David
Repetto for providing the opportunity for a new edition and to Maggie Barbieri for
her support and editorial guidance.
David Stewart
Ohio University
EXPLORING THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
CHAPTER 1
The Varieties of
Religious Experience
INTRODUCTION
Philosophy and Religion
Both philosophy and religion are common terms, although defining them precisely is
difficult due to the diversity of meanings each has acquired. The word religion derives
from a Latin term that referred to the bond between man and the gods, and in the
view of most persons religion implies a belief in some kind of supernatural being or
beings. This is the definition of religion usually offered by dictionaries, but such an
understanding of religion would exclude some religious traditions; for example, in
Confucianism the question of the existence of supernatural beings never arises.
Further complicating the problem of arriving at a satisfactory definition of religion
is the wide diversity of religious traditions. Every culture has a religious tradition of some
sort, and these are as varied as the cultures that gave them birth. Many religious tradi-
tions are thoroughly bound up with cultic and ritual practices, but others are not. Some
religions are tied to a priesthood, but this is not true of all. Divine revelation plays an
important role in some traditions, but the relative importance of revelation in contrast
with what can be known by reason alone is itself often a matter of disagreement.
In the study of religion, one response to this diversity of meanings is to adopt a
neutral, descriptive approach. That is, one simply investigates a religion in its various
cultural manifestations, describing religious phenomena, whatever they may be.
Such descriptive study concentrates on comparing or contrasting the various modes
of religious awareness that are encountered and perhaps deriving certain conclusions
from this descriptive analysis about the nature of the religion under study. Whatever
the merits of this approach may be, it cannot be considered a philosophical study of
religion, for philosophy is the critical examination of human life and thought.
1
2 The Varieties of Religious Experience
The study of religion, like the study of any other organized human activity, can be
approached from a variety of standpoints. The historian, sociologist, and psychologist
each approach religion with a unique concern. The historian will be interested in the
development of a religious tradition over time, its similarities to other traditions, and
the influence that a religion has on the economic, political, and social affairs of a
particular society. The sociologist is concerned with discovering what societal values
are expressed in a religious tradition, how the religious beliefs of a group provide
cohesiveness in a society, and how stratifications within the society are affected by
its religious traditions. The psychologist will focus on belief structures themselves
as indicative of a particular kind of self-understanding. Of course, the concerns of
historians, sociologists, and psychologists will overlap, for the borderline between
disciplines is not always sharply defined.
Besides the differences among the interests of the various academic disciplines,
there is also the difference between being a student of a religion and being a believer
in that religion. A student, on the one hand, might investigate Islam and try to under-
stand what Moslems believe, how those beliefs are incorporated into ritual, what the
various Moslem sects are, and how the beliefs of Islam relate to other religions in the
Near East—all without accepting the tenets of Islam as true. A believer, on the other
hand, may adopt the neutral stance of a student of religion, but the believer’s attitude
toward a religion will inevitably be influenced by personal religious commitments,
particularly if the religion under scrutiny is the believer’s own. The believer’s attitude
is a much more existential one, since the religion under scrutiny is not just a subject
for academic study, but also a matter of personal commitment. The principal difficulty
encountered in studying one’s own religious tradition is in adopting an objective view-
point (insofar as any objectivity is possible in religious study).
The philosophical study of religion, by virtue of the critical task of philosophy,
demands detachment from personal beliefs in order to critically examine the funda-
mental questions raised by religion. This detachment is a necessary first step if one
is to conduct a truly philosophical study of religion. This does not mean that an
individual committed to a particular religious tradition cannot philosophize about
that tradition; that would imply that a person could not believe religiously what had
been discovered philosophically, a strange state of affairs indeed! The point is that
the philosophical study of religion demands a degree of detachment from personal
religious beliefs. In turn, a philosophical approach to religion may well produce
fresh understanding and increased clarity, upon which an even deeper commitment
can be based. In a philosophical analysis of a religion, the student will be enriched
by contact with the work of historians, sociologists, psychologists, and scholars of
comparative religion. But encounters with these disciplines merely prepare the
student for the philosophical task, which is to analyze critically the fundamental
issues raised by religion and to subject these issues to rigorous scrutiny.
If, however, as we have seen, even the task of discovering an essential nature of
religion seems impossible, how can the philosopher begin? One answer to this ques-
tion is to recognize that there is no such thing as religion, only religions. Religions can
be grouped into various traditions, and within these traditions, certain fundamental
Introduction: Philosophy and Religion 3
and common questions will emerge. This means that, for example, a philosopher
analyzing a family of Eastern religions would discover a different set of questions than
would emerge from the study of an ancient animistic religion. Each religion raises
its own set of questions, and part of the philosopher’s job is to ferret out these funda-
mental issues and submit them to as thorough an examination as possible.
One of the challenges in approaching the study of religion in a college course
is defining the scope of what will be covered. One method or type of course is the
history-of-religions approach, which looks at the content of specific religious tradi-
tions, examines the growth and development of that content, and compares it with
the content of other religions. While interesting and important, and even when
including some treatment of the philosophical themes of various religions, this
approach is a descriptive survey method, not a philosophical one. Sometimes,
courses or books based on the comparative approach to the study of religion can
become a little like the commercial recordings of “One Hundred of the World’s
Best-loved Melodies” or “Mozart’s Greatest Hits.” While providing breadth, such
broad comparative study of religion risks losing the depth of analysis that is impor-
tant to philosophy and appropriate to major themes such as God, evil, death, and
faith. Some persons coming to a philosophy class on religion may therefore be
disappointed to discover that it does not offer thumbnail sketches of the beliefs
of Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and other of the world’s great religions.
As interesting as such a comparative study would be, it would not focus on the
themes that are the primary concern of a philosophical study.
A philosophical study of religion is also affected by the meaning of the term
philosophy itself. With its beginnings in Greece, philosophy as a discipline has become
identified with a particular way of thinking. Western philosophy places great empha-
sis on the human faculty of rationality and the role played by reason and argument in
discovering truth. Its methods are argument, analysis, dialectical reasoning, and
discursive thought. Philosophy asks such religious questions as, Is faith rational?
Can the claims of the Judaeo-Christian tradition about God be proved? How can we
harmonize belief in a benevolent God with the fact of evil and suffering in the world?
What influence should religion have on public policy? Western religions are not the
only traditions to raise such questions, but because of the interplay between philoso-
phy and religion in the West, philosophy of religion as a discipline has taken on a
decidedly Western cast. But, as we will see in the selections that follow, non-Western
religious traditions also deal with some of the same issues. Given the increasingly
global nature of trade and the growing interplay among cultures, it is important that
philosophical questions not be dealt with in an exclusively Western frame of refer-
ence, but that, where possible, they be seen in both their Western and Eastern forms.
In doing so, however, it is important not to treat Eastern approaches as simply
Western responses in different terminology, but to recognize the distinctive contribu-
tions they make to our understanding of philosophical themes.
In general, we can say with the contemporary philosopher John Hick that
philosophy of religion is philosophical thinking about religion. But we must
understand this as philosophical thinking not about religion in general, but
about the problems raised by a particular religious tradition. To quote Hick, the
philosophy of religion “seeks to analyze concepts such as God, holy, salvation,
worship, creation, sacrifice, eternal life, etc., and to determine the nature of
religious utterances in comparison with those of everyday life, scientific discov-
ery, morality, and the imaginative expressions of the arts.”1 We must emphasize,
however, that these concepts, while central to the Judaeo-Christian tradition,
are not universal to all religions. When we look at what philosophers in both
the Jewish and the Christian traditions have pointed to as central concerns, we
find a cluster of problems—the nature and existence of God, the problem of
evil, the relation between faith and reason, the meaning of death, the relation-
ship between morality and religion, the question of human destiny, and the
influence of religion on public policy issues. It is to these concepts, therefore,
that we will seek to apply the rigors of philosophical analysis.
THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY

AND RELIGION
The philosophy of religion, in the sense just defined, can be a useful tool in under-
standing religion, but the two are distinct. As has already been mentioned, philosophy
can concern itself with different religions—the religions of the East, ancient religions,
contemporary religions, religions of Native Americans, and so forth. In each case, the
philosopher’s task is to determine the central issues and analyze them through careful
scrutiny and investigation. In this sense, philosophy of religion is analogous to similar
philosophical efforts aimed at other human disciplines. There can be philosophy of
science, philosophy of education, philosophy of law, philosophy of art, philosophy
of culture, and philosophy of psychology, to name just a few possibilities. In each case,
the philosophical study of the discipline is distinct from the discipline itself. A philo-
sophical study of law would raise such fundamental notions as the nature of justice, the
meaning of rights, the nature of equality, and the status of law itself. The philosopher
dealing with science would probe beneath the methods of scientists and question the
meaning of proof and such assumptions made by scientists as their belief in the unifor-
mity and regularity of nature, the dependability of inductive reasoning, and the mean-
ing of such fundamental concepts as cause and effect. In both cases, the philosopher is
not practicing law or doing science, but is forcing to the forefront the fundamental
questions raised by these activities. Lawyers may talk a lot about justice, but what do
they mean by it? Scientists may believe that the present laws of physics will hold true
in the future, but on what basis do they accept the conviction?
Similarly, philosophy of religion is different from the practice of religion.
Philosophy of religion is not a systematic statement of religious beliefs (which would
1 John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 2d ed., Foundations of Philosophy Series (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 2.
Introduction: Philosophy and Religion 5
be theology or dogmatics), but a second-order activity focused on the fundamental

issues of a given religion. Christians, for example, talk a lot about God, but what is
the evidence that God exists? If God’s existence can be proved, how does one go
about proving it? And if God exists, how can one account for the presence of evil in
the world? Such questions are philosophical in nature, and the philosopher will
not be content to let them go unexamined. The task of philosophy, at least as it is
conceived of in the West, is to submit claims such as those made by religions to a
thoroughgoing rational investigation.
There are philosophers, however, who question Western philosophy’s focus on
rational analysis. They point out that this emphasis on rationality is one-sided, for
human beings are not just creatures of reason, but function through a complex
unity of reason, emotion, will, appetites, and feelings. Religion, they insist, makes
an appeal not just to human reason, but to emotion and feelings as well; therefore,
any philosophical investigation of religion must include its nonrational as well as
rational aspects. Though religion has rational elements, it appeals as well to the
heart. Are people religious because they have felt the force of a powerful rational
argument? Probably not. There are grounds for saying that religion seems to arise
not so much from rational insight as from a powerful nonrational experience of
something ultimate that demands allegiance and loyalty. How such experience
arises and how it can be accounted for is the concern of the first group of readings.
Mystical Experience
Religious experience is as hard to define as religion. If we understand religion to be

that which demands our ultimate allegiance, or that which involves our beliefs
about God or what we consider sacred, then we can better understand religious
experience. It can take many different forms, but central to it is the direct encounter
with what one considers the divine, the sacred, or the ultimately important. The
exploration of some of these varieties of religious experience is the task of this first
collection of readings.
Ambiguity also surrounds the use of the term mysticism which is used to
describe anything from an encounter resulting in unification with the divine to any
experience slightly out of the ordinary. As we are using the term in this chapter,
basic to all types of mystical experience is an encounter with the divine or the
sacred. Mystical experience in this sense is not confined to any particular religious
tradition. No single set of doctrines is associated with it, and not all mystics are even
in agreement as to precisely what constitutes a mystical experience. Some mystics
have found the experience to be a spontaneous and unexpected joy; others have
found the experience only after a long and tortuous ascetic life. Aldous Huxley, in
his book The Doors of Perception, claims to have undergone heightened experiences
not unlike those of the mystics through the use of hallucinogenic drugs.
Although not every religious experience is mystical in the strict sense of the
term, there are mystical elements in many different kinds of religious experience, and
mystical types of religious experience seem to be found in all religious traditions. One
type of mystical experience, a kind that can be called union mysticism, is the experi-
ence of complete union with the divine involving complete loss of self-identity. How
the divine with which one is united is understood varies, depending on the religious
tradition of the one having the experience. For Hindus, this union is with Brahman,
or the One, and involves the complete loss of self or self-identity.
W. T. Stace further distinguishes between what he calls introvertive (inward-
looking) and extrovertive (outward-looking) mysticism.1 Introvertive mysticism, as in
the example from Hinduism just given, offers an experience of complete withdrawal
1 See W. T. Stace, ed., The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: New American Library, 1960).
6
Mystical Experience 7
from the world and a union with the transcendent characterized variously as the
One, God, or, paradoxically, the Abyss or sheer Nothingness. Extrovertive forms of
union, in contrast, produce a sense of unity with nature in which all distinctions
between the self and nature disappear, and an experience of overwhelming totality
and oneness occurs. For both types of mystical experience, the sense of union and loss
of self-identity is important. In such experiences of union, mystics almost uniformly
claim to have risen above the limitations of space and time and to have experienced
a loss of individuality in union with something greater than themselves. A mystical
experience is intensely private, beyond words, beyond reason and emotion, and
essentially indescribable.
Another form of mysticism, found more frequently in Christianity than is
union mysticism, could be referred to as communion mysticism. Here the experience
is not that of union with the divine, but the sense of the presence of God within
one’s life, or communion with God, or the sense that in prayer someone is listening.
References to this type of religious experience are found throughout the New
Testament. Jesus said, “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). Paul spoke of “Christ
in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27) and said of the body that it is “God’s
temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you” (1 Corinthians 3:16). The English
theologian W. D. Davis speaks of this as “Christ-mysticism.”2 In such experiences
one has, not a loss of self, but rather a transformed self, a new self arising from the
old. Spoken of variously as new life or a new birth, this experience of God brings
about a renewed sense of purpose. Paul’s experience of Christ led him to say, “I have
been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”
(Galatians 2:20).
Although mysticism, understood as communion mysticism, is not an unusual
feature of Christianity, there have been Christian mystics whose experiences seemed
more intense and involved visions, ecstatic experiences, the hearing of voices, and other
phenomena that are not the usual expectations of Christians. Roman Catholic
Christianity has been able to incorporate such persons more willing than has Protestant
Christianity. Among Catholic mystics are Bernard of Clairvaux (twelfth century),
St. Bonaventure (thirteenth century), and St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross
(sixteenth century). In spite of its skepticism of such experiences with their intense
emotion and antirational auras, Protestant Christianity has nonetheless included such
mystics as Jakob Böhme (seventeenth century), George Fox (seventeenth century), and
William Law (eighteenth century).
Likewise, Judaism has had its mystics. Hasidic Judaism, with its roots going back
to the twelfth century, has emphasized the importance of the mystical life, and in
the later Middle Ages a mystical minority movement known as Cabalism arose in
Judaism. Its influence was principally in Spain and southern France, and it has no
continuity with modern Judaism (whereas Hasidism does).
2 See W. D. Davis, Invitation to the New Testament (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1969), pp. 347–350.
However we define it, mystical experience may not be all that rare. National
surveys reveal that a sizable percentage of Americans report having had an experience
involving religious insight or awakening or an encounter with the divine. The sociolo-
gist and priest Andrew Greeley observes that “a full 35% of Americans reported they
had had a mystical experience: feeling ‘very close to a powerful, spiritual force
that seems to lift you out of yourself.’ And one-seventh of those who have had such
experiences—5% of the whole population—have literally been ‘bathed in light’ like
the Apostle Paul.”3
That people today report having had religious experiences is an empirical fact, and
such experiences immediately raise a host of questions for philosophers. Among the
first would be the question of how we can know whether the reports of mystical experi-
ence are different in kind from the reports of those having delusions. One answer is
given by the British philosopher C. D. Broad, who, throughout his philosophic career,
was interested in paranormal experiences, including the experiences of mystics. How
are we to tell whether they are more in common with the delusions of someone who
has had too much drink or are like someone with sight among blind persons?
Broad, who has a rather sympathetic approach to the claims of mystics, offers
the following argument: The delusions of an alcoholic suffering from delirium
tremens are perceptions of things not unlike the objects we perceive in our everyday
life. The alcoholic may see pink rats or snakes on the bed, and since we would be
able to see these things if they were there, that we don’t see them is a strong argu-
ment for the view that the drunk is suffering from delusions. Broad suggests that the
case with the mystic may be more aptly compared with the perceptions of a person
with sight in a land of the blind. Here is how Broad puts it:
When there is a nucleus of agreement between the experiences of men in different

places, times, and traditions, and when they all tend to put much the same kind of
interpretation on the cognitive content of these experiences, it is reasonable to
ascribe this agreement to their all being in contact with a certain objective aspect
of reality unless there is some positive reason to think otherwise. The practical
postulate which we go upon everywhere else is to treat cognitive claims as veridical
unless there be some positive reason to think them delusive. This, after all, is our
only guarantee for believing that ordinary sense-perception is veridical. We cannot
prove that what people agree in perceiving really exists independently of them; but
we do always assume that ordinary waking sense-perception is veridical unless we
can produce some positive ground for thinking that it is delusive in any given case.
I think it would be inconsistent to treat the experiences of religious mystics on
different principles.4
What basis do we have for accepting the claims of mystics as being truthful and
dependable insights into the nature of things? Like the arguments for the existence
3 Andrew Greeley, “Mysticism Goes Mainstream,” American Health, January–February 1987, p. 47.
4 C. D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company,
1953), p. 197.
Mysticism 9
of God, we will see that the issue is inconclusive. Reasonable people can refuse to
accept the veridical nature of mystical experience and still be religious. Others who
have such experiences find themselves driven to religion. Still others apparently
have had experiences similar to mystical experience completely apart from a com-
mitment to any religion.
The reading that follows, a selection from the philosopher William James, is
a discussion of mystical experience more relevant to union mysticism than to
communion mysticism. After giving a definition of mystical experiences, James
offers several examples, a description of some of the disciplines used by mystics to
induce the experiences, and the vocabulary they develop to describe them. He ends
with an analysis of mystics’ claims that they have a special and privileged way of
knowing religious truth.
Mysticism

WILLIAM JAMES
W hat does the expression ‘mystical states of consciousness’ mean? How do we

part off mystical states from other states?
The words ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystical’ are often used as terms of mere reproach,
to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and
without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers a ‘mystic’ is any person who
believes in thought-transference, or spirit-return. Employed in this way, the word
has little value: there are too many less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep it useful by
restricting it, I will . . . propose to you four marks which, when an experience has
them, may justify us in calling it mystical . . . In this way we shall save verbal dispu-
tation, and the recriminations that generally go therewith.
1. Ineffability.—The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as

mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression,
that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from
Source: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902).
The full text is also available in the Library of America Series, William James: Writings 1902–1910.
this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or trans-
ferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling
than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never
had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have
musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s
self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot
interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him
weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experi-
ences an equally incompetent treatment.
2. Noetic quality.—Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to
those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of
insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illu-
minations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though
they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for
after-time.
These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in
which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually
found. These are:—
3. Transiency.—Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare
instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond
which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality
can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they recur it is recog-
nized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous devel-
opment in what is felt as inner richness and importance.
4. Passivity.—Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by
preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through
certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism pre-
scribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the
mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he
were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects
mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative
personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic
trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may
be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no signifi-
cance for the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere
interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive.
Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their
importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of
their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult to make,
and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures.
These four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of conscious-
ness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study. Let it then
be called the mystical group.
Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples. . . .
Mysticism 11
In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under
the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the
divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual
concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach
it. The yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his
lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samâdhi, “and comes face to
face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. . . .”
The Buddhists use the word ‘samâdhi’ as well as the Hindus; but ‘dhyâna’ is their
special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recog-
nized in dhyâna. The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one
point. It excludes desire, but not discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In
the second stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity
remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along
with memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage the indifference, memory,
and self-consciousness are perfected. [Just what ‘memory’ and ‘self-consciousness’
mean in this connection is doubtful. They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in
the lower life.] Higher stages still of contemplation are mentioned—a region where
there exists nothing, and where the mediator says: “There exists absolutely nothing,”
and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: “There are neither ideas
nor the absence of ideas,” and stops again. Then another region where, “having
reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops finally.” This would seem to be,
not yet Nirvâna, but as close an approach to it as this life affords.
In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the pos-
sessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest
times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of
the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have been inoculated into
Islam by Hindu influences. We Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are
disclosed only to those initiated. . . .
In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many
of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes of the
authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as precedents, and a codi-
fied system of mystical theology has been based upon them, in which everything
legitimate finds its place. The basis of the system is ‘orison’ or meditation, the
methodical elevation of the soul towards God. Through the practice of orison the
higher levels of mystical experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism,
especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything
methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical
experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our
mind-curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life.
The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind’s detachment from outer
sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal things. Such manuals
as Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommend the disciple to expel sensation by a
graduated series of efforts to imagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline
would be a semi-hallucinatory mono-ideism—an imaginary figure of Christ, for
example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether
literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism. But in certain cases imagery
may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state
of consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical
teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the
best of them, thus describes the condition called the ‘union of love,’ which, he says,
is reached by ‘dark contemplation. . . .’
My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke [mystical experience] as
authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for the truth of the twice-bornness
and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this
question as concisely as I can.
In brief my answer is this—and I will divide it into three parts:—
1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be,
absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who
stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
3. They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness,
based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one
kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in
which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to
have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
1.
As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and
emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. They have been
‘there,’ and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical
truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate
have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him
into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind—we commonly
attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs. It mocks our utmost efforts, as a
matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own
more ‘rational’ beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which
mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of
fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have
them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the
five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their episte-
mological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression,—that is, they are
face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.
The mystic is, in short, invulnerable, and must be left, whether we relish it or
not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which
men live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms.
Mysticism 13
2.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought
to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves
outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can ever ask of us in
this life is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and
have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a
unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom,
however, this would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism
the other way; and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge
it, it is for ‘suggestive,’ not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to
do so suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being
strong. . . . The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a
‘privileged case.’ It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest
specimens and their preservation in ‘schools.’ It is carved out from a much larger
mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has histori-
cally taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin
with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and
makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both
ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church. It is dualistic
in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the
great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions
non-metaphysical minds, for whom ‘the category of personality’ is absolute. The
‘union’ of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than
like an original identity. How different again, apart from the happiness common to
all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and
other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort. The fact is
that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific
intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial
alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies,
provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional
mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of
any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic
identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It is only relatively in favor of all
these things—it passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in
which they lie.
So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for reli-
gious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated
traditions except those which the textbooks on insanity supply. Open any one of
these, and you will find abundant cases in which ‘mystical ideas’ are cited as char-
acteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity,
paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of
religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in
the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same
voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous
powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have
desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is
evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic
mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that
great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the
existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of
matter: ‘seraph and snake’ abide there side by side. To come from thence is no
infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of
confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the
outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as
we are not mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to
acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their
intrinsic nature.
3.
Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows
the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what
we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning
to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the
emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already
objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection
with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything
that our senses have immediately seized. It is the rationalistic critic rather who
plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for
there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be
added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must
always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such
superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more
extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different
mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The
wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this
world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting
and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our
world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to
use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our
custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we
are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious deal-
ing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our
approach to the final fullness of truth.
Mysticism 15
Discussion Questions
1. Even though national surveys reveal that many people have had intense religious
experiences, such experiences do not seem to be widely talked about. Why do you think this
is the case?
2. Do you agree with C. D. Broad’s view that mystics should be compared to persons with
sight in the land of the blind? Why or why not?
3. William James gives examples of mystical experiences in different religious traditions.
What conclusion can you draw from this about the relation between mysticism and religion?
4. Explain in your own words the difference between communion mysticism and union
mysticism.
5. James concludes, “non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical
states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature.” What reasons does he
advance for this conclusion? Do you agree?
Intuitive Ways of Knowing
Any defender of mystic experience as veridical is thereby committed to the view that
there are multiple ways of knowing. Because the Western world has become so depen-
dent on scientific ways of knowing, it is tempting to completely discount any knowl-
edge claim not based on perception, observation and, in general, empirical modes of
thought that can be quantified and analyzed by statistical and logical methods. It is this
limited view of knowledge that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan calls into question.
Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) was a significant Indian philosopher who held
both teaching and administrative positions at leading Indian universities. He also
had a significant career as statesman and politician. He served as an ambassador to
the Soviet Union and later as both vice president and president of India. He is
known widely in the West as an interpreter of Hindu thought and one of its most
eloquent expositors. His book, Indian Philosophy, is not only an eloquent exposition
of the history of Indian religion but also forms the basis for Radhakrishnan’s effort to
show the compatibilities between Eastern and Western religious traditions.
Radhakrishnan is known for his interpretation of the Upanishads which, together
with the Brahma-sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, form the core Scriptures of Hinduism.
The Upanishads provide the basis for Vedanta, the form of Hinduism espoused by
Samkara (788–820), the noted ninth-century Hindu theologian who developed a
systematic interpretation of Hindu themes found in the metaphysical assertions of the
Upanishads. The term Upanishad comes from the Sanskrit phrase meaning instruction,
in the sense of personal and private teaching by a master to disciples. Among the over
two hundred Upanishads, most interpreters limit the most significant ones to eighteen
or even fewer. These Hindu Scriptures originated over a long period of time, beginning
as early as 800 B.C.E. Central to their theological claims, as understood by Vedanta, is
the centrality of Brahman as the sole and ultimate reality. Vedanta claims that only
Brahman is real and all else is illusion or maya, including the physical world and
individual selves. Radhakrishnan understands this to mean that the world is neither
ultimate reality nor unreality but something in between. The point is that knowledge
cannot be based on this illusory world of the senses but can only be directed toward
the ultimately real, and the way to this knowledge is not the scientific approach
directed to the world of the senses but to the ultimate reality through a sort of religious
16
Personal Experience of God 17
or spiritual experience. It is difficult to find a single English word to capture this kind of
knowledge, but the one Radhakrishnan uses is intuition, a kind of noninferential,
unmediated, direct insight. Therefore, the knowledge we gain through the senses is not
knowledge of the ultimate and permanent reality but only knowledge of the passing
world of appearances. True knowledge, or intuitive wisdom, is knowledge of Brahman
and comes through intuition rather than through the intellect. His description of intu-
itive wisdom, however, resembles in many ways the language of the mystics when they
speak of awareness of the ineffable or the absolute.
In his discussion of intuitive knowledge Radhakrishnan argues that such knowl-
edge is not unique to Hinduism but is shared by other world religions and is even
found in ancient Greek philosophy and in such later philosophical movement as
neoplatonism. Perhaps an apt summary of Radhakrishnan’s views can be found toward
the end of the selection: “Those who emphasise the transcendence of the Supreme to
the human insist on the specifically religious consciousness, of communion with a
higher than ourselves with whom it is impossible for the individual to get assimilated.
Devotional religion is born of this haunting sense of otherness.”
A note on spellings: There are various ways of transliterating Sanskrit words
using the Latin alphabet, and in the reading that follows some of the transliterations
may not be as familiar as the more common ones: r..sis=rishi, sage or a person of
wisdom; kr..sna=Krishna, a divine figure some regard as a god in his own right. The
Taoist Scriptures, the Tao te ching, are referred to as Tao Têh King. Since most of the
Sanskrit words are defined in the author’s discussion, the differences in translitera-
tion style should not pose a problem for the reader.
Personal Experience of God

SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN
A ll the religions owe their inspiration to the personal insights of their prophet
founders. The Hindu Religion, for example, is characterised by its adherence to
fact. In its pure form, at any rate, it never leaned as heavily as other religions do on
Source: SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN AND CHARLES A. MOORE: A SOURCE BOOK
IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY © 1957 Princeton University Press, 1985 renewed PUP. Reprinted by per-
mission of Princeton University Press.
authority. It is not a “founded” religion; nor does it centre round any historical
events. Its distinctive characteristic has been its insistence on the inward life of
spirit. To know, possess and be the spirit in this physical frame, to convert an obscure
plodding mentality into clear spiritual illumination, to build peace and self-existent
freedom in the stress of emotional satisfactions and sufferings, to discover and realise
the life divine in a body subject to sickness and death has been the constant aim of
the Hindu religious endeavour. The Hindus look back to the Vedic period as the
epoch of their founders. The Veda, the wisdom, is the accepted name for the highest
spiritual truth of which the human mind is capable. It is the work of the .. rsis or
the seers. The truths of the .. rsis are not evolved as the result of logical reasoning or
systematic philosophy but they are the products of spiritual intuition, dr..s.ti or vision.
The ..rsis are not so much the authors of the truths recorded in the Vedas as the seers
who were able to discern the eternal truths by raising their life-spirit to the plane of
the universal spirit. They are the pioneer researchers in the realm of spirit who saw
more in the world than their fellows. Their utterances are based not on transitory
vision but on a continuous experience of resident life and power.1 When the Vedas
are regarded as the highest authority, all that is meant is that the most exacting of all
authorities is the authority of facts.
If experience is the soul of religion, expression is the body through which it
fulfils its destiny. We have the spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they
are communicated to others, śruti or what is heard, and smr.ti or what is remembered.
Śaṁkara equates them with pratyak.sa or intuition and anumāna or inference. It is the
distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations
change. Śruti and smr.ti differ as the authority of fact and the authority of interpreta-
tion. Theory, speculation, dogma, change from time to time as the facts become
better understood. Their value is acquired from their adequacy to experience. When
forms dissolve and the interpretations are doubted, it is a call to get back to the
experience itself and reformulate its content in more suitable terms. While the
experiential character of religion is emphasised in the Hindu faith, every religion at
its best falls back on it.
The whole scheme of Buddhism centres on Buddha’s enlightenment. Moses saw
God in the burning bush, and Elijah heard the still small voice. In Jeremiah we read:
“This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith
the Lord. I will put my hand in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it.”2
Jesus’ experience of God is the basic fact for Christianity: “As he came up out of the
river he saw the heavens parted above him and the spirit descending like a dove
towards him: and he heard a voice sounding out of the heavens and saying ‘Thou art
my beloved son. I have chosen thee.’ ” According to St. Mark, the baptism in the
Jordan by John was to Jesus the occasion of a vivid and intense religious experience, so
much so that he felt that he had to go for a time into absolute solitude to think it over.3
1 Sadā paśyanti sūrayah.

2 xxxi. 37.
3 Mark i.10.
He obviously spoke of the ineffable happening, the sudden revelation, the new peace
and joy in words that have come down to us. He emphasises the newness of the reborn
soul as something which marks him off from all those who are religious only at second
hand. “Verily I say unto you, among men born of women there hath not arisen a greater
than John the Baptist; but the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.”1 The
vision that came to Saul on the Damascus road and turned the persecutor into an apos-
tle2 is another illustration. Faith means in St. James acceptance of dogma; in St. Paul it
is the surrender of heart and mind to Christ; but in the Epistle to the Hebrews, faith is
defined as that outreaching of the mind by which we become aware of the invisible
world.3 The life of Mohammad is full of mystic experiences. Witnesses to the personal
sense of the divine are not confined to the East. Socrates and Plato, Plotinus and
Porphyry, Augustine and Dante, Bunyan and Wesley, and numberless others, testify to
the felt reality of God. It is as old as humanity and is not confined to any one people.
The evidence is too massive to run away from.
CHARACTER OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

To study the nature of this experience is rather a difficult matter. All that one can hope
to do is to set down a few general impressions. It is a type of experience which is not
clearly differentiated into a subject-object state, an integral, undivided consciousness in
which not merely this or that side of man’s nature but his whole being seems to find
itself. It is a condition of consciousness in which feelings are fused, ideas melt into one
another, boundaries broken and ordinary distinctions transcended.4 Past and present
fade away in a sense of timeless being. Consciousness and being are not there different
from each other. All being is consciousness and all consciousness being. Thought and
reality coalesce and a creative merging of subject and object results. Life grows con-
scious of its incredible depths. In this fulness of felt life and freedom, the distinction of
the knower and the known disappears.5 The privacy of the individual self is broken
into and invaded by a universal self which the individual feels as his own.
The experience itself is felt to be sufficient and complete. It does not come in a
fragmentary or truncated form demanding completion by something else. It does not
1 See also Matt. xi.11.

2 Acts ix.1–9.
3 See also I Cor. xiii.12; Romans viii. 18–25; Rev. xiii.22.
4 “In this intelligible world, everything is transparent. No shadow limits vision. All the essences see
each other and interpenetrate each other in the most intimate depth of their nature. Light everywhere
meets light. Every being contains within itself the entire Intelligible world, and also beholds it entire in
any particular being. . . . There abides pure movement; for He who produces movement, not being foreign
to it, does not disturb it in its production. Rest is perfect, because it is not mingled with any principle of
disturbance. The Beautiful is completely beautiful there, because it does not dwell in that which is not
beautiful” (Enneads, v.8.4).
5 “To have seen that vision is reason no longer. It is more than reason, before reason, and after
reason, as also is the vision which is seen. And perhaps we should not here speak of sight; for that which
is seen—if we must needs speak of seer and seen as two and not one—is not discerned by the seer, nor
perceived by him as a second thing. Therefore this vision is hard to tell of; for how can a man describe as
other than himself that which, when he discerned it, seemed not other, but one with himself indeed?”
(Enneads, vi.9 and 10).
look beyond itself for meaning or validity. It does not appeal to external standards of
logic or metaphysics. It is its own cause and explanation. It is sovereign in its own rights
and carries its own credentials. It is self-established (svatah.siddha), self-evidencing
(svasaṁvedya), self-luminous (svayamprakāśa). It does not argue or explain but it knows
and is. It is beyond the bounds of proof and so touches completeness. It comes with
a constraint that brooks no denial. It is pure comprehension, entire significance,
complete validity. Patañjali, the author of the Yoga Sūtra, tells us that the insight is
truth-filled, or truth-bearing.1
The tension of normal life disappears, giving rise to inward peace, power and
joy. The Greeks called it ataraxy, but the word sounds more negative than the
Hindu term “śānti” or peace, which is a positive feeling of calm and confidence, joy
and strength in the midst of outward pain and defeat, loss and frustration. The expe-
rience is felt as profoundly satisfying, where darkness is turned into light, sadness
into joy, despair into assurance. The continuance of such an experience constitutes
dwelling in heaven which is not a place where God lives, but a mode of being which
is fully and completely real.
However much we may quarrel about the implications of this kind of experience,
we cannot question the actuality of the experience itself. While the profound intu-
itions do not normally occur, milder forms are in the experience of all who feel an
answering presence in deep devotion or share the spell which great works of art cast on
us. When we experience the illumination of new knowledge, the ecstasy of poetry or
the subordination of self to something greater, family or nation, the self-abandonment
of falling in love, we have faint glimpses of mystic moods. Human love perhaps takes us
nearest to them. It can become an experience deep and profound, a portal through
which we enter the realm of the sublime. “My life, My all, My more,” said Sappho to
Philaenis. To have one’s heart and mind absorbed in love seems to unveil the mystery
of the universe. We forget the sense of the outward world in our communion with the
grandeur beyond. Religious mysticism often falls into the language of passionate love. It
has been so from the Upanisads and the Song of Songs.
Since the intuitive experiences are not always given but occur only at rare
intervals, they possess the character of revelation. We cannot command or continue
them at our will. We do not know how or why they occur. They sometimes occur
even against our will. Their mode of comprehension is beyond the understanding of
the normal, and the supernormal is traced to the supernatural. Those who are gifted
with the insight tend to regard themselves as the chosen ones, the privileged few.
Conscious of a light which other men had not, they feel inclined to believe that the
light has been directed on them and that they are not only the seekers but the
sought. “Only he who is chosen by the Supreme is able to realise it.”2
If all our experience were possessed of intrinsic validity (svatahprāmānya) there
would be no question of truth and falsehood. There would be nothing with which
our experience will have to cohere or to correspond. There would not arise any need
1 R
2
. tambharā latra prajñā (Yoga Sūtra I.48).
Yamaivesa vr.nute lena labhya.h.
or desire to test its value. All our experience will be self-valid, i.e. all reality will be
present in its own immediate validity. But even the noblest human minds have had
only glimpses of self-valid experiences. The moments of vision are transitory and
intermittent. We therefore do not attain an insight, permanent and uninterrupted,
where reality is present in its own immediate witness. But we are convinced that
such an ideal is not an impossible one.
So long as the experience lasts, the individual remains rapt in contemplation,
but no man can rest in that state for all time. Life is restless surge. Scarcely is the
seer assured of the unique character of the experience than he is caught in the whirl
of desire and temptation, discord and struggle. During the vision, its influence was
so potent and overwhelming that he had neither the power nor the desire to analyse
it. Now that the vision is no more, he strives to recapture it and retain in memory
what cannot be realised in fact. The process of reflection starts. He cannot forget
the blessed moments which have a weight for the rest of his life and give to his
beliefs a power and a vividness that nothing can shake. The individual adopts an
attitude of faith which is urged by its own needs to posit the transcendental reality.
He affirms that the soul has dealings, direct, intimate and luminous, with a plane of
being different from that with which the senses deal, a world more resplendent but
not less real than the conventional one. The experience is felt as of the nature of a
discovery or a revelation, not a mere conjecture or a creation.
The real was there actually confronting us, it was not conjured out of the
resources of our mind.1 He claims for his knowledge of reality an immediate and intu-
itive certainty, transcending any which mere reason can reach. No further experience
or rational criticism can disturb his sense of certainty. Doubt and disbelief are no more
possible. He speaks without hesitation and with the calm accents of finality. Such
strange simplicity and authoritativeness do we find in the utterances of the seers of the
Upanisads, of Buddha, of Plato, of Christ, of Dante, of Eckhart, of Spinoza, of Blake.
They speak of the real, not as the scribes, but as those who were in the immediate
presence of “that which was, is and ever shall be.” St. Theresa says: “If you ask how it
is possible that the soul can see and understand that she has been in God, since during
the union she has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see it
then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has returned to herself, not by any
vision, but by a certitude which abides with her and which God alone can give her.”2
In addition to the feeling of certitude is found the sense of the ineffability of the
experience. It transcends expression even while it provokes it. It is just what it is and
not like anything else. There is no experience by which we can limit it, no conception
by which we can define it. The Kena Upanisad says that “it is other than the known
and above the unknown.”3 As Lao Tze expresses it at the beginning of his Tao Têh
King: “The Tao which can be expressed is not the unchanging Tao; the Name which
can be named is not the unchanging Name.” . . .
1 Bhūtam brahma na purusavyāpāratantram (Śaṁkara on Brahma Sūtra I.i.l).

.
2 James: Varieties of Religious Experience (1906), p. 409.
3 I.3.
EXPERIENCE AND THE VARIETY OF EXPRESSIONS

If all our experiences were adequately intuited at once, such immediate intuitions
could not be doubted under any circumstances; but, as it is, we are compelled to
relate our intuitive experiences with others and here we are obliged to employ
formulas. The pedestrian function of consolidation and revaluation seems to be
indispensable. The only way to impart our experiences to others and elucidate their
implications for the rest of our life and defend their validity against hostile criticism
is by means of logic. When we test the claim of the experience to truth, we are really
discussing the claims of the forms or propositions in which the nature of the experi-
ence is unfolded. In the utterances of the seers, we have to distinguish the given and
the interpreted elements. What is regarded as immediately given may be the product
of inference. Immediacy does not mean absence of psychological mediation but only
non-mediation by conscious thought. Ideas which seem to come to us with com-
pelling force, without any mediate intellectual process of which we are aware, are
generally the results of previous training in traditions imparted to us in our early
years. Our past experience supplies the materials to which the new insight adds fresh
meanings. When we are told that the souls have felt in their lives the redeeming
power of Kr..sna
. or Buddha, Jesus or Mohammad, we must distinguish the immediate
experience or intuition which might conceivably be infallible and the interpretation
which is mixed up with it. St. Theresa tells us that after her experience she learned to
understand the Trinity. Surely she would not have recognised the revelation as that
of the Trinity if she had not already known something of the Trinity.1 Similarly, if
Paul had not learned something about Jesus, he would not have identified the voice
that came to him on the Damascus road as Jesus’. We must distinguish the simple
facts of religion from the accounts which reach us through the depth of theological
preconceptions. That the soul is in contact with a mighty spiritual power other
than its normal self and yet within and that its contact means the beginning of
the creation of a new self is the fact, while the identification of this power with the
historic figures of Buddha or Christ, the confusion of the simple realisation of the
universal self in us with a catastrophic revelation from without, is an interpretation,
a personal confession and not necessarily an objective truth. Something is directly
experienced, but it is unconsciously interpreted in the terms of the tradition in which
the individual is trained. The frame of reference which each individual adopts is
determined by heredity and culture.
Again, there is no such thing as pure experience, raw and undigested. It is always
mixed up with layers of interpretation. The alleged immediate datum is psychologically
mediated. The scriptural statements give us knowledge, or interpreted experience,
a that-which. The “that” is merely the affirmation of fact, of a self-existent spiritual
experience in which all distinctions are blurred and the individual seems to overflow
into the whole and belong to it. The experience is real though inarticulate.
Among the religious teachers of the world, Buddha is marked out as the one
who admitted the reality of the spiritual experience and yet refused to interpret it
1 Evelyn Underhill: Mysticism, 5th ed., p. 132.
as a revelation of anything beyond itself. For him the view that the experience
gives us direct contact with God is an interpretation and not an immediate datum.
Buddha gives us a report of the experience rather than an interpretation of it,
though strictly speaking there are no experiences which we do not interpret. It is
only a question of degree. But Buddha keeps closest to the given and is content
with affirming that a deeper world of spirit penetrates the visible and the tangible
world. Such a world certified as valid by the witness of perfect intuition exists
beyond or rather within the world of multiplicity and change which the senses and
understanding present to us. The primary reality is an unconditional existence
beyond all potentiality of adequate expression by thought or description by symbol,
in which the word “existence” itself loses its meaning and the symbol of nirvāna .
alone seems to be justified. The only liberty in which Buddha indulges when
obliged to give a positive content to it is to identify it with Eternal righteousness
(dharma), which is the principle of the universe1 and the foundation of all conduct.
It is on account of it that we have the implicit belief in the worth of life.
The Hindu thinkers admit the ineffability of the experience but permit themselves
a graduated scale of interpretations from the most “impersonal” to the most “personal.”
The freedom of interpretation is responsible for what may be called the hospitality of
the Hindu mind. The Hindu tradition by its very breadth seems to be capable of
accommodating varied religious conceptions. . . .
God and Self
While the fulness of spiritual being transcends our categories, we are certain
that its nature is akin to the highest kind of being we are aware of in ourselves. If the
real were utterly transcendent to the self of man, it would be impossible for us to
apprehend even dimly its presence. We would not be able to say even that it is
“wholly other.” There is in the self of man, at the very centre of his being, some-
thing deeper than the intellect, which is akin to the Supreme. God’s revelation and
man’s contemplation seem to be two sides of one fact. The spiritual glimpses are
prophetic indications of an undeveloped power of apprehension in the human mind
as well as of an underlying reality with which it is unable to establish permanent
contact without an adequate development of that power. There is a real ground in
man’s deepest being for the experience of reality. Man as a microcosm has relations
with every form of existence. While the spiritual apprehension appears in the course
of our ordinary life, it is not due to it. It has its source elsewhere though it exhibits
its force on the plane of the ordinary consciousness. It is due to that part of the soul
which is timeless being. The consubstantiality of the spirit in man and God is the
conviction fundamental to all spiritual wisdom. It is not a matter of inference only.
In the spiritual experience itself, the barriers between the self and the ultimate real-
ity drop away. In the moment of its highest insight, the self becomes aware not only
of its own existence but of the existence of an omnipresent spirit of which it is, as it
were, a focussing. We belong to the real and the real is mirrored in us. The great text
of the Upani.sad affirms it—Tat tvam asi (That art Thou). It is a simple statement
1 See Appendix to the writer’s work on Indian Philosophy, I, 2nd ed., 1929.
of an experienced fact. The Biblical text, “So God created man in his own image;
in the image of God created he him,”1 asserts that in the soul of man is contained
the true revelation of God. “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.”2
According to Plato man is potentially a participator in the eternal mode of being
which he can make his own by living in detachment from the fleeting shadows of
the earth. In the Theaetetus Socrates declares that we should strive to become “like
unto the divine.” “I and my Father are one,” “All that the Father hath are mine,” is
the way in which Jesus expressed the same profound truth. It is not a peculiar rela-
tion between any one chosen individual and God but an ultimate one binding every
self to God. It was Jesus’ ambition to make all men see what he saw and know what
he knew. In the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Jesus sums up the various ethical
demands in the general requirement: “Be ye therefore perfect as your heavenly
Father also is perfect.” As Paul says, he was the first-born among many brethren.
Recognising us all as children of God and made in his image, Jesus shows us
by his own example that the difference between God and man is only one of degree.
St. John spoke of the spirit as “the light that lighteth every man that cometh into
the world,” the “spirit that guides unto all the truth.” The phrase in I Peter of a birth
“of the incorruptible seed by the word of God” refers to the divine in man. Plotinus’
last words to his physician Eristochius are: “I was waiting for you before that which
is divine in me departs to unite with itself the Divine in the Universe.”3 The
Quakers believe in the divine spark or the apex in the soul. Descartes asks: “How
could I doubt or desire, how could I be conscious, that is to say, that anything is
wanting in me, and that I am not altogether perfect, if I had not within me the idea
of a being more perfect than myself, by comparison with whom I recognise the
defects of my own nature.”4 According to Eckhart: “There is something in the soul
which is above the soul, divine, simple, an absolute nothing. . . . This light is satis-
fied only with the supraessential essence. It is bent on entering into the simple
ground, the still waste wherein is no distinction, neither Father nor Son nor Holy
Ghost, into the unity where no man dwelleth.” Augustine says: “And being admon-
ished to return into myself, I entered even into my inmost self. Thou being my
guide, I entered and beheld with the eye of my soul, above the same eye of my soul,
above my mind, the light unchangeable.”5 St. Catherine of Genoa says: “God is my
being, my life, my strength, my Beatitude, my Goal, my Delight.” “All minds par-
take of one original mind,” says Cudworth.6 The individuals are the reproductions
of an eternal consciousness according to Green. William James, in his Varieties of
Religious Experience, writes: “The overcoming of all the usual barriers between the
1 Genesis i.27.
2 Proverbs xx.27.
3 Witness also the last testament of Labadie: “I surrender my soul heartily to my God, giving it back
like a drop of water to its source, and rest confident in him, praying God, my origin and ocean, that he
will take me into himself and engulf me eternally in the divine abyss of his being” (Inge, Philosophy of
Plotinus (1918), I, 121 n).
4 Third Meditation.
5 Confessions, vii.10. See also vii.32.
6 Intellectual System, iii.62.
individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states
we become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is
the everlasting and triumphant mystic tradition, hardly altered by differences of
clime and creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism,
in Whitmanism, we have the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical
utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think,
and which brings it about that the mystic classics have, as has been said, neither
birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man and God, their
speech antedates language, nor do they grow old.” The immanence of God, the
revelation of the meaning and mystery of life in the soul of man, is the substance of
the mystic testimony.
We generally identify ourselves with our narrow limited selves and refer to spiritual
experience as something given or revealed to us, as though it did not belong to us. We
separate the power of spiritual apprehension from the rest of our nature and refer to it
as something divine. Such a separation is unfair to humanity. The insight of the best
moments reveals the deepest in us. It is wrong to regard human nature as its very self
when it is least inspired and not its true self when it is most. If our self finds in these
moments of vision its supreme satisfaction, and is intensely alive while they last, then
that self is our true self. We cannot limit our being to the physical or the vital, the cus-
tomary or the conventional. The divine in us is the source and perfection of our nature.
The Divine is both in us and out of us. God is neither completely transcendent
nor completely immanent. To bring about this double aspect, contradictory
accounts are given. He is divine darkness as well as “unencompassed light.” The
philosophers with their passion for unity emphasise the immanent aspect, that there
is no barrier dividing man from the real. The unity of man and God is the funda-
mental thesis of the great philosophic tradition which has come down to us from the
Upani.sads and Plato. Aristotle, Plotinus, Śaṁkara, Spinoza, Bradley and a host of
others are witnesses to it.
Those who emphasise the transcendence of the Supreme to the human insist
on the specifically religious consciousness, of communion with a higher than our-
selves with whom it is impossible for the individual to get assimilated. Devotional
religion is born of this haunting sense of otherness. We may know God but there
is always a something still more that seems unknown and remains unspoken. A
profound impression of the majesty of God always remains with the devotee who
is certain that we can never reach the divine level of glory. Some of the seers of
the Upani.sads, the author of the Bhagavad-gītā, St. Theresa, John of the Cross,
represent this type. For them the experiences themselves are due to the grace of
God. God speaks to us, commands us, comforts us, and we speak to him in praise
and prayer, reverence and worship. There are many degrees in this personal rela-
tionship, from the feeling of utter humiliation in the presence of the numinous,
the other than ourselves, to the communion with a supreme Love on whose grace
the worst sinner can count.
There cannot be a fundamental contradiction between the philosophical idea
of God as an all-embracing spirit and the devotional idea of a personal God who
arouses in us the specifically religious emotion. The personal conception develops

the aspect of spiritual experience in which it may be regarded as fulfilling the
human needs. Man finds his rest and strength in the spiritual experience and so
he knows the spirit as that which fulfils his needs. God is represented as possessing
the qualities which we lack. In a sense the Freudians are not wrong when they
assert that our religion is the projection of the desires of grown-up children. Justice,
love and holiness are the highest qualities we know and we imagine God as pos-
sessing them, though these qualities exist in God in a different sense from their
existence in us.
To compare the Supreme with the highest kind of being we know is nearer the
truth than comparing him with anything lower. Though the supreme spirit in its
essential aspect is the changeless noumenal reality, its representation in the form of
a personal God who is the source, guide and destiny of the world seems to be the
highest open to the logical mind. The difference between the Supreme as spirit and
the Supreme as person is one of standpoint and not of essence, between God as he is
and God as he seems to us. When we consider the abstract and impersonal aspect of
the Supreme, we call it the Absolute; when we consider the Supreme as self-aware
and self-blissful being, we get God. The real is beyond all conceptions of personality
and impersonality. We call it the “absolute” to show our sense of the inadequacy
of all terms and definitions. We call it “God” to show that it is the basis of all that
exists and the goal of all. Personality is a symbol and if we ignore its symbolic
character it is likely to shut us from the truth. Even those who regard personality as
the ultimate category of the universe recognise that God is vast and mysterious,
mighty and ultimate.1
Our myths and metaphors “do him wrong, being so majestical,” and the spiri-
tual seers know it; it is their intellectual followers who ignore it.
In the history of thought we have had different interpretations of the spiritual
experience, such as Buddha’s conception that it is the reality we are to accept with
reverence; Aristotle’s view of the Unmoved First Mover whose supreme perfection
1 Calvin says: “God treats sparingly of his essence. His essence is indeed incomprehensible by us.
Therefore let us willingly leave to God the knowledge of his own essence” (Institute of the Christian
Religion).
A Bengali poet sings:
“I have searched the Vedas and the Vedāntas, the Tantras and the Mantras, yet nowhere have I
found thy fulness.
“As Rāma thou dost take the bow, as Śyāma the Black (Kr.s. na)
. thou dost seize the sword.
“O mother, mother of the universe, art thou male or female? Who can say? Who knows they form?
“Nilakantha’s mind ever thinks of thee as chief of the Creators” (E. J. Thomson and A. M. Spencer:
Bengali Religious Lyrics, 9.78).
A modern poet writes:
“Some seek a Father in the heavens above;
Some ask a human image to adore;
Some crave a spirit vast as life and love;
Within thy mansions we have all and more.”
(G. Matheson, quoted in Bulcock: Religion and its New Testament Explanation (1928), p. 278).
draws the universe towards himself as the beauty of the beloved draws the lover;1
Spinoza’s God who is that than which nothing is more real, which we are called
upon to love without expecting anything in return, a personal God who is a creature
of moods and passions, an ethical God who is the highest good at which men aim,
and a knightly God who begs of us the favour of helping him in his great designs.
The monotheists are quite certain that the gods of the polytheists are symbolic if
not mythological presentations of the true God, but they are loath to admit that
their own God is at bottom a symbol. All religion is symbolic, and symbolism is
excluded from religion only when religion itself perishes. God is a symbol in which
religion cognises the Absolute. Philosophers may quarrel about the Absolute and
God, and contend that God, the holy one who is worshipped, is different from the
Absolute which is the reality demonstrated by reason. But the religious conscious-
ness has felt that the two are one.2
1. Based on your knowledge, do you think that the experiences Radhakrishnan cites from
various religions as examples of intuitive experience are all the same? If different, how are
they different?
2. Have you, personally, had an experience that could be classified as religious in
Radhakrishnan’s sense of the term? Or, to put it more explicitly, have you ever had a mystical
experience? The answer to this question may be interesting if asked in a group of persons.
3. To put the question differently, have you ever had a nonmystical experience of God?
Would you be willing to describe it?
4. Assuming that the only way of knowing is the empirical, scientific way, what does this
do to claims of mystical experience? Can they be explained in other ways? If so, how?
5. Basic to Radhakrishnan’s analysis is the claim that most religions share some common
features regarding the experience of God. Do you agree that religious devotion is rooted in
such experiences, as Radhakrishnan implies? Give reasons for your answer.
1Metaphysics, A. 7.
2 Cp. Thomas à Kempis: “He to whom the eternal word speaks is set at liberty from a multitude of
opinions.”
Critique of Mysticism
An issue raised by any discussion of religious experience is whether it is central to all

religions or is merely one among many features of religions. It also raises the question
of the nature of religious experience in general.
What is clear about religious experience, however one defines it, is that it is
something in addition to the cognitive and rational component of religion. Think
of it in this way: Cognitive content refers to the specifics of religious belief.
The rational component consists of the reasons given to support those beliefs.
Some thinkers have protested that this sort of analysis leaves out the important
role played by religious experience, which is nonrational. This means that reli-
gious experience is different from the rational component—not opposed to it, just
different. According to these thinkers, even if it is not mystical, religious experi-
ence should not be ignored.
The importance of experience in the genesis of religion continued to be a
theme found in writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The previous
selection from the writings of Radhakrishnan shows just how central religious expe-
rience is, in his view, to understanding religion as a whole. Although William James
gives a descriptive account of mystical components of religious experience, he seems
to leave open the possibility that such experiences, though perhaps not the core of
religion, nonetheless add a vital component to it.
The philosopher Walter Kaufmann will have none of it. In the selection that
follows he argues that mystical experience is not the core of religion, as its sup-
porters allege, but merely one among many features found in religions. He takes
on William James point by point, arguing against James’s description of mystical
experience. He also does not think the less mystical religious experiences, which
he calls “inspirational experiences,” are central to religion since they can be given
a nonreligious interpretation. While not denying that some followers of a religion
have had both mystical and inspirational experiences, Kaufmann points out that
“millions of religious people have never had an experience of either type.” To
make religious experience the core of religion would be to generate a “secondhand
religion” for those who haven’t had such experiences. Kaufmann finds this to be
unacceptable.
28
The Core of Religion

WALTER KAUFMANN
C LAIMS FOR MYSTICISM. Many writers find the core of religion in mysticism. This
provides an experiential basis for religion and an excuse for the conflicts between
religion and common sense, faith and reason. Religion, it is said, represents an attempt
to do justice to a singular kind of experience which is ignored by common sense and
by the sciences: at the very least, religion supplements the partial world views that are
based on sense and reason; and some writers even claim that the world of sense and
reason is a phantom while mysticism affords us a glimpse of ultimate reality.
It would follow that there are two kinds of religion: the genuine religion of the
mystics, and the secondhand religion of the rest of mankind. The mystics are said to
have experienced something to which religious scriptures, dogmas, rites, and propo-
sitions try to give form, however inadequately. The mystic himself does not need
these aids: they are for the rest of us who must, alas, get our religion secondhand.
Some think that all the mystics agree on essentials, which is, on the face of it,
patently false; but the term can be defined so narrowly that it insures uniformity:
those who do not agree are not called real mystics. Even to the extent to which
there is agreement, there is doubt about its significance . . . .
INEFFABILITY. In his chapter on “Mysticism” in The Varieties of Religious Experience,
William James proposed “four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify
us in calling it mystical.” These four criteria were: ineffability, noetic quality, tran-
siency, and passivity. After briefly discussing each, James reiterated: “These four char-
acteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness peculiar enough
to deserve a special name.” Yet the last three criteria afford us no grounds whatever for
distinguishing the mystic experience: sense experiences also yield knowledge, do not
last, and find us receptive rather than active. It would seem therefore that it must be
ineffability that sets apart mystic experiences.
In his emphasis on ineffability, James is far from alone. On the basis of many
assertions in this vein by mystics themselves, other writers have stressed this
point, too; most emphatically, perhaps, Walter Stace in his attempt to show that
mysticism is the core of all religion. This claim of a unique ineffability deserves
closer scrutiny.
Source: KAUFMANN, WALTER, CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY © 1958 by

Walter Kaufmann, 1979. Published by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton
University Press.
29
The first objection that comes to mind is that so many mystics have been down-
right garrulous. A sympathetic immersion in the texts, however, suggests that their
effusions often issued from dissatisfaction with any single statement they could make.
The second objection is that this criterion might exclude the major figures of the
Bible from Moses to St. Paul: they did not take refuge in any claim of ineffability, and
their own statements apparently struck them as adequate and clear. This objection
may be answered by saying that these men were in deed no mystics.
The third objection is more detailed and involves some analysis of the assertion
that the mystic experience is distinguished by its ineffability. What is supposed to be
ineffable? Is it the experience or its object? Let us begin by supposing that it is the
experience.
There are two aspects of an experience that might well lead a person to call it
ineffable: first, direct acquaintance; secondly, emotion. Suppose you have long
known a description or even a picture of the temple of Poseidon at Paestum in
southern Italy; and then you see the temple for the first time. This experience might
well be ineffable in a sense. What you can say about the temple after this experience
might be nothing new at all. What you now describe, you could have described
before, too. But the difference reading a description or even seeing a picture and
seeing the temple itself may be overwhelming. If it is, the second element comes
into play, too: you have an emotional experience; and emotional experiences are
extremely difficult to describe. (Cf. §§ 28 ff. and 63.) . . .
Both the element of acquaintance and that of emotion are present in all our
experiences, and neither is entirely ineffable. The element of acquaintance can be
communicated, and usually is, simply by the statement that we saw something,
or heard, or smelled, or felt something with our own eyes, ears, nose, or body. The
element of emotion is generally communicated by means of an approximate label:
I was thrilled, excited, disappointed, desperate, or possibly dumfounded. To achieve
greater precision requires art. If utterly unimaginative declaratory sentences could
do full justice to all our nonmystic experiences, there would be no need for poetry
and painting, for the subtle prose of Joyce and Faulkner, or for music. . . .
Now it may be claimed that the mystic differs from other men by having a kind
of second sight which enables him to perceive an ineffable object. Where the mystic
himself claims something of this sort, we must consider three possibilities.
First, his experience may actually have no object at all; it may be intransitive
like the experience of hunger, bliss, despair, or ecstasy. If we realize that we are
hungry and that some food would allay our discomfort, we are not likely to be
very puzzled by our experience or to think of it as ineffable, though if we concen-
trated on what we actually feel, we should find that it was exceedingly hard to
describe. But if we are hungry, as occasionally happens, without realizing that we
are hungry, we are quite apt to consider our experience ineffable. It is similar
with homesickness when a child does not diagnose its own condition. It cannot
rightly say what it feels. Words fail the child: it must depend on the intuitive
understanding of a person who has had the same experience and knows how
it feels.
The Core of Religion 31
Bliss, despair, and ecstasy present fundamentally the same picture. They are all
ineffable in a sense but amenable to an imaginative attempt at communication. When
we know what prompted the experience, we are less apt to emphasize its ineffability;
when we feel elated or dreadfully depressed without quite understanding our own
condition, we are more apt to stress the inadequacy of words.
Secondly, it is possible that an experience has a definite object which is describ-
able, and that it is only the element of acquaintance or the emotional aspect which
all but defies description. In that case, my description will sound like the descriptions
I used to read; it will miss what I had always missed—and what my audience will miss
until and unless they have the experience themselves. As in all of the preceding
cases, there is no essential difference between mystic and nonmystic experience.
Thirdly, let us imagine a case in which a person desires to have a particular
experience of which he has some preconception. He may, for example, crave a
vision of the Virgin Mary. He may go into seclusion, forgo sleep, fast, practice
austerities, pray and meditate, and hope for his vision all the time. When the
moment of his vision comes, we should hardly expect him to see Shiva in his glory,
dancing. Lutherans do not usually see the Virgin Mary, and Catholics do not see
Martin Luther, unless it were in hell. On the nonreligious level, a man who desires
passionately to evoke the vivid picture of a loved one who is either dead or distant
will usually find, if he succeeds, that the image conforms, at least in important
respects, to the image he expected.
Now, if a man desires the experience of an ineffable object, whether Brahma or
the One or God, then any experience that is not ineffable will be ruled out as not
yet the ultimate experience. If on the other hand, the man has an experience which
is in important respects indescribable, he will be inclined to insist that it was ineffa-
ble even if it belonged in one of the categories considered above. If he was deter-
mined all along to experience something timeless and eternal, he will construe his
oblivion of time during his experience as an indication that he has experienced
something timeless. If he wished for the experience of the One, he will take the
absence of plurality in his experience for a proof that its object was the One. . . .
CRITERIA OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE. We have found William James’ set of four
criteria utterly inadequate: what sets apart mystical experiences is not that they are,
unlike other experiences, ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive. Other similar
attempts are little better; and many are a great deal worse.
Evelyn Underhill, for example, in one of the best-known studies of Mysticism,
offers an effusive tribute rather than objective criteria when she stipulates five points
in Chapter IV, following up each with a little paean. In the original, all five sentences
are italicized. “(1) Mysticism is practical, not theoretical. . . . (2) Mysticism is an
entirely spiritual activity. . . . (3) The business and method of Mysticism is Love. . . .
(4) Mysticism entails a definite Psychological Experience. . . . (5) True Mysticism is
never self-seeking.”
These suggestions came out of years of study which issued in other books, too, and
they have some evocative power; but they do not offer adequate criteria. In fact, Miss
Underhill seems to imply that the experience itself has no distinctive criteria and can
be judged to have been an instance of “True Mysticism” only in the light of its fruits:
mysticism—that appears to be the implication—is a psychological experience which
affects a person’s life and leads him to engage in “entirely spiritual activity” which is
marked by the prominence of “love” and the absence of “self-seeking.” The emphasis
on love excludes the sages of the Upanishads and the Zen Buddhists. Nor did Miss
Underhill realize that her five points fit the Hebrew prophets rather better than many
of the most-renowned mystics, for example, Plotinus. Clearly, she was thinking of
certain Christian mystics whom she admired especially.
Miss Underhill was perhaps the best-known English writer on mysticism. Her
American counterpart was Rufus Jones. He defined mysticism as “the type of reli-
gion which puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relation with God, on
direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence” (xv). But this defintion
would restrict mysticism to theistic religions, which is hardly reasonable. Again, the
Zen Buddhists would be left out.
What James and Jones and Underhill, among others, overlook is this: what sets
apart the mystic experience is not anything given, but the interpretation and evalua-
tion which the person who has the experience accords to it. And this interpretation
need not be theistic.
To be considered mystical, and experience must, first, be considered different
from everyday perception. It stands out, it is uncommon, it marks a break in the
everyday world. James’ four criteria take no note of this. It may seem to be highly
elusive criterion, but it is not. Two men may have two very similar experiences: if
one of them feels that it was part of the everyday world and really not at all extraor-
dinary, he rules out the suggestion that it might have been a mystical experience;
while the other man, if he feels that it was an uncommon experience, leaves open
the possibility that it might have been mystical.
The second criterion is that the experience is considered much more impor-
tant than our everyday perceptions. If a man says that while crossing the street
and being narrowly missed by a car he had an uncommon experience, but that
he attaches no importance to it, then he is implying that it was not a mystical
experience.
The third criterion is that the person who has the experience finds no objective
correlative for it in nature. The conception of the objective correlative was popu-
larized by T. S. Eliot, who took the idea—and not only this idea—from Santayana’s
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (277); and Eliot’s use of it was anything but pro-
pitious. He argued that Shakespeare’s Hamlet “is most certainly an artistic failure”
and then tried to back up this extraordinary judgment by finding “the grounds of
Hamlet’s failure” in the lack of an objective correlative. It will be best to quote
Eliot’s own explanation of his term from “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919): “The
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correl-
ative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall
be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked.” To give an example, Eliot claims that “the words of Macbeth on hearing of
his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were auto-
matically released by the last event in the series. The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in
this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is
deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inex-
pressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.”
A short critique of Eliot will provide a helpful perspective for our third criterion
of the mystical experience. In the first place, there is a very important sense in
which Hamlet’s emotions are fully warranted by the facts. His father, whom he
worshipped, has been murdered. If Hamlet’s feelings toward his father were deeply
ambivalent, this would complicate his emotion and make it harder for him to
express it. His mother, whom he loves, has remarried almost immediately—a man
whom Hamlet loathes, and of whom he suddenly hears that he was the murderer.
Moreover, his murdered father was king, he himself is the heir, and his loathsome
uncle is now the head of the state: even without going into Hamlet’s relation to
Ophelia, it should be clear that Hamlet’s emotions are not “in excess of the facts as
they appear.” And yet there is a sense in which they are: a less sensitive person
would feel less emotion even under such extraordinary provocation; it is only in
conjunction with Hamlet’s sensibility that the objective correlative is adequate for
his emotions.
It is a commonplace that Hamlet is highly sensitive; and highly sensitive people,
by definition, feel emotions which are, if one insists on putting it that way, “in excess
of the facts”—from the point of view of less sensitive people. The average person
would not have broken out into the words of Macbeth either, even if he had heard of
his wife’s death under the very same circumstances; and one might with more justice
question the unity of Shakespeare’s conception of Macbeth—even though Eliot con-
siders Macbeth one “of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies”—than the emotion
of Hamlet. (Cf. § 87.)
There is, in sum, no objective correlation of fact and emotion in such a way
that one could say generally that certain facts warrant a certain amount of emotion,
unless we include among the facts of the case the sensibility of the person who
has the experience. If we apply this result to experiences which may or may not be
mystical, it appears that a highly emotional experience in a situation in which most
men would not feel nearly so much emotion does not establish the absence of an
objective correlative: if the person who has the experience is extremely high-strung
and excitable and has possibly even worked himself into a state of hypersensitivity
by fasting, going without sleep, and praying fervently, then there is an objective
correlative even for an enormous amount of emotion. Our criterion, however, is
that the person who has the experience finds no objective correlative for it in
nature; that he himself feels that his experience is in excess of what is waranted by
the naturalistic facts. If he does find an objective correlative for it in nature, then he
rules out the suggestion that it might be a mystical experience.
The fourth criterion is that the person who has the experience finds the objective
correlative either beyond nature or in nature as a whole, as opposed to any conjunc-
tion of things in nature. Which of these two alternatives he embraces and what name
he gives to the objective correlative will generally depend on the religious tradition in
which he stands. The man of the Upanishads will speak of Brahma; the Taoist of the
Tao; some Buddhists of Nirvana; some Christians of God, others of the Trinity, and
still others of the Virgin; and some who stand outside all denominations may speak of
nature or the cosmos.
These four criteria are meant to be taken in conjunction: where all four are
satisfied we are confronted with what is usually called a mystical experience. . . .
If the fourth criterion were qualified further to demand that the person who had
the experience must feel afterward that he was altogether one with the non-naturalistic
objective correlative we mentioned—if, in short, we should restrict mysticism to expe-
riences of a so-called unio mystica—we should exclude altogether too much that is
generally included in discussions of mysticism. “Numerous mystics, Jews as well as non-
Jews, have by no means represented the essence of their ecstatic experience, the
tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, as a union with God.”
Scholem has shown this in considerable detail as far as Jewish mysticism is concerned;
but there can be no doubt that he is right about non-Jewish mystics, too.
Mystical experiences are by no means all the same, and the differences
are not reducible to the interpretations which the mystics offer afterward. The
experiences themselves are molded by the personality and the prior beliefs and
expectations of the mystic. Suzuki does not have the same experience as Santa
Teresa. . . .
MYSTICISM, INSPIRATION, AND RELIGION. What sets apart the mystical experi-
ence is in part what the man who has it thinks of it. And he will generally give his
experience a religious interpretation, or even have his experience in religious terms,
only when he stands in a religious tradition. The mystical experience is not the core of
religion but a phenomenon in the history of religion.
Inspirational experiences, too, can be given a nonreligious interpretation by
the person who has the experience, depending on his prior outlook. But while the
mystical experience is frequently mild and impersonal and at least superficially at
odds with the traditional anthropomorphism of popular religion, the inspirational
experience is typically violent and suggests to the person having it that he encoun-
ters a being not altogether unlike himself, only more powerful. It is therefore likely
that this type of experience had more to do with the origin of the major religions
than the mystical experience. This thesis would have to be tested by careful histori-
cal research, but an initial probability in its favor may be established by reference to
the Hebrew Scriptures and to the Vedic literature, both of which are inspirational
rather than mystical.
The major religious teachers of mankind have had experiences which more
or less approximated one or the other of these two types; but millions of religious
people have never had any experience which closely approximated either type. So
we may conclude that mystical and inspirational experiences have played a central
role in all of the major religions and sacred scriptures of mankind, but these two
types of experience cannot be said to be the core of religion; rather they constitute
two central phenomena in religion. There are others as well.
1. What is your own sense of the importance of religious experience? Which do you find
more acceptable, the views of James or those of Kaufmann?
2. What in your own experience supports your attitude toward religious experience?
3. Kaufmann claims that accepting mystical experience as central to religion would
create a secondhand religion for those not having such experience. Do you agree? Why or
why not?
4. Defenders of religious experience claim that the cognitive and rational elements in
religion are, by themselves, insufficient. What is your own view on this question?
5. If religious experience is not the core of religion, what is?
Varieties of Religious
Understanding
Today, with the increases in communication, travel, immigration patterns, and the
generally enhanced knowledge of the world and its peoples, it is scarcely possible to
adhere to one’s own religion without encoutering those with differing religions. We
are speaking here not of different denominations or groups within a religion but of
totally different religious traditions. This would not pose any particularly philo-
sophical problems were it not for the fact that some religions claim that theirs is
the only way to salvation and anyone outside of that religious tradition is damned.
Close to this claim of exclusivity is the logical difficulty of dealing with religious
truth claims. If religion A has the truth and religion B differs from it, then how is it
possible to avoid saying that religion B is false? And if religion C claims that it has
the only way to salvation, how can it then accept the salvation claims of religions
A and B?
In the selection that follows, John Hick deals with the conceptual difficulties
that must be overcome if one is to have what he refers to as a pluralistic view of
religions. Without repeating his discussion of the issues here, it is important to
understand that Hick deals with the issues on several levels. Initially, he looks at
what might be called the moral imperatives of various religions or what he, using
the terminology of the Christian faith, refers to as the “fruits of the Spirit.” He
notes that there is a consistency among the world’s great religions in the kind of
behavior they espouse and that judged on this basis no single tradition can claim
moral superiority.1 It is, of course, possible to point out major failings within each
civilization and the religion it espouses. But no religious tradition seems to be any
worse in this regard; people are often not as good as their religion demands or may
even attempt to justify their monstrous acts by appealing to their religion for
approval. In this regard, Hick says, “it is not possible to establish the unique moral
1 In an appendix to his book, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), C. S. Lewis offers
a summary of the teachings of the world’s religions that shows their consistency in moral demands.
He refers to this, using the traditional terms, as Natural Law or the Tao, or Way (see pp. 95–121).
36
Varieties of Religious Understanding 37
superiority of any one of the great world faiths” and that “both the virtues and the
vices are, so far as we can tell, more or less equally spread among the population,
of whatever major faith . . .”
The conclusion of Hick’s selection focuses on the conceptual difficulty of
accepting different religious traditions as equally true, for this at first appears to
be a manifest contradiction. Appealing to three analogies, Hick first argues that
people can perceive reality differently depending on their own perceptual experi-
ence, and he uses as an example the well-known duck-rabbit picture from psychol-
ogist Jastrow, an example also referred to by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical
Investigations. Secondly, Hick points out that the epistemological difficulty inher-
ent in the wave/particle complementarity in physics shows how we have come to
accept dual accounts of physical phenomenon as both true, depending on the
observational context. This, he suggests, might provide an analogous way of think-
ing about different experiences of the sacred. His final analogy is from cartography
that allows a three-dimensional reality—the earth—to be portrayed variously in
different projections, all of which have their purposes and none of which can be
considered privileged. He concludes that “it could be that the conceptual maps
drawn by the great traditions . . . are all more or less equally reliable within their
different projections, and more or less equally useful for guiding us on our journey
through life.”
Though he does not mention this issue in the selection that follows, there are
important issues in addition to the philosphical difficulties posed by claims of reli-
gious exclusivity. A religion’s claim to have the only viable hold on the truth can
lead to absolutism and intolerance. It is only a short step from absolutism to the
view that anyone differing in their religious beliefs should not be allowed to hold
those beliefs and should either be forced to change them or be prevented from
acting on them. Denial of religious freedom, repression, persecutions, pogroms, and
wars of extermination too often follow absolutist claims about religious truth. This
need not be the case, and it is not necessary for a religion to abandon its sense of
uniqueness; the approach Hick suggests does not require that one give up tradi-
tional beliefs but only understand them in a new light. The issues he raises are
important ones and are likely to become more so as the dynamics of contemporary
life force the adherents of major religious traditions into even more direct contact
with each other.
The Pluralistic Hypothesis

JOHN HICK
T he new conditions affecting our understanding of the world religions have been
gradually forming during the last three centuries. During what is called the
European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there devel-
oped a Western realization that Christendom is part of a much larger human world,
with great civilizations having existed outside it, above all in China and India as
well as the Islamic world; and along with this the realization that Christianity is one
world religion amongst others. It was then that the generic idea of religion became
established in educated circles, with Christianity seen as one particular form. But
now, and particularly since the end of the Second World War, this awareness has
become prominent in public consciousness. At least three developments have con-
tributed to this. One has been an explosion of information in the West about the
religions of the world. First-rate scholarship, published in reasonably cheap paper-
backs, is now readily available concerning—taking them in order of antiquity—
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Islam, Sikhism,
Baha’i, as well as the primal or indigenous religions of Africa, North and South
America, Australasia, and elsewhere. Secondly, travel opportunities have multi-
plied and great numbers of Westerners have spent time in India, Turkey, Egypt,
Thailand, Sri Lanka and other non-Christian countries, and have seen something
of the peaceful influence of Buddhism among the Thai people, something of the
ecstatic devotion and the powerful sense of the divine among Hindus, something of
the marvels of Islamic civilization as expressed architecturally in, for example, the
Taj Mahal at Agra or the great mosques of Istanbul; and many Westerners have also
made their own mind-expanding and consciousness-altering inner journeys in the
practice of Eastern methods of meditation. And third, and perhaps most important
of all, there has been massive immigration from East to West, bringing Muslims,
Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists to settle in Europe and North America. There are, for
example, between four and five million Muslims in North America, and about five
million in Europe; and there are also in the West smaller but still quite large num-
bers of Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, as well of course as the long-established Jewish
communities, tragically reduced by a third in the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s. As a
result of this post-war immigration we are now familiar in many major cities of the
Source: From A Christian Theology of Religions © 1995 John Hick. Used by permission of
Westminister John Knox Press.
38
The Pluralistic Hypothesis 39
Western world—including my own city of Birmingham, England—not only with

churches and synagogues but also with mosques, gurudwaras, meditation centres,
and temples of many kinds; and may have worshippers in these places as neighbours.
A further result, making an even deeper and more significant impression on
many people is the fact that by coming to know individuals and families of these
various faiths it has become a fairly common discovery that our Muslim or Jewish or
Hindu or Sikh or Buddhist fellow citizens are in general no less kindly, honest,
thoughtful for others, no less truthful, honourable, loving and compassionate, than
are in general our Christian fellow citizens. People of other faiths are not on average
noticeably better human beings than Christians, but nor on the other hand are they
on average noticeably worse human beings. We find that both the virtues and the
vices are, so far as we can tell, more or less equally spread among the population, of
whatever major faith—and here I include Humanism and Marxism as major
(though secular rather than religious) faiths. At any rate I have to record the fact
that my own inevitably limited experience of knowing people who are Jews,
Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, including a few remarkable individuals of these
religions as well as more ordinary individuals and families, both in the United States
and Europe and also in India, Africa, Sri Lanka, and Japan, has led me to think that
the spiritual and moral fruits of these faiths, although different, are more or less on a
par with the fruits of Christianity; and reading some of the literature of the different
traditions, both some of their scriptures and philosophies and also some of their
novels and poetry portraying ordinary life, has reinforced this impression.
And again, when we look at the great civilizations of the earth, informed as
they have been by different religious faiths, we see both great goods and great evils
in each. But it doesn’t seem possible to make a comparative assessment of these
goods and evils in any acceptable way so as to establish the moral superiority of
Christian civilization. For the goods and evils are so often incommensurate. How do
you weigh the evils of the Indian caste system over the centuries against the evils of
the European class system over the same centuries; or the poverty of so many
Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim countries against the greedy use of the earth’s non-
renewable resources and the selfish destruction of the environment by so many
Christian countries; or the social problems of Calcutta or Bangkok or Cairo against
the poverty, drugs, violence, crime and despair in many of our own inner cities; or
the cruelties of some Eastern regimes against the virulent anti-Semitism of
Christian Europe? It is easy, of course, to pick out some manifest evil within another
tradition and compare it with some manifest good within one’s own. But this is not
a truthful way of proceeding. The fact is that for every evil that you can quite rightly
point to in another strand of history, it is possible with equal justification to point to
a different but more or less equally reprehensible feature of one’s own. We have to
see the world religions as vast complex religio-cultural totalities, each a bewildering
mixture of varied goods and evils. And when we do so we find that we have no way
of objectively calibrating their respective values, adding so many points for this
feature and deducting so many for that. We can, I suggest, only come to the negative
conclusion that it is not possible to establish the unique moral superiority of any one
of the great world faiths. It may be that in the sight of God one of them has in fact
been, as an historical reality, superior to the others, but I don’t think that from our
human point of view we can claim to know this. . . .
SALVATION
Let’s now look at the situation again from a slightly different angle. Let’s concentrate on
the idea of salvation, an idea that is absolutely central to Christian thought, both tradi-
tional and revisionary. If we define salvation as being forgiven and accepted by God
because of the atoning death of Jesus, then it is a tautology that Christianity alone
knows and teaches the saving truth that we must take Jesus as our lord and saviour,
plead his atoning death, and enter into the church as the community of the redeemed,
in which the fruits of the Spirit abound. But we’ve seen that this circle of ideas contra-
dicts our observation that the fruits of the Spirit seem to be as much (and as little)
evident outside the church as within it. I suggest that we should continue to follow the
clue provided by these fruits; for Jesus was clearly more concerned with men’s and
women’s lives than with any body of theological propositions that they might have in
their minds. Indeed in his parable of the sheep and the goats the criterion of divine
judgment is simply whether we have fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the
naked, and visited the sick and the imprisoned (Matt. 25.31–46)—in other words,
whether our lives have shown the fruits of the Spirit. Suppose, then, we define salvation
in a very concrete way, as an actual change in human beings, a change which can be
identified when it can be identified—by its moral fruits. We then find that we are talk-
ing about something that is of central concern to each of the great world faiths. Each in
its different way calls us to transcend the ego point of view, which is the source of all
selfishness, greed, exploitation, cruelty, and injustice, and to become re-centered in that
ultimate mystery for which we, in our Christian language, use the term God. We are, in
the words (transposed into inclusive language) of the Theologia Germanica, to be to the
Eternal Goodness what our own hands are to ourselves.1 In Muslim terms, we are to
submit absolutely to God, doing God’s will and finding in this the fulfillment of our
humanity. In Jewish terms, we are to live with joy and responsibility in accordance with
God’s Torah, finding in this, once again, the fulfillment of our humanity. In Hindu
terms, to quote Radhadkrishnan, ‘The divine consciousness and will must become our
consciousness and will. This means that our actual self must cease to be a private self; we
must give up our particular will, die to our ego, by surrendering its whole nature, its
consciousness and character to the Divine.’2 And in Buddhist terms, to quote a leading
contemporary exponent of Buddhism to the West, Masao Abe, ‘Buddhist salvation
is . . . nothing other than an awakening to reality through the death of the ego’,3 an
awakening which expresses itself in compassion for all sentient life.
1 Theologia Germanica, Ch. 10, trans. Susanna Winkworth, London: Macmillan 1937, p. 32.
2 S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanishads, London: Allen & Unwin and New York: Humanities
Press 1969, p. 105. Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford
University, and subsequently President of India, and was the author of a number of books on Eastern
philosophy and religion.
3 The Buddha Eye, ed. Frederick Franck, New York: Crossroad 1982, p. 153.
Without going further, it is I think clear that the great postaxial traditions,
including Christianity, are directed towards a transformation of human existence
from self-centredness to a re-centring in what in our inadequate human terms we
speak of as God, or as Ultimate Reality, or the Transcendent, or the Real. Among
these options I propose to use the term “the Real”, not because it is adequate—there
is no adequate term—but because it is customary in Christian language to think of
God as that which is alone finally real, and the term also corresponds to the Sanscrit
sat and the Arabic al-Haqq, and has parallels in yet other languages. And what is
variously called salvation or liberation or enlightenment or awakening consists
in this transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness. For brevity’s
sake, I’ll use the hybrid term “salvation/liberation”. I suggest that this is the central
concern of all the great world religions. They are not primarily philosophies or
theologies but primarily ways of salvation/liberation. And it is clear that salvation,
to this sense of an actual change in human beings from natural self-centredness
towards a re-centering in the Divine, the Ultimate, the Real, is a long process—
though there are often peak moments within it—and that this process is taking
place not only within Christianity but also, and so far as we can tell to a more or less
equal extent, within the other great traditions.
I can now introduce the familiar three-fold distinction within Christian theolo-
gies of religion as exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist.4 There are of course many
variations within each of these, but the threefold classification itself, when applied to
both truth-claims and salvation-claims, seems to cover the range of options. I some-
times hear people say that they do not fit into any of these three categories. I then ask
them what their own theology of religions is, and invariably it turns out either that
they don’t have one, so that naturally it does not exemplify any of the three types,
or else they do have one and it is manifestly a variation of one or other of the three!
You can of course double the number of options by adding the qualifier ‘possibly’ to
each, as Schubert Ogden has done in the case of pluralism: he argues that as well
as pluralism there is the view that pluralism is, from the Christian point of view, a
theological possibility, a possibility which one may affirm without having to affirm
that it is in fact realized.5 This seems clearly right. But I don’t think that it affects the
basic threefold distinction, and I shall accordingly continue to employ this widely
used typology.
So let us speak first in terms of salvation claims. Here, exclusivism asserts that
salvation is confined to Christians, or even more narrowly, in the traditional Catholic
dogma, that extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church there is no salvation. This
exclusivist position was however implicitly repudiated by Vatican II, and again by the
4 This widely used typology first appeared in print in Alan Race’s Christians and Religious Pluralism
(London: SCM Press and Maryknoll, New York, 1983, 2nd ed. 1994). It has recently been criticized by
Ian Markham in ‘Creating Options: Shattering the “Exclusivist, Inclusivist, and Pluralist” Paradigm,’ and
defended by Gavin D’Costa in ‘Creating Confusion: A Response to Markham’ both in New Blackfriars
(January 1993).
5 Schubert Ogden, Is There Only One True Religion or Are There Many?, Dallas: Southern Methodist
University Press, 1992.
present Pope in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, 1979, in which he said that
‘man—every man without any exception whatever has been redeemed by Christ,
and . . . every man—with each man without any exception whatever—Christ is in a
way united, even when man is unaware of it’ (para. 14). The only salvation-exclusivists
left are the few Catholic ultra-conservative followers of the late Archbishop Lefebvre,
who was excommunicated in 1988, and a much more numerous, vociferous and influ-
ential body of Protestant fundamentalists. Their position is a consistent and coherent
one for those who can believe that God condemns the majority of the human race,
who have never encountered or who have not accepted the Christian gospel, to eternal
damnation. Personally, I would view such a God as the Devil! But, more fundamen-
tally, if we mean by salvation an actual salvific change in women and men, then it is,
as I have been reminding us, an observable fact that this is not restricted either to any
section of Christianity or to Christianity as a whole. Given this very concrete concep-
tion of salvation/liberation, then, Christian exclusivism is not a live option, and I shall
not now spend any more time on it.
The position taken by Vatican II, and by the Pope in the encyclical from which
I just quoted, and also by the majority of both Catholic and Protestant theologians
today other than many fundamentalists, is aptly called inclusivism. This acknowl-
edges that the salvific process is taking place throughout the world, within each of
the great world faiths and also outside them, but insists that wherever it occurs it is
the work of Christ. Salvation, on this view, depends upon Jesus’ atoning death on
Calvary, though the benefits of that death are not confined to Christians but are
available, in principle, to all human beings. Thus people of the other world faiths
can be included within the sphere of Christian salvation. In Karl Rahner’s famous
phrase, they can be ‘anonymous Christians’. Many inclusivists feel, understandably,
uncomfortable with that imperialistic-sounding phrase; but their position is never-
theless essentially Rahner’s—namely that salvation, whenever and wherever it
occurs, is exclusively Christian salvation, so that Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists,
and so on, who are saved are saved, and can only be saved, by Christ whether or not
they know the source of their salvation.
This Christian inclusivism takes two forms. One defines salvation in traditional
terms, holding that in order to be saved one must personally accept Jesus as one’s lord
and saviour, but adds that those who do not encounter him in this life may do so after
death. This is an increasingly favoured option among conservative Christians who
nevertheless cannot accept that God has ordained the eternal loss of the majority of
humankind through no fault of their own. A recent Protestant example is Richard
Swinburne in his Responsibility and Atonement,6 and a recent Catholic example is
Father J. A. DiNoia’s ‘Christian theology of religions in a prospective vein’ in his
The Diversity of Religion7—meaning by ‘prospective’ that non-Christians may receive
salvation in or beyond death. My only comment upon this appeal to the life to come
is that a theologian who insists upon the unique superiority of Christianity but who
6 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 173.

7 Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1992, ch. 3.
cannot accept the exclusion of non-Christians as such from salvation, has no option
but to take this step, even though it involves abandoning the traditional teaching
that God’s grace in Christ must be accepted in this present life and that death fore-
closes the options.8 There should therefore be no concealment of the fact that one
part of the dogmatic structure is being modified in order to retain the acceptability of
another part and that this is being done, under the pressure of our modern sensibility,
in order to make room for the salvation of the non-Christian majority of humankind.
For those who define salvation in exclusively Christian terms some such doctrinal
modification is today unavoidable. But it can also be dangerous to the long-term
health of the dogma that is being saved. The new extension is analogous to the
epicycles that were added to preserve the old Ptolemaic astronomy for a little longer
before it finally collapsed. We should be warned that such theological epicycles tend
to appear in the last days of a dying dogma!
The other form of inclusivism is compatible with the wider understanding
of salvation as salvation/liberation, the actual transformation of men and women,
and ultimately through them of societies, and can gladly acknowledge that this is
happening—and happening in varying degrees now, in this life—outside Christianity
as well as within it. It insists, however, that the salvific influences of the Torah in
the lives of Jews, of Islam in the lives of Muslims, of Hindu spiritual practices in the
lives of Hindus, of the Buddhadharma in the lives of Buddhists, and so on, are all
ultimately due to the salvific work of Christ, who is secretly at work within all these
traditions. This is the idea of the unknown Christ of Hinduism—unknown, that is,
to Hindus,—and likewise the unknown Christ of Buddhism, and so on. Here Christ
has to mean, not the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but the resurrected Jesus in his
divine glory, now thought of as the heavenly Christ. As a very general idea this
sounds promising. However, the problem is to spell it out more precisely. It needs to
be shown by what kind of invisible causality the saving death of Jesus around 30 CE
has operated to make the other great religious traditions effective contexts of salva-
tion/liberation, apparently to much the same extent as Christianity. It will not
suffice to speak of the work of the resurrected Christ, since this presumably began
with Jesus’ resurrection around 30 CE—unless one is prepared to defend the idea of a
causality operating backwards through time to account for the spiritually liberating
power of the Buddha’s teachings some five hundred years earlier, and indeed, to
cover the beginnings of Hinduism and Judaism, operating backwards through time
8 Thus St. Augustine, affirming that unbaptized infants go to hell, says, ‘If, therefore [after a string
of biblical quotations], as so many and such divine witnesses agree, neither salvation nor eternal life
can be hoped for by any man without baptism and the Lord’s body and blood, it is vain to promise these
blessings to infants without them’, On Forgiveness of Sins, and Baptism, Book I, ch. 34. (The Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1956), p. 28.)
The Council of Florence (1438–45) declared that everyone outside the church will go to hell ‘unless
before the end of life they are joined to the church’ (Denzinger, 714). John Calvin wrote that ‘the strange
notion of those who think that unbelievers as to the coming of Christ, were after his death freed from
their sin, needs no longer refutation; for it is an indubitable doctrine of Scripture, that we obtain not sal-
vation in Christ except by faith; then there is no hope left for those who continue to death unbelieving’
(Commentary on the Catholic Epistles, trans. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Society 1856), p. 113).
for more than a thousand years. This would, surely, be a philosophical quagmire that
few would wish to get into.
In order to make sense of the idea of Christ at work within the world religions,
including those that precede Christianity, it will be necessary to leave aside the his-
torical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and his death on the cross, and to speak instead of
a non-historical, or supra-historical, Christ-figure or Logos (i.e. the second person of
the Trinity) who secretly inspired the Buddha, and the writers of the Upanishads,
and Moses and the great Hebrew prophets, and Confucius and Lao-Tze and Zoroaster
before the common era, as well as Muhammad, Guru Nanak, Ramakrishna and many
others since. But this Christ figure, or Logos, operating before and thus indepen-
dently of the historical life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, then becomes in effect a
name for the world-wide and history-long presence and impact upon human life of
the Divine, the Transcendent, the Ultimate, the Real. In other words, in order to
make sense of the idea that the great world religions are all inspired and made salvific
by the same transcendent influence we have to go beyond the historical figure of
Jesus to a universal source of all salvific transformation. Christians may call this the
cosmic Christ or the eternal Logos; Hindus and Buddhists may call it the Dharma;
Muslims may call it Allah; Taoists may call it the Tao; and so on. But what we then
have is no longer (to put it paradoxically) an exclusively Christian inclusivism, but a
plurality of mutually inclusive inclusivisms which is close to the kind of pluralism
that I want to recommend. I am suggesting in effect that religious inclusivism is
a vague conception which, when pressed to become clear, moves towards pluralism.
I will try presently to indicate what such a pluralism involves.
TRUTH-CLAIMS
But first let’s return to something I pointed out earlier, namely that the three-fold
exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism scheme can be applied both to salvation-claims
and also to truth-claims. Thus far we’ve been looking at it in terms of salvation-
claims. But what about truth-claims? For it’s undoubtedly the case that the great
world faiths have developed very different belief-systems. According to some, the
ultimate is personal, according to others non-personal. Among those which speak of
a personal God, Christianity teaches that the one and only God is triune and that
Jesus of Nazareth was the second person of this Trinity living a human life; whilst
Judaism teaches that the one and only God is not triune but strictly unitary, and has
selected the Jewish race as God’s chosen people and frequently intervened in their
history in Palestine, Egypt, and Babylonia; whilst Islam teaches that the one and
only God is unitary but is directly self-revealed in the Qur’an, and has intervened in
the life of the Muslim community in Mecca and Medina. Again, Vaishnavite
Hinduism believes in the personal Vishnu, who has become incarnate in Krishna
and in a number of other earthly figures; and Saivite Hinduism believes in the
divine lord Shiva, whose cosmic dance is the life of the universe. And so on. Again,
among the non-theistic traditions, advaitic Hinduism speaks of the universal con-
sciousness of Brahman, which in the depths of our being we all are; whilst different
strands of Buddhism speak of the universal Buddha nature, or of the Dharmakaya,
or Nirvana, or Sunyata; and Taoism of the eternal Tao whose nature cannot be
spoken in human terms. There are thus many different conceptions of the Ultimate,
the Real, related to correspondingly different forms of religious experience and,
arising from these, correspondingly different belief-systems. But if any one of these
belief-systems is true, in the sense of reflecting reality, must not all the others be
false, at least in so far as they differ from it? As Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘it is evident
as a matter of logic that, since [the great world religions] disagree, not more than
one of them can be true’.9 And yet I now want to question this basic assumption
that there can be at most one true religion, in the sense of a religion teaching saving
truth about the Ultimate and our relationship to the Ultimate. I want to suggest a
different approach altogether, and shall do so by means of a series of three analogies.
Consider, first, the psychologist Jastrow’s famous ambiguous duck-rabbit picture
which Wittgenstein used in his discussion of seeing-as in the Philosophical Investigations.
Suppose there is a culture in which ducks are a familiar sight but rabbits are com-
pletely unknown and have never even been heard of; and another culture in which
rabbits are familiar but ducks completely unknown. So when people in the duck-
knowing culture see the ambiguous figure they naturally report that it’s the picture of
a duck. Indeed they may well claim to know that this is what it is; for lacking the
concept of rabbit they are not aware that the picture is ambiguous. And of course the
other way round with the rabbit-knowing culture. Here it’s manifestly a rabbit and
there is again no ambiguity about it. The people of these two cultures are fully enti-
tled to affirm with full conviction that this is the picture of a duck, or of a rabbit, as
the case may be. And each group, when told of another group who claim that the
figure is something entirely different and alien to them, will maintain that that group
are confused or mistaken in some perhaps inexplicable way.
But Wittgenstein would be able to offer an account of the situation according
to which each group is right in what it affirms but wrong in its inference that the
other group is mistaken. They are both, he could point out, right in virtue of the fact
that what is actually there is capable of being equally correctly seen in two quite
different ways, as a duck or as a rabbit.
The analogy that I am suggesting here is with the religious experience component
of religion. And the possibility that I want to point to is that the ultimate ineffable
9 Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian, London: Allen & Unwin 1957, p. xi.
Reality is capable of being authentically experienced in terms of different sets of

human concepts, as Jahweh, as the Holy Trinity, as Allah, as Shiva, as Vishnu, and
again as Brahman, as the Dharmakaya, as the Tao, and so on, these different personae
and impersonae occurring at the interface between the Real and our differing religious
mentalities and cultures.
A second analogy may help to suggest how this may be possible. This is the wave-
particle complementarity in physics. It seems that if in an experimental situation you
act upon light in one way, it is observed to have wave-like properties, and if in another
way, to have particle-like properties. The properties it is observed to have depend
upon how the observer acts in relation to it. As Ian Barbour writes, in describing Niels
Bohr’s complementarity principle, ‘No sharp line can be drawn between the process of
observation and what is observed’;10 and he quotes Henry Folse’s interpretation of
Bohr as implying an ontology which ‘characterizes physical objects through their pow-
ers to appear in different phenomenal manifestations rather than through determinate
properties corresponding to those of phenomenal objects as was held in the classical
framework’.11 The analogy that I have in mind here is with spiritual practices—
prayer, forms of meditation, sacraments, common worship. In these practices we act in
relation to the Real. The suggestion here is that if in the activity of I-Thou prayer we
approach the Real as personal then we shall experience the Real as a personal deity.
What we are then likely to be aware of will be a specific divine personality, involved
in a particular strand of human history, the one who has chosen the Jewish people; or
the heavenly Father of Jesus’ teaching; or the divine being who spoke to the Arab
peoples in the Qur’an, and so on. Or if our religious culture leads us to open ourselves
to the Real in various forms of meditation, as the infinite non-personal being-
consciousness-bliss of Brahman, or as the eternal Dharmakaya ever expressing itself in
the limitless compassion of the Buddhas, then this is likely to be the way in which we
shall experience the Real. Putting it in familiar Christian language, revelation is a
relational matter, taking different forms in relation to people whose religious receptiv-
ity has been formed by different traditions, with their different sets of concepts and
their different kinds of spiritual practice.
A third analogy comes from cartography. Because the earth is a three-dimensional
globe, any map of it on a two-dimensional surface must inevitably distort it, and there
are different ways of systematically distorting it for different purposes, including
for example the familiar cylindrical projection invented by Mercator which is used in
constructing many of our maps of the world. But it does not follow that if one type of
map is accurate the others must be inaccurate. If they are properly made, they are all
accurate—and yet in another sense they are all inaccurate, in that they all inevitably
distort. However, one may be more useful for one purpose, another for another—for
great circle navigating, for shorter journeys, for travel in the tropics, for travel nearer to
10 Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science, Vol. I, London: SCM Press and New York: Harper &
Row 1990, p. 98.
11 Henry Folse, The Philosophy of Niels Bohr: The Framework of Complementarity, New York: North
Holland 1985, p. 237, quoted by Barbour, op. cit., p. 99.
the Poles, and so on. The analogy here is with theologies, both the different theologies
of the same religion and the even more different theologies and philosophies of differ-
ent religions. It could be that representations of the infinite divine reality in our finite
human terms must be much more radically inadequate than a two-dimensional repre-
sentation of the three-dimensional earth. And it could be that the conceptual maps
drawn by the great traditions, although finite picturings of the Infinite, are all more or
less equally reliable within their different projections, and more or less equally useful for
guiding us on our journey through life. For our pilgrim’s progress is our life-response to
the Real. The great world faiths orient us in this journey, and in so far as they are, as we
may say, in soteriological alignment with the Real, to follow their path will relate us
rightly to the Real, opening us to what, in different conceptualites, we will call divine
grace or supernatural enlightenment that will in turn bear visible fruit in our lives.
1. Hick says that religious inclusivism, “when pressed to become clear, moves towards
pluralism.” Explain how he thinks this happens.
2. Speaking from within the Christian tradition, Hick appeals to the notions of the divine
logos and the cosmic Christ. How do these concepts help him develop his notion of religious
pluralism?
3. How might God be understood in a way that responds to the varieties of human expe-
rience of the ineffable? Give some specifics.
4. Discuss the three analogies Hick uses to buttress his claim that various cultures can
conceptualize their experience of the divine in ways that are different but not exclusive. Do
some of these analogies seem to you to work better than others?
5. Given Hick’s analysis, how would you describe your own attitudes both toward your
own religion and other world religions?
RETROSPECTIVE
Religious Experience
The theme of this chapter follows the title of the influential book The Varieties of
Religious Experience by William James. We began with his discussion of mysticism,
the most intense and private form of religious experience. James points out that
mysticism can take many forms, from the ecstatic experience of union with the inef-
fable to the sense of the presence of God within. It knows no boundaries of religious
tradition or cultural background. The empirical fact that many persons have had a
mystical experience of one kind or another also means that any account of religion,
whether Eastern or Western, must come to terms with mysticism. Radhakrishnan
argues that intuitive knowledge based on religious experience is a feature of both
Eastern and Western religious traditions.
Walter Kaufmann is not so sure. He finds James’s account of mysticism

unconvincing and concludes that mystical experience, far from being the core
of religion, is merely one feature of religions. But not all religious persons have
mystical experiences, or even what he calls inspirational experiences. Either they
are condemned to a secondhand religion, or we have to conclude that religious
experience—whether mystical or inspirational—merely constitutes one feature
of religion, among others.
The selection by John Hick confronts the sheer variety of ways the earth’s people
experience the sacred. The issue Hick explores is how to hold one’s own religious tradi-
tion as legitimate without de-legitimizing the traditions and experience of other faiths.
It is a difficult issue not without hazards, one of which would be to adopt a relativism
that sees all faiths as equally authoritative and legitimate. Hick avoids such relativism
by arguing that the world’s major religions are complementary with one another and
offer different, though not necessarily opposed, ways of understanding the sacred.
From the exploration of religious experience in this chapter, we will move on to
other existential themes: the relation of religion to life and its implications for death
and human destiny. A philosophical study of religion cannot remain at the level of
experience forever, since philosophy must also confront thorny conceptual problems,
such as arguments for God’s existence, the problem of evil, and the relation between
faith and reason. Our exploration of philosophical themes in religion has just begun.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Alston, William F. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1993.
Examines grounds for belief based on religious experience.
Hepburn, Ronald. “Mysticism, Nature and Assessment of,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (l967), vol. 5,
pp. 429–434.
Otto, Rudolf. Mysticism, East and West. New York: Macmillan, 1932; reprinted, Kila, MT: Kessinger
Publishing Co., 2003.
Provides both a helpful understanding of mysticism and a backdrop for Otto’s own views.
Smart, Ninian. Dimension of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999.
Explores in detail the ways human beings experience the sacred and the spiritual aspects of life and
how they express those experiences.
Teresa of Avila, St. The Interior Castle, trans. Mirabai Starr. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003; and St. John
of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003.
A new translation of St. Teresa of Avila and the reprint edition of St. John of the Cross make readily
available these two classics of Christian mysticism.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. New York:
Dutton, 1915; reprinted, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.
The Dover edition is a reprint of the book that is still the classic study of mystical experience. Also
by the same author: Practical Mysticism and The Spiritual Life. The Evelyn Underhill Association maintains
a Web site devoted to a study of her works: www.evelynunderhill.org.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Alston, William F. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1993. Examines grounds for belief based on religious experience.
Hepburn, Ronald . Mysticism, Nature and Assessment of, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), vol. 5, pp.
429434.
Otto, Rudolf . Mysticism, East and West. New York: Macmillan, 1932; reprinted, Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing
Co., 2003. Provides both a helpful understanding of mysticism and a backdrop for Ottos own views.
Smart, Ninian . Dimension of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the Worlds Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999. Explores in detail the ways human beings experience the sacred and the spiritual aspects of life
and how they express those experiences.
Teresa of Avila, St . The Interior Castle, trans. Mirabai Starr. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003; and St. John
of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003. A new translation of St. Teresa of
Avila and the reprint edition of St. John of the Cross make readily available these two classics of Christian
mysticism.
Underhill, Evelyn . Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. New York:
Dutton, 1915; reprinted, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.
The Dover edition is a reprint of the book that is still the classic study of mystical experience. Also by the same
author: Practical Mysticism and The Spiritual Life . The Evelyn Underhill Association maintains a Web site
devoted to a study of her works: www.evelynunderhill.org.
Religion and Life

Robert, Buckman . Can We Be Good Without God?. Toronto: Penguin, 2000. Subtitled, Behaviour, Belonging
and the Need to Believe, the book defends a secular approach to morality.
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) articles discuss the themes of this chapter: Religion and Morality by
Patrick H. Nowell-Smith (vol. 7, pp. 150158) and Life, Meaning and Value of by Paul Edwards (vol. 4, pp.
467477).
Lesnick, Howard . Listening for God: Religion and Moral Discernment. New York: Fordham University Press,
1998. Offers reflections for how religious belief brings value to life.
Outka, Gene and Reeder, John P. Jr ., eds. Religion and Morality. Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor, 1973. A
collection of essays on the relation between religion and ethics that frames the issues in a compelling way.
Religion and Human Destiny

Edwards, David L. After Death: Past Beliefs and Real Possibilities. London: Cassell, 1999. A valuable survey of
beliefs about life after death.
Hick, John . Death and Eternal Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. A thorough and readable analysis of the
various dimensions of the topic .
Mackinnon, D. M. and Antony Flew . Death in New Essays in Philosophical Theology. London: SCM Press,
1955. Two views are presented in somewhat of a debate format.
Olson, Robert G. Death in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), vol. 2, 307330. Offers a good bibliography
and historical survey of attitudes toward death .
Raphael, Simcha Paul . Jewish Views of the Afterlife. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson Publishers, 1996. A survey
of four thousand years of Jewish thought on the afterlife .
Tilby, Angela Soul . God, Self and the New Cosmology. New York: Doubleday, 1992. A companion volume to
the BBC series entitled Soul.
Arguments for God's Existence

Gale, Robert M . On the Nature and Existence of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Investigates Western philosophys justifications for belief in God.
Hartshorne, Charles . The Logic of Perfection. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1991. A defense of
the ontological argument by a proponent of process theology.
Haught, John F . God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Examines
how evolution can be approached theologically.
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. See especially pp. 1321. Offers an argument for
Gods existence based on natural law.
Oppy, Graham Robert . Ontological Arguments and Belief in God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996. Explores the various versions of the ontological argument and argues that it is inadequate to convince
the unbeliever.
Paulos, John Allen . Irreligion. A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Dont Add Up. New
York: Hill & Wang, 2008. Uses mathematics to attack the arguments for Gods existence.
Plantinga, Alvin . God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eermans, 1978. Discusses natural theology, the
traditional arguments for Gods existence, and the problem of evil.
The Problem of Evil

Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. London, 1954.
Buch, Maganlal A . The Principles of Hindu Ethics. Baroda, 1921.
Eliade, Mircea . Notes de Dmonologie, Zalmoxis 1 (1938).
Eliade, Mircea . Mephistopheles and the Androgyne. Trans. J. M. Cohen . New York, 1965.
Eliot, Sir Charles . Hinduism and Buddhism. 3 vols. London, 1921.
Herman, Arthur Ludwig . The Problem of Evil and Indian Thought. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Published by Motilal Barnarsidass (New Delhi, 1976).
Keith, Arthur Berriedale . Indian Mythology. Vol. 6, part 1, of The Mythology of All Races, ed. L. H. Grey .
Boston, 1917.
Kolenda, Pauline Mahar . Religious Anxiety and Hindu Fate. Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (1964.
Supplement, Aspects of Religion in South Asia.):7181.
Obeyesekere, Gananath . Theodicy, Sin and Salvation in a Sociology of Buddhism. In Leach Edmund R . (ed.),
Dialectic in Practical Religion. Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, no. 5, pp. 740. Cambridge, 1968.
194 Sharma, Ursula . Theodicy and the Doctrine of Karma . Man, n.s.8 (1973):348364.
Smith, Ronald Morton . Sin in India. Unpublished paper presented at a conference on Tradition in South Asia,
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 15 May, 1970.
Watts, Alan . The Way of Zen, New York, 1957.
Weber, Max . The Sociology of Religion. Trans. by Ephraim Fischoff , intro. by Talcott Parsons . 4th ed.
London, 1963.
Davis, Steven T . Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.
Offers a theodicy that responds to the presence of evil in the world .
Drange, Theodore M. Nonbelief and Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1998. Sides with atheism in the philosophical debate over the problem of evil .
Ehrman, Bart D . Gods Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important QuestionWhy we Suffer.
New York: Harper-Collins, 2008. Proposes that atheism is the only honest response to the problem of evil .
Geach, Peter . Providence and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Offers an analysis of such
concepts as omnipotence and divine foreknowledge as they relate to the problem of evil .
Kushner, Harold . When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon, 1981. Argues that God does
not have the power to prevent all evil .
Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Defends the goodness of God despite the
fact of suffering; written by the popular author of The Chronicles of Narnia .
Nieman, Susan . Evil in Modern Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Surveys modern
philosophys efforts to come to terms with the fact of evil .
Rowe, William L. God and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Explores the question of whether the
amount of suffering in the world counts against belief in God .
Faith and Reason

Aquinas, Thomas . On Faith and Reason. Stephen F. Brown , ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co.,
2000. An anthology of excerpts from the writings of Thomas Aquinas on the relation between faith and reason .
Harris, Sam . The End of Faith. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004. A neuroscientist argues that religious
faith is both unjustified and dangerous in the modern world .
Helm, Paul , ed. Faith and Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. A collection of readings showing
the dialogue between faith and reason in Western philosophy .
Hick, John . Faith and Knowledge. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966. A treatment of the topic
by a noted philosopher of religion .
Morris, Thomas V. God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994. Twenty philosophers describe their personal journey to religious belief and in the
process address the role of argument and reason in the development of faith .
Swinburne, Richard . Faith and Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Defends trust and belief as
essential for religious faith .
Religion and Current Issues
Boonin, David . A Defense of Abortion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A title in the Cambridge
Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy, the book makes a case for abortion rights .
Dennett Daniel C . Breaking the Spell. Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006. Seeing
himself as an heir of David Hume, the author gives an account of religions origins consistent with his
naturalistic assumptions .
Lilla, Mark . The Stillborn God. Religion, Politics and the Modern West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
313 Shows that separation of church and state was difficult to achieve and is in constant danger of being
compromised.
Maguire, Daniel C. , ed. Sacred Rights. The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003. A collection of essays illustrating that the worlds religions are more liberal on
the issues than some might think .
Nussbaum, Martha C . Liberty of Conscience. In Defense of Americas Tradition of Religious Equality. New
York: Basic Books, 2008. A noted philosopher relates how the founders of the United States overcame
religious intolerance in favor of equal treatment for all religions .
Pennock, Robert T. , ed. Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Its Critics. Philosophical, Theological, and
scientific Perspectives. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. A comprehensive collection of articles by proponents
and opponents of intelligent-design creationists .
Prothero, Stephen . Religious Literacy. What Every American Needs to KnowAnd Doesnt. New York:
HarperSanFrancisco, 2007. Argues that teaching religion in public schools does not violate the separation
doctrine and that religious literacy can make the world a less dangerous place .

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EXPLORING THE

Published 2016 by Routledge

First issued in hardback 2017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an iriforma business

Copyright © Taylor & Francis, 2010, 2007, 2001 , 1998, 1992

Cover Image: Roberto Gennaro I iStock.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Exploring the philosophy of religion/[edited by] David Stewart.-7th ed.

ISBN 13: 978-0-2056-4519-0 (pbk)

INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 1

Intuitive Ways of Knowing 16

Varieties of Religious Understanding 36

RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 47

INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AND LIFE 49

Life’s Goal Is to Obey God’s Will 53

Life’s Goal Is to Achieve Greatness 58

Life Is Not Meaningful Without God 64

Life Is Meaningful Without God 71

RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGION AND LIFE 82

INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AND DEATH 85

The Immortality of the Soul 88

The Finality of Death 96

The Hope for Resurrection 101

Death in Buddhism 112

RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGION AND DEATH 117

ADDITIONAL SOURCES 118

INTRODUCTION: THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 119

The Ontological Argument 123

The Cosmological Arguments 132

The Design Argument 142

The Moral Argument 151

RETROSPECTIVE: THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 158

ADDITIONAL SOURCES 159

INTRODUCTION: GOD AND EVIL 161

Evil and the Power of God 168

Theodicy in Process Thought 177

Karma and Evil 188

The “Vale of Soul-Making” Theodicy 195

RETROSPECTIVE: GOD AND EVIL 204

ADDITIONAL SOURCES 207

INTRODUCTION: OPINION, BELIEF, AND KNOWLEDGE 209

Belief and Falsification 214

Will and Belief 227

No Rational Basis for Faith 245

The Leap of Faith 253

RETROSPECTIVE: FAITH AND REASON 260

ADDITIONAL SOURCES 261

INTRODUCTION: RELIGION AND SOCIETY 263

Religion and Government 266

Religion and Women 275

Religion and World Origins 284

Religion and Human Origins 300

RETROSPECTIVE: RELIGION AND CURRENT ISSUES 311

ADDITIONAL SOURCES 312

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARIES 314

Philosophy and Religion

THE RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY

be theology or dogmatics), but a second-order activity focused on the fundamental

Religious experience is as hard to define as religion. If we understand religion to be

When there is a nucleus of agreement between the experiences of men in different

W hat does the expression ‘mystical states of consciousness’ mean? How do we

1. Ineffability.—The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as

I will take up these points one by one.