Table Of ContentComparative Theology and
the Problem of Religious
Rivalry
Refl ection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series
SERIES EDITOR James Wetzel, Villanova University
A Publication Series of
The American Academy of Religion
and
Oxford University Press
CONVERGING ON CULTURE
Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism
Edited by Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney and Kathryn Tanner
LESSING’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT
Toshimasa Yasukata
AMERICAN PRAGMATISM
A Religious Genealogy
M. Gail Hamner
OPTING FOR THE MARGINS
Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology
Edited by Joerg Rieger
MAKING MAGIC
Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World
Randall Styers
THE METAPHYSICS OF DANTE’S COMEDY
Christian Moevs
PILGRIMAGE OF LOVE
Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life
Joy Ann McDougall
MORAL CREATIVITY
Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Moral Life
John Wall
MELANCHOLIC FREEDOM
Agency and the Spirit of Politics
David Kyuman Kim
FEMINIST THEOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DIFFERENCE
Margaret D. Kamitsuka
PLATO’S GHOST
Spiritualism in the American Renaissance
Cathy Gutierrez
TOWARD A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY
Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology
Jason A. Springs
CAVELL, COMPANIONSHIP, AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Peter Dula
COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS RIVALRY
Hugh Nicholson
Comparative
Theology and the
Problem of
Religious Rivalry
hugh nicholson
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nicholson, Hugh (Hugh R.).
Comparative theology and the problem of religious rivalry / Hugh
Nicholson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-977286-5
1. Religions—Relations. 2. Eckhart, Meister, d. 1327.
3. Sankaracarya. 4. Christianity—Relations—Hinduism.
5. Hinduism—Relations—Christianity. 6. Mysticism. I. Title.
BL41.N53 2011
202—dc22 2010028114
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To
Francis X. Clooney, SJ
with gratitude
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Foreword
I am grateful to Hugh Nicholson several times over for writing
Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry. The
dedication is of course gratifying. It is wonderful to see one’s
students prosper and pursue their intellectual commitments in the
years after graduate school. It is particularly fi ne to see a student of
the caliber of Hugh speak in his own scholarly voice, pursuing issues
crucial to comparative theology in his own distinctive way—a way
such as I myself did not choose, perhaps could not have mastered.
He is notably successful in detecting fi ssures deep in the writings of
earlier scholars who seriously engaged traditions other than their
own; such is a matter of historical interest, to be sure, but it also
sheds light on who we are as their descendants.
Hugh’s formidable analytic strengths are evident in manifold
astute insights into what authors mean by what they write, and his
insights are commendably accompanied by due investment in the
longer historical perspective. Thus, he does very well in noticing the
roots of today’s “comparative theology discourse” in nineteenth-
century ventures deeply intertwined with political concerns and what
today we might call the “theology of religions discourse.” One might
of course go back still farther, for example, studying the major
missionary encounters of the sixteenth century, with due attention to
Catholic missionary scholarship that, whatever its limitations, never
neatly separated comparative study from theologizing about
viii foreword
religions. But Hugh’s point is well taken: there is no innocent, apolitical the-
ology, no innocent encounter across religious boundaries, no scholar whose
work does not have some political positioning at stake, no comparative theology
that defi nitively leaves behind the mixed motives and messages of the past.
His return to Otto’s Mysticism East and West is an excellent way to get at
why people are inclined to take up comparative study. He brings the venerable
comparison of Eckhart and Śaṅkara back to life in a remarkably fresh way, well
attuned to this new era of comparative studies. That Otto did not enter very
deeply into the study of Śaṅkara is well known, and Hugh’s corrections in this
regard—grounded in Hugh’s own seriousness on matters Indological—show
why this matters. While Otto’s agenda would not have been saved by better
Indology, such knowledge would have usefully upset his agenda and enabled
him to make better judgments on Śaṅkara and Eckhart, beyond the scope of his
original intentions.
In all this, Hugh charts his own path, attuned to the issues of current urgency,
particularly regarding comparative theology as a discipline he agrees is important
and even urgent. As far as I can see, his approach does not so much correct mine,
as indicate how interesting it is when relatively likeminded scholars take up
related issues differently. My own interest in Sá nk̇ ara and the Brahma Sūtras is
less analytic and philosophical than Hugh’s, and relatively untroubled by my
early reading Otto. Mine is an on-again, off-again love affair, with a sense that no
matter how deeply I read Vedan̄ ta texts, I will never have gone deep enough—
and yet am still reading as a Roman Catholic, returning to the reading of my own
tradition the better for it. Hugh does something else, engaging Otto in argument,
and better yet, he shows why the argument need not be posed in the terms Otto
favored; Hugh draws on Sá nk̇ ara to explain his position in a way that makes it
resistant to merely unfavorable comparisons with Eckhart.
I cannot say whether my work would be better were I more explicit in dis-
closing an inevitable political agenda, though I do suspect that my commitment
to the closer reading of texts “for their own sake” would necessarily be sorely
trimmed were I to spend much time discussing contextual issues; but I can say
with some certainty that because Hugh has indeed done his work in uncovering
the fact and manner of the political, now comparative theology as a fi eld is defi -
nitely much better off. There will always be rivalries among those who belong to
religions and fi nd themselves studied, those who study them, and those who
ponder whether such study can in some way be fruitful; but Hugh’s work shows
us better how to insure that the inevitable not be reduced to the unnoticed.
Francis X. Clooney, SJ
Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions
Harvard University
Preface
This book addresses the problem of oppositional identity in
theological discourse. To be more specifi c, it attempts to reconcile the
ideal of religious tolerance with an honest acknowledgment of the
extent to which religious communities mobilize identity on the basis
of interreligious differences. What led me to this particular
theological problematic was an increasingly acute sense of the
politically ambiguous nature of comparing religious traditions. On
the one hand, the impetus for such comparison is often an irenic,
“liberal” desire to reconcile the teachings of various religions. Indeed,
the basic presupposition of the comparative enterprise—that
religions are comparable in some way—challenges the absolutist
belief in the uniqueness of any single tradition. At the same time,
however, the act of comparison brings the differences among
religions strongly to the fore. In a comparative context, religious
teachings become strongly marked as Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and
so on. Even if we stop short of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s assessment
that such marking denatures the pristine unity of a transcendental
experience of faith, we must concede that, at the very least, it directs
our attention to precisely those aspects of religious commitment—
parochialism, chauvinism, intolerance, and polemics—that are
distasteful to liberal sensibilities.
Up until fairly recently, various forms of pluralist theology gave
the reassuring impression that it was possible to affi rm religious
