Lectures by Dr Jessica Frazier

We find the idea of God in different religions and it is theologically interesting that semantic analogues of the category appear across the boundaries of traditions. This series of lectures explores Hindu ideas of God and raises questions about the meaning of God in human traditions and the idea of comparative theology.

Psychologists of religion from Jung to Freud, and Boyer and Laing, have produced speculative models of religious subjectivity, according to which the human mind appears variously as an ocean of symbols, a volcanic core wracked by powerful forces, a computational machine, or a shell through transcendence may occasionally break. Just as science posits its own models, so psychologists of religion use metaphors of spatial relations and fluid dynamics to provide a mapping of the self. We examine this mechanistic model, and also look at the way in which thinkers such as Jung and Boyer incorporate un-mappable territories as a crucial concession to the claims of religion itself.

Many of the canonical names in anthropology have been criticised for their literary style and their tendency towards evocative narrative. Here we argue that this is not a methodological weakness, but the autonomous development of a conception of understanding in terms of imaginative empathy and inter-subjectivity, which parallels hermeneutic philosophy. Religious experiences are literally recreated in the reader, forming an intimate bond between the scholar and his or her subject.

The necessity of analysing religious influences on society has meant that key sociologists from Marx to Durkheim and Weber insisted on the significance of mood, motivation, and individual agency as the heart of any idea of society change. Religious feeling is thus one of the cornerstones enabling their theorisation of social dynamics. Here we look at sociological models for studying subjectivity as an autonomous ‘centre’ of dynamism and force, the beating heart of grand-scale movements of history.

Jessica Frazier, Divinity Faculty, Cambridge, and OCHS

Drawing on Clifford Geertz's understanding of religion as a 'worldview', the seminar series explore key themes in Hinduism and looks at the way in which crucial conceptual 'translations' are needed to understand Hindu culture properly from without, and asks whether it is possible to derive critical and hermeneutic 'theory' in religious studies from Indic material. One of the goals will be to challenge the hegemony of Western-derived 'theories' of religion, culture, and human nature.

Drawing on Clifford Geertz's understanding of religion as a 'worldview', the seminar series explore key themes in Hinduism and looks at the way in which crucial conceptual 'translations' are needed to understand Hindu culture properly from without, and asks whether it is possible to derive critical and hermeneutic 'theory' in religious studies from Indic material. One of the goals will be to challenge the hegemony of Western-derived 'theories' of religion, culture, and human nature.

Gadamer appears to be an unusually secular figure among the phenomenologists of his day; unlike those who began as theologians, his study of classical culture taught him to study religion dispassionately, while embracing religious arts as a channel for his own concerns. Influenced by “Swabian piety”, Bultmannn’s ‘demythologisation’, the spirituality and humanism of the classical world, 'free-thinkers' such as Goethe, Rilke, and Stefan George, and creative re-thinkers of the Christian tradition such as Scheler and Heidegger, Gadamer affirmed both the cultural contingency of faith, and its confessional power.

Amid theologies of Being and secular philosophies, Gadamer explored a middle ground of non-theistic perspectives, reclaiming a philosophy of immanent 'spirit'. in his work on Plato and Hegel, he was often in dialogue with the classical Greek and later German traditions of ‘pantheist’ or ‘immanentist’ thought found in Spinoza, Lessing, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and others. In many respects, Gadamer appears as one of the twentieth century's first philosophers of immanence.

These four seminars rethink the ways that the sacred is defined in the world today. Questioning current assumptions about science, reality and religion, it draws on both western and Indian scholastic philosophy to explore ideas of the divine as: 1) The creative ground of a sacred continuum between nature and ‘super-nature’; 2) The material and foundation of existence; 3) The impetus of all dynamic movement and development; 4) A basis for new emerging forms of existence and value.Classical debates about creation, immutability, Being and transcendence in the Western philosophical tradition remain unresolved, and these seminars seek new solutions in Indian conversations about these ideas. We draw on sources in the Bhedābheda Vedāntic tradition of Indian thought to suggest different ways of formulating the divine nature. Typically, we see the divine paradoxically as something more than the world’s realm of mere transient and finite forms, yet the ground and creative source of them all. This way of thinking was continually challenged by Buddhist theories of mereology, change, and anti-essentialism, leading to an evolution of the original doctrines through novel and innovative new approaches. Yet we also see how this Hindu theory of a ‘sacred continuum’ challenges the way that Western ideas of God tend to oppose ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, human vs divine will, and the supposed conflict between the religious and the secular.Week 2, Thursday 30 January – Divine Materials: Rethinking the SacredIn this first seminar we look at current academic theories of the ‘sacred’, and explore tendencies to treat the idea of ‘god’ as something other than the world, beyond reason and evidence, and counter to human creativity. In contrast, we explore notions of a ‘sacred’ continuum between the world and its divine source in ideas of aseity, sovereignty, immutability, simplicity, and creation in both Western and Indian scholastic sources.

These four seminars rethink the ways that the sacred is defined in the world today. Questioning current assumptions about science, reality and religion, it draws on both western and Indian scholastic philosophy to explore ideas of the divine as: 1) The creative ground of a sacred continuum between nature and ‘super-nature’; 2) The material and foundation of existence; 3) The impetus of all dynamic movement and development; 4) A basis for new emerging forms of existence and value.Classical debates about creation, immutability, Being and transcendence in the Western philosophical tradition remain unresolved, and these seminars seek new solutions in Indian conversations about these ideas. We draw on sources in the Bhedābheda Vedāntic tradition of Indian thought to suggest different ways of formulating the divine nature. Typically, we see the divine paradoxically as something more than the world’s realm of mere transient and finite forms, yet the ground and creative source of them all. This way of thinking was continually challenged by Buddhist theories of mereology, change, and anti-essentialism, leading to an evolution of the original doctrines through novel and innovative new approaches. Yet we also see how this Hindu theory of a ‘sacred continuum’ challenges the way that Western ideas of God tend to oppose ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, human vs divine will, and the supposed conflict between the religious and the secular.Week 6, Thursday 27 February – Divine Causation and Agency: Metaphors of Current, Body, PersonalityHere we look at divine energy and agency in philosophies of the divine. Process philosophies and the Indian debates about causal agency both explore a notion of divine Being as a causal force that is present at each moment (kāraṇa, śakti, prakāra, vyūha, etc.)