Review Author(s): Purushottama Bilimoria Review by: Purushottama Bilimoria Source: History of Religions, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Nov., 2002), pp. 185-188 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176412 Accessed: 21-03-2015 22:23 UTC
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History of Religions
(dharma, sambhogika, nairmndnika)corresponded to three separate modes of "grasping" (by Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and ordinary people), and one (svdbhavika) correspondedto Emptiness. What you think about Haribhadra'sinterpretationof the Abhisamayalamkara depends in the end on what you think about the logic of Madhyamakaphilosophy-not just about its use of logical inference but about the story it tells of the two truths(ultimate and conventional) and the natureof liberation. Tsong-kha-pa felt the force of this story and thought enough of it to use Haribhadra'sinterpretation as the foundation for his own understandingof the Buddha. Go-ram-pa chose the perspective of nondualyogic attainment.In the end, Makranskychooses to side with Go-ram-pa.I would incline toward the logical clarity of Haribhadra and Tsong-kha-pa.Either way, Makranskyhas shown that Mahayanaphilosophy offers a choice, and this choice leads into the heart of the Mahayana. MALCOLM DAVID ECKEL
Boston University
Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by JosE IGNACIOCABEZON.Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1998. Pp. 264. $20.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). "Scholasticism,"in modern times, has become a term of derision-much like casuistry and dogma-signaling for the auditor rather "an obsessive interest in hopelessly fine conceptual distinctions" (p. 201) associated more with medieval scholastic pedantry and authoritarianismthan with the moderist striving toward clarity and parsimony or the postmodernist tendency toward fanciful play with signifiers. In the postpositive era, to be a "scholastic" is to be an apologist for a traditionallymarkedreading or composing (and dissemination) of text in place of the more self-critical and historically nuanced hermeneuticor empirical interpretation informed by the "view from nowhere."Yet, like Leibniz deferring to the style of Thomas Aquinas, some believe that there is a solid merit and some life left in the scholastic sandpit: for scholarly archeology, but also for comparative commentarialand creative engagement with texts and cultural artifacts. Before a prolegomenon for an ingenious instantiationof a modified scholastic practice is set out, some preliminary cross-cultural decontextualization and delineation of the historical traces of the institutionalprecursorof the academy-scholasticism of the medieval Europe and its much earlier non-Western counterparts-would seem to be a sine qua non. That is the dauntingchallenge taken up in this volume. It is a remarkableproject, if only for the problems it raises for such an inquiry and for whetting the appetite of the serious scholar of the history and philosophy of religions, and comparative literaturemore generally, who is hard pressed to justify such seemingly arcane pursuits as learning classical languages and translating, comparing, and commenting on texts that bear little relevance to the issues and modes of the "research"-drivensubdisciplines in the modern technocratic academy.
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Book Reviews
There are nine chapters with the editor's introductionand conclusion. As the subtitle indicates, the collection brings "comparative"and "cross-cultural"perspectives to the legion of scholasticism. Although nowadays we often tend to see "comparative"and "cross-cultural"used interchangeably,they have distinctive connotations and rhetorical import here: "comparative" in the sense of both internal comparisons enacted in the textual tradition in question but also as a meta-ecrit abstractionthat arises from a constructive "at-a-distance"analysis by the modern-dayscholar who may display little or no vested interest in defending the positions, ideological moves, and cultures that were the lifeblood or apologia of the scholastic practices; "cross-cultural"in the sense of traversinga numberof cultures but also looking across the boundaryof one culturefrom the concerns of another culture, and from the evolving epistemic critique informing the global history of ideas. But there are furthercategories, descriptors,variables, disciplinary power relations, and explanatorychallenges-for example, on the question of periodicity,motivation, goals, and imperiousdesigns in respect of the theological, jurisprudential,ritual, soteriological, and so on, ends for which scholasticism, like "tradition-in-use,"becomes a ruse or device in different contexts and cultures-that is not capturedby the seemingly familiar subtitle. Jose Cab6zon conceived this project following his earlier work on scholastic hermeneutics in Buddhist thought. There he discerned certain basic characteristics of scholasticism, which are offered as heuristic tropes for discussion and guiding templates for the individual authors to reflect on, build upon, "deconstruct,"or criticize from the vantage point of the tradition each has chosen to investigate as exemplification of scholastic practice(s). The characteristics anchor commitments of certain kinds, and these are weaved into a working definition that gets tested in the subsequent chapters, namely, (1) "tradition":a strong sense of tradition, its definition, boundaries, preservation, and defense against assaults or erosions; (2) "lingua-favor":a concern with language (with scripture in particular)and expressibility (even of the ineffable); (3) "proliferative":inclusive attitudein regardto texts, categories, and disputationsto be dealt with (e.g., deferring constantly to the adversarialposition); (4) "completeness": a sense of the whole system (overlooking nothing that is religiously or philosophically essential); (5) "accessibility": the epistemological access to the real (by revelation, insight, or inquiry);(6) "systematicity":reiterationof the orderlinessfound in the world (textualrepresentations,resemblance);(7) "rationalism":reasonedargumentation, syllogism and analysis, and avoidance of contradiction;(8) "self-reflexivity": turning the tool of inquiry (exegesis, argumentation)onto the practice of inquiry itself (yielding second-orderforms of discourse such as hermeneuticsand logic). As would be obvious, not all of the characteristicsare given equal weighting or necessarily afford the same degree of commitment or attention, in each of the traditionsand subtraditions,periods and terrains,studied in the body of the work; indeed, at least two of the authors found themselves departing sharply from the list. Daniel A. Madigan, citing Josef van Ess's study of the Mu 'tazilites and more developed mutakallimunapproachto scripturalhermeneuticsand reason, discov1 I have combined Daniel A. Madigan'smore perspicuous summarywith Cab6zon'sown in his introduction and conclusion (pp. 50, 237).
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ers that category 7 is ratherstretchedin this case, because mutakallimin scholastics made a selective use of the tradition of the prophet, and their cultivation of rationality and argumentationwas in the end a device to beat-as the expression goes-the enemy at their own game. The debate was more often than not onesided, and the adversary was hardly given a chance to defend his arguments or challenge the mutakallim'sversion of his answers (p. 51). Paul Griffiths,on the other hand, is less concerned about how things worked in the historical traditions and is more eager to construct a rebirthof-what he calls-an "ideal-typically" (i.e., normative) scholastic practice that is sullied neither by the barbarouscynicism and "anti-authority"relativism of an overgrown age of reason (the legacy of the Enlightenment as the "unreconstructedmodernist"),nor by the invidious excesses of a religion-forsaken orgasmic postmodernism (along with postcolonialism, postprint, image-byte technologies, and so on) (cf. pp. 211, 255, 231). The bulk of the essays, however, demonstrate an interplay of the traits, taking seriously the editor's edict that these do not exhaust a criterial definition but are heuristic pointers that remain openended and subject to (de)contextualizationin each cultural and comparative setting. I have learned a lot from reading here and gained a vignette or two into the history of religions as, among its other virtues, a scholastic discourse. As a philosopher who has been looking for ways to addressthe decentering of philosophy of religion in the academy, and the marginalization especially of the comparative philosophy of religions, I could not help wondering if the discourse of scholasticism might provide an exemplary model of heuristics for a reworkingof this other academic enterprise.The distinctive markof philosophy of religion has been that its subject matteris derived almost exclusively from theology. In that regard,philosophy of religion has always remained aloof, inward-looking, and immersed in its own Judeo-Christianroots (with occasional acknowledgment of Arabic scholastic falasifa-s), and for large part it has remained totally closed to possible responses and analysis that other traditions and cultures might have on the same "big questions" that it sets out to solve or resolve. There is therefore an understandable movement to retrieve aspects of the "non-Westernvoices" in ancient and medieval scholasticism, as the bulk of the essays in the volume also attempt, especially where these "voices" were at the same time involved in comparative argumentation.But in the end, I came to this sad conclusion: comparative scholasticism cannot provide an adequatemodel for philosophy of religion as the latter is analytically narrowerand conceptually broaderthan the "archivism"of scholasticism. For the simulacra of reason and rational disputation (the "intellectualist" thrust, as Francis X. Clooney uses this term in his essay) within scholastic practices are too often geared toward apologetics (the rational triumph of faith, hope, and charity), "performatives"(redefining the "normative"),or misological conversion-ending at times in a crusadingor inquisitionaldissimulation-of the rival theology and intellectual culture in confrontation with diverse religious worldviews, the emergent sciences, or the Enlightenment (as in the case of "baroque scholasticism" as discussed by Louis Roy's opening chapter on "Medieval Latin Scholasticism").One may grantthat scholasticismis more dynamic (and that its boundaries, like those of "tradition,"more permeable), and one may concede that in the contemporarychaos of epistemological anarchismthere may be good ethical grounds for cultivating an "ideal" or "paradigmatic"type of comparative
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scholasticism (as Clooney hints at, and Griffithsdevelops). But for my wager, I am less convinced that this is possible-much less for philosophy of religion, but also for the academy if it is to save itself from the intrusionsof the deliberalizing state and the "teaching machine" mentalite; or at least not possible until scholasticism of whatever ilk has been liberated from its own historical conditions and teleologies. For anotherreason: postmodernismhas been grossly misrepresented where it has been noted at all in this volume. Jacques Derrida (and Michel Foucault too for that matter)is as close as one might get to an "ideal-typically"scholastic, in that Derrida is deeply rooted in the Hebraic scholastic tradition from which he sets out to deconstruct almost the entire Western analytic system of thinking (as Foucault does also from deep in the archives). Can John D. Caputo be dismissed as a scholastic dilettante or one trading in jargonistic postmodern "tear-ism"?And a supplementaryquestion: could the volume not have been enriched by a more balanced representationof essays by living scholastics in the few "literary"traditions visited here? Not all scholars practicing, or advocating throughtheir commentarialforays, the academic version of the old art are deeply personally rooted in the very traditions they seek to unravel or interpret.At the journey's unending end, we may not be left to worry about the noble efforts of Roberto de Nobili tackling the Upanisads with Trinitarianassumptions, or with the kind of scenario that Robert Goss in his chapter describes of the Jesuit philosopher Ippolito Desideri (who spent his time among dGe-lugs-pa scholars in Tibet, arrivingin 1716, and wrote a Tibetan opus on Buddhist doctrines using the Catholic scholastic method and naturaltheology doctrinairestyle, even presuming that the question of existence depended on God!). Nevertheless, we could be guilty of lesser sins: of overlooking the sociocultural dimension of scholasticism (thus, e.g., not a word is breathed about the gender imbalance across the board except in passing) or whether the scholastic discourse has any place in so-called primitive or primal traditionswhere writing may not be favored; of silence on the relation of scholastic practice to mysticism and the lived dimension of religion; and of forgetting to remember the vanishing present with its many travails and pressures now mounting up as religions and politics enter even more discordant cleavages than in the times of scholastic Middle Ages. To where do we turn? PURUSHOTTAMA BILIMORIA
Deakin University of Melbourne
Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. By DAVIDFRANKFURTER.Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. 336, 23 plates. $57.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Roman Egypt is approachedfrom the perspective of several disciplines: Papyrologists deal with the Greek textual remains from the perspective of classical philology and ancient history; Egyptologists study the transmissionof traditional Egyptian culture in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic texts and in the monuments and archaeological remains; and theologists and historians of religions deal with the rise and early development of Christianity and the Hermetic,
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