A Tale of Three Women

My Trysts with Religious Pluralism

The daily business of academic life is routine, undramatic, and even banal one reads books,
takes notes, gives lectures, supervises graduate dissertations, and tries to write books. Of
course, what drives this frenetic cycle day after day, year after year is an insatiable thirst
for knowledge. I can imagine that people in another line of work would look at me with utter
incredulity if in response to their question, But why do you have to read so many books? I
were to say, Simply because those books exist. At the same time, I know that my thirst is
kept alive not so much by academic conventions, or by the incessant demands of publication,
or even by the sheer existence of books in the libraries, but by the kindred spirits of my
questioning students in whose spiritual-philosophical-existential quests I often see reflected
some traces of my younger selves.

Back then, I set myself this question: can we develop reasoned arguments, which proceed
from premises that we can share, to demonstrate with the force of logical compulsion, who of
these two Vishnu or Jesus Christ is the ultimate reality? As I look at the conceptual
pathways I have trudged along, I see that this undertaking has literally been a case of a fool
rushing in where angels fear to tread, for I confess that after two decades of grappling with
this momentous question, I still do not know (and I do not even know whether I will ever
know in this lifetime) whether I can answer this question in either the affirmative or the
negative. Therefore, I find myself temperamentally aligned with a position called religious
pluralism in the academic literature on religious diversity. Precisely how to characterise this
position turns out to be a conceptual nightmare, for it seems to encompass a great variety of
standpoints that reject, in common, the view that there is one absolute path to the supreme
reality. Here is one common version.

The affirmation that the diverse religious traditions of humanity are all oriented to the
ultimate reality, so that they constitute different historically-shaped and culturally-
informed worlds within which human beings can cultivate patterns of attunement to,
grounding in, or resonance with the divine.

As they say, God is in the details my philosophical anxiety relates to the word all in this
formulation. However, long before I learnt to think philosophically, I was once upon a time
just a little boy who spent his early childhood in the company of three women from three
religious backgrounds my mother, a Vaishnava Hindu; my mothers best friend, a pious
Sunni Muslim; and my paternal aunt, a devout Roman Catholic. I was marked in a very
corporeal sense of that term by my somewhat unwitting participation in, and partial
inhabitation of, these three distinct religious lifeforms. Mostly unreflectively, I went along to
Vaishnava temples, and sometimes to Catholic Mass on Sundays with my aunt, and while I
was aware, in a sort of unselfconscious way, that my family was not Muslim, I also felt
powerfully drawn to the egalitarian visions of Islam. I say marked because while today the
unstable hybrid of religious agnostic is perhaps the most fitting description of my own
philosophical standpoint on religious matters, even a snatch of a devotional Hindu song or a
Benedictine plainchant can transport me in a trice to those other worlds which are too deeply
subtle for my conceptual ingenuity to outline, dissect, or analyse. While I have not studied in
depth the philosophical and theological dimensions of the multiple worlds of Islam, the sheer
beauty, subtlety, and delicacy of the mystical strains of Islamic spirituality resonate
noiselessly in my puzzled, tangled, and wayward heart.

And yet I am, at the end of the day, not a card-carrying member of religious pluralism. We
can disambiguate between two forms of religious pluralism what I will call the Gnostic
form (Religious Pluralism GNO) and the Fallibilist form (Religious Pluralism FALL).

Religious Pluralism GNO: The religious traditions Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam
are all oriented to the same ultimate reality. I know this statement to be unequivocally
true.

Religious Pluralism FALL: I hope that the religious traditions Hinduism, Christianity,
and Islam are all oriented to the same ultimate reality.

I believe that the conceptual heart of the matter in all forms of religious pluralism is the
following basic epistemological-metaphysical claim which I myself endorse.

RP: No single human individual possesses the Gods eye point of view.

A logical consequence of RP is that Religious Pluralism GNO is conceptually inconsistent, for

if no human individual possesses apodictic truth, religious pluralists cannot claim that they
know that Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam are all oriented to the same divine reality.
Perhaps they are, or perhaps they are not one simply cannot claim to know, since none of
us, according to RP, has accessed the fullness of truth.

And yet I remain, after all, to turn to the other end of the dialectic, some kind of a religious
pluralist more precisely, Religious Pluralism FALL is the version which I affirm. If it is true
that we are human beings long before we are trained to think with philosophical rigour, my
affirmation of Religious Pluralism FALL has to do primarily not with the nature of logical
reasoning or the structure of conceptual thinking or the formulation of doctrinal systematics,
but simply with these three women whose love has lain across my life. I hope that none of
them whom I have seen living through, from within their mundane businesses of everyday
life, the agonies of doubt and the occasional ecstasies of religious conviction have missed
out on the ultimate reality, whoever that is. Religious pluralism, especially as Religious
Pluralism FALL, is therefore a matter not of knowing but of hoping what truly distinguishes
religious pluralists from their philosophical rivals is not the breadth of their knowledge
(which are perhaps different constellations of clouds of unknowing) but the outreach of their
hope. If we walk by faith, and not by sight, Religious Pluralism FALL is the fallibilist
pilgrimage of those who are sufficiently armed with epistemic humility, magnanimity of
spirit, and a deepened sense of mystery to walk the extra mile with the Other in shared quests
for the absolute. Perhaps, in fact, the others will not get there, or perhaps we will not arrive at
the final destination religious pluralists, having rejected RP, should not make categorical
pronouncements on these matters. And yet, they can hope, and continue to live in, with and
through a hope for universal humanity.