Part of why I like Jean luc Marion is his appropriation of Levinas face of the other, the others regarding me, his or her gaze impresses itself upon me as a saturated phenomenon. We cannot see past our reflection in their eyes and yet their gaze compells us to respond in some way. Levinas here has a slightly different focus but both are important. What this post made me think of though is Gregory of Nyssa, the first to really think out the implications of gods infinity. In life of Moses perfection is in following God, because we never reach the final destination—progress is perfection. But returning to Marion, the saturated phenomenon of revelation is deeply tied rot the gaze of the other and I think this is important. As Augustine says, “God is more intimate to me than my inmost self and beyond my utmost grasp.” This is why I think in the hesychast / eastern Christian tradition there are both those like Gregory of nazianzus who speak of God as being to the soul what the soul is to the body, and yet who quite clearly simultaneously identify God’s essence as beyond being and ultimately other. This for me is what the essence energies distinction helps preserve. God in his energies is God but God as manifest or acting. But he will always always remain beyond.
You may be interested in the work of @tinaforsee at Philosophy and Fiction (https://philosophyandfiction.substack.com/). We had a long chat in the comments of one of her pieces lately about the possibility of genuine intersubjective contact, which I think connects closely with your thoughts on Marion and Levinas above.
Interesting reflection, thanks for the intro to Levinas and the topic of horizons. I'll have to think more about that side of things!
Meanwhile, let me put on a Buddhist hat and try to answer from the Madhyamika perspective. To understand Nagarjuna's emptiness, we need to go back to the initial mythos of Buddhism, which is that the Buddha sat down, went into a state of transcendence, and came back extolling that state and ready to guide others towards it; yet he never gave a positive description of what he found there. He didn't describe a paradise, or a meeting with God or any gods, bring down some Law, etc. The words used to explain what he discovered are either negative ("liberation" ~ lack of bondage, "peace" ~ lack of conflict), or vague like "profound" and "transcendent". And to the extent that his surrounding culture had a story of revealed ultimate truth (the four original Vedas), he rejected it as invalid. Yet he emphatically said that what he discovered was better than anything in the world.
One way to read Nagarjuna, is as a head-on attempt to grapple with the Buddha's silence. The Buddha is assumed to be compassionate, so if he didn't give positive descriptions of whatever truth is found in transcendence, the implication is that it must be truly indescribable. In this perspective, the relevant horizon is not the emptiness of bare consciousness, but the limit of what can be correctly apprehended by conceptual thought, narratives, explanations or propositions. The further implication is that any attempt to force words on whatever lies beyond this horizon will necessarily be quite unrelated to reality, and therefore invalid, and also unlikely to help anyone "get there".
Nagarjuna takes a hard look at how anything can be known or conceptualized. Through an extended set of reasonings, he argues that true, ultimate, well-founded conceptual knowledge of *anything* is impossible. A well-known Western counterpart might be the Münchhausen trilemma (which has roots in Pyrrhonism, which shows signs of mutual influence with Buddhism!). That does not make Nagarjuna a nihilist; he still asserts the validity of the Buddha's state of transcendence as a non-propositional mode of intuitive, indescribable knowledge (Sanskrit: jnāna), and also the relative validity of our everyday knowledge of things in their interdependence.
In that perspective, the Buddhist Madhyamika objection to theism is a nuanced one. If we have an intuitive faculty that is able to peer beyond the horizon, it stands to reason that people of different cultures and times would have discovered it and given it names. The word "God" implies a relationship of "I-Thou", which is a bit beyond what early Madhyamika can handle, but later forms of Buddhism do make use of devotional I-Though relationships, so even that can possibly be accommodated.
Perhaps the real incompatibility between Buddhism and the Abrahamic traditions is not at the level of pure theology, where you can find surprisingly deep parallels, but in the original Abrahamic revelation, with all its specific narrative claims: revealing the one true God through the one true Book, giving the one true Law, choosing the one chosen People, incarnating as the one true Son, having a definite Will for the world, and so on. Same goes for revealed Hinduism with Vishnu and his 10 avataras and so on. The Buddhist vision is more of an open space where words utterly fail, and if you make the effort to go there, you will know you're in the right place, but you won't be able to explain.
That was the appeal of Buddhism for me (I studied and followed it for almost 20 years). General claims of transcendence ring true enough, and are corroborated even nowadays by people like Eckhart Tolle. But whenever I've had a look at the various purported revelations, ranging from the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, up to weirder ones like the Book of Mormon or the Course in Miracles, I saw echoes of human wisdom, but not an ultimate revealed truth that I could find reason to accept.
What's perhaps most interesting to me is that way you describe the Buddha's efforts (or lack thereof) to describe that "transcendent" experience he had: "if he didn't give positive descriptions of whatever truth is found in transcendence, the implication is that it must be truly indescribable." And this is precisely how classical Abrahamic theology describes any approach towards God: God is ineffable, unknowable, truly and utterly transcendent, etc.
I do think part of the struggle in discourse between these traditions is that Buddhism tends to understand the word "God" as just a particular mode of the word "god". But in English, the use of a capital letter actually denotes a *completely different concept*. (This is obviously a ridiculous situation, and I wish English had developed a better mode of distinction here. But we play the cards we are dealt.)
So for (again, classical) Christian "theism", "God" does not denote something kind of like Zeus, or even something like Vishnu, only more so: it denotes precisely the absolute, ultimately Real which transcends everything, which is unknowable, unspeakable, etc. etc. I really do think that the right place to begin comparisons between (again and again, the classical) conception of God in Abrahamic thought and Buddhist thought would be to begin with the Buddhist view of Nirvana. Of course, Nirvana is never "personalized" the way Jews, Christians, and Muslims tend to personalize God. But I think this has more to do with cultural and devotional practices more than genuine philosophical and theological ones.
All that said, you will have noticed my constant caveats about "classical" Abrahamic thought. And I've made that caveat because, unfortunately, many Christians (especially western Protestants) have abandoned the classical view of God in favor of the univocal nominalism of Ockham. That's a great tragedy and catastrophe, and it *does* mean that there are a large number of Christians who really *do* believe in a god who is just a very powerful version of Zeus, with a different name and different mythos.
But my hope would be that Christian/Buddhist dialogue could focus on Christianity at its best! And I think the good news is that there are good opportunities for that. And I do think (as I suggested in the article) that Levinas's conception of Otherness as necessarily real and necessarily fully transcendent (ineffable, unknowable) may be a good bridge in that discussion.
Part of why I like Jean luc Marion is his appropriation of Levinas face of the other, the others regarding me, his or her gaze impresses itself upon me as a saturated phenomenon. We cannot see past our reflection in their eyes and yet their gaze compells us to respond in some way. Levinas here has a slightly different focus but both are important. What this post made me think of though is Gregory of Nyssa, the first to really think out the implications of gods infinity. In life of Moses perfection is in following God, because we never reach the final destination—progress is perfection. But returning to Marion, the saturated phenomenon of revelation is deeply tied rot the gaze of the other and I think this is important. As Augustine says, “God is more intimate to me than my inmost self and beyond my utmost grasp.” This is why I think in the hesychast / eastern Christian tradition there are both those like Gregory of nazianzus who speak of God as being to the soul what the soul is to the body, and yet who quite clearly simultaneously identify God’s essence as beyond being and ultimately other. This for me is what the essence energies distinction helps preserve. God in his energies is God but God as manifest or acting. But he will always always remain beyond.
You may be interested in the work of @tinaforsee at Philosophy and Fiction (https://philosophyandfiction.substack.com/). We had a long chat in the comments of one of her pieces lately about the possibility of genuine intersubjective contact, which I think connects closely with your thoughts on Marion and Levinas above.
Interesting reflection, thanks for the intro to Levinas and the topic of horizons. I'll have to think more about that side of things!
Meanwhile, let me put on a Buddhist hat and try to answer from the Madhyamika perspective. To understand Nagarjuna's emptiness, we need to go back to the initial mythos of Buddhism, which is that the Buddha sat down, went into a state of transcendence, and came back extolling that state and ready to guide others towards it; yet he never gave a positive description of what he found there. He didn't describe a paradise, or a meeting with God or any gods, bring down some Law, etc. The words used to explain what he discovered are either negative ("liberation" ~ lack of bondage, "peace" ~ lack of conflict), or vague like "profound" and "transcendent". And to the extent that his surrounding culture had a story of revealed ultimate truth (the four original Vedas), he rejected it as invalid. Yet he emphatically said that what he discovered was better than anything in the world.
One way to read Nagarjuna, is as a head-on attempt to grapple with the Buddha's silence. The Buddha is assumed to be compassionate, so if he didn't give positive descriptions of whatever truth is found in transcendence, the implication is that it must be truly indescribable. In this perspective, the relevant horizon is not the emptiness of bare consciousness, but the limit of what can be correctly apprehended by conceptual thought, narratives, explanations or propositions. The further implication is that any attempt to force words on whatever lies beyond this horizon will necessarily be quite unrelated to reality, and therefore invalid, and also unlikely to help anyone "get there".
Nagarjuna takes a hard look at how anything can be known or conceptualized. Through an extended set of reasonings, he argues that true, ultimate, well-founded conceptual knowledge of *anything* is impossible. A well-known Western counterpart might be the Münchhausen trilemma (which has roots in Pyrrhonism, which shows signs of mutual influence with Buddhism!). That does not make Nagarjuna a nihilist; he still asserts the validity of the Buddha's state of transcendence as a non-propositional mode of intuitive, indescribable knowledge (Sanskrit: jnāna), and also the relative validity of our everyday knowledge of things in their interdependence.
In that perspective, the Buddhist Madhyamika objection to theism is a nuanced one. If we have an intuitive faculty that is able to peer beyond the horizon, it stands to reason that people of different cultures and times would have discovered it and given it names. The word "God" implies a relationship of "I-Thou", which is a bit beyond what early Madhyamika can handle, but later forms of Buddhism do make use of devotional I-Though relationships, so even that can possibly be accommodated.
Perhaps the real incompatibility between Buddhism and the Abrahamic traditions is not at the level of pure theology, where you can find surprisingly deep parallels, but in the original Abrahamic revelation, with all its specific narrative claims: revealing the one true God through the one true Book, giving the one true Law, choosing the one chosen People, incarnating as the one true Son, having a definite Will for the world, and so on. Same goes for revealed Hinduism with Vishnu and his 10 avataras and so on. The Buddhist vision is more of an open space where words utterly fail, and if you make the effort to go there, you will know you're in the right place, but you won't be able to explain.
That was the appeal of Buddhism for me (I studied and followed it for almost 20 years). General claims of transcendence ring true enough, and are corroborated even nowadays by people like Eckhart Tolle. But whenever I've had a look at the various purported revelations, ranging from the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, up to weirder ones like the Book of Mormon or the Course in Miracles, I saw echoes of human wisdom, but not an ultimate revealed truth that I could find reason to accept.
What's perhaps most interesting to me is that way you describe the Buddha's efforts (or lack thereof) to describe that "transcendent" experience he had: "if he didn't give positive descriptions of whatever truth is found in transcendence, the implication is that it must be truly indescribable." And this is precisely how classical Abrahamic theology describes any approach towards God: God is ineffable, unknowable, truly and utterly transcendent, etc.
I do think part of the struggle in discourse between these traditions is that Buddhism tends to understand the word "God" as just a particular mode of the word "god". But in English, the use of a capital letter actually denotes a *completely different concept*. (This is obviously a ridiculous situation, and I wish English had developed a better mode of distinction here. But we play the cards we are dealt.)
So for (again, classical) Christian "theism", "God" does not denote something kind of like Zeus, or even something like Vishnu, only more so: it denotes precisely the absolute, ultimately Real which transcends everything, which is unknowable, unspeakable, etc. etc. I really do think that the right place to begin comparisons between (again and again, the classical) conception of God in Abrahamic thought and Buddhist thought would be to begin with the Buddhist view of Nirvana. Of course, Nirvana is never "personalized" the way Jews, Christians, and Muslims tend to personalize God. But I think this has more to do with cultural and devotional practices more than genuine philosophical and theological ones.
All that said, you will have noticed my constant caveats about "classical" Abrahamic thought. And I've made that caveat because, unfortunately, many Christians (especially western Protestants) have abandoned the classical view of God in favor of the univocal nominalism of Ockham. That's a great tragedy and catastrophe, and it *does* mean that there are a large number of Christians who really *do* believe in a god who is just a very powerful version of Zeus, with a different name and different mythos.
But my hope would be that Christian/Buddhist dialogue could focus on Christianity at its best! And I think the good news is that there are good opportunities for that. And I do think (as I suggested in the article) that Levinas's conception of Otherness as necessarily real and necessarily fully transcendent (ineffable, unknowable) may be a good bridge in that discussion.