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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2013
This article is a response to the essays in this issue of the Journal of Anglican Studies on scriptural reasoning in the Anglican context, from the perspective of a Roman Catholic theologian, and one who is engaged in another kind of interreligious study, comparative theology. It sets out in general terms the distinctive character of comparative theology as an inquiry that crosses the borders between religious traditions. It draws attention to some of the common ground between comparative theology and scriptural reasoning and the character of each as theological disciplines, even while drawing out some of the distinctive marks of comparative theology. In this way it aims to shed light on how scriptural reasoning, even in its general form, is similar to other sustained efforts at interreligious learning, yet possessed of distinctive characteristics that make it interestingly different from the close reading that is comparative theology.
Francis X. Clooney, SJ is Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions.
2. Comparative in this context marks a practice that requires intuitive as well as rational insight, practical as well as theoretical engagement. It is therefore not primarily a matter of evaluation, as if merely to compare A and B so as to determine the extent of their similarity and which is better. Nor is it a scientific analysis by which to grasp the essence of the comparables by sifting through similarities and differences. Rather, as a theological and necessarily spiritual practice (and, in my use of it, a way of reading), comparison is a reflective and contemplative endeavor by which we see the other in light of our own, and our own in light of the other. In this necessarily arbitrary and intuitive practice we understand each differently because the other is near, and by cumulative insight also begin to comprehend related matters differently too. Finally, we see ourselves differently, intuitively uncovering dimensions of ourselves that would not otherwise, by a non-comparative logic, come to the fore. Much in this note and the related paragraphs is adapted from Chapter 1 of my Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).Google Scholar
3. Clooney, Francis X., Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
4. In his forward to a Modern Theology issue dedicated to scriptural reasoning: ‘Editorial Preface: The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning’, Modern Theology 22.3 (July 2006), pp. 339–43 (339).Google Scholar
5. Quash, Ben, ‘Heavenly Semantics: Some Literary-Critical Approaches to Scriptural Reasoning’, Modern Theology 22.3 (July 2006), pp. 403–420) (404).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Quash, ‘Heavenly Semantics’, pp. 404–405.Google Scholar
7. See for instance http://www.dimmid.org/.Google Scholar
8. Ford recounts how the Benedictine nuns of Turvey Abbey undertook a kind of contemplative scriptural reasoning that proved to be very fruitful, ‘a fruitful form of “stereophonic” interreligious reading’. He adds that ‘all agreed that, done together successively, these ways of reading gave a richer appreciation of both the texts and of each other’ (Ford, ‘Scriptural Reasoning: Its Anglican Origins, its Development, Practice and Significance’, this issue, 147–65).Google Scholar
9. The preceding paragraphs are adapted from my Beyond Compare, ch. 2.Google Scholar
10. Ford, ‘Scriptural Reasoning’, this issue, pp. 147–65.Google Scholar
11. Ahmed, ‘Scriptural Reasoning and the Anglican–Muslim Encounter’, this issue, pp. 166–78.Google Scholar
12. His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming, 2013).Google Scholar
13. I have in mind the strand of my work that has sought a deeper and more intimate engagement among traditions. In its conviction that depth and particularity are the means to greater openness and that love can be a matter of improbable, ill-advised excesses, His Hiding Place Is Darkness is the last act in a project begun implicitly in my Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Srivaisnavas of South India (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). There I first explored the lyric and dramatic dimensions of divine-human love, sought and suffered. In terms of the intensity of focus and care for the poetic, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) manifests the same energy, clearing the way for Christian readers to take seriously and learn from Hindu goddess traditions, even when there is no place for goddesses in Christian theology. The immediate predecessor of His Hiding Place Is Darkness is Beyond Compare, wherein I explored the narratives of loving surrender proposed and cultivated by two prominent medieval theologians, the Srivaishnava Hindu Vedanta Deshika (fourteenth century) and the Catholic Christian Francis de Sales (seventeenth century). There I once more argued that engaging multiple traditions of loving surrender increases rather than attenuates the uncompromising devotion deep rooted within a particular tradition.Google Scholar
14. At the end of the introduction to His Hiding Place Is Darkness, I deliberately divert further discussion of comparative theology in the abstract: ‘I will say no more about comparative theology in this book, not just because I have recently explained the discipline at length [in Comparative Theology], but more importantly because comparative theology is best learned not in what is said about it, but in what it does. All that follows is an act of comparative theology, even if the term itself need not appear again in these pages.’Google Scholar
15. I have always taken this passage to be representative of the great tradition of Christian learning to which the Catholic Church belongs. Faith and reason are in harmony; the true, the good, and the beautiful converge; no question is to be stifled, no truth feared; to know is ultimately to know God. Nostra Aetate does not explicitly say all this. In any case, the Church has not always lived up to its high ideal and at times it has attempted to limit inquiry and channel the truth toward predetermined answers that make the intervening and arduous research appear superfluous. The hesitations and worries of recent decades have made the work of learning interreligiously appear less welcome in the Catholic Church. But Nostra Aetate nonetheless represents our best instincts. On the climate for interreligious study in the post-Vatican II Church, see my Australia lecture, ‘Artful Imagining: A Personal Insight into the Study of Religions after Vatican’, Australian eJournal of Theology 19.2 (August 2012), pp. 97–111.Google Scholar
16. Why I have studied Hinduism all these years has something to do with my personal history and a genuine curiosity – intellectual, but also spiritual – to learn from Hinduism. I have been thinking about this body of religious traditions for a long time, beginning in 1973 when, just out of college, I went to Kathmandu, Nepal, to teach secondary school boys, all Hindu and Buddhist. There I began to study Hinduism and to learn deeply from some of its many traditions.Google Scholar
17. Ahmed, ‘Scriptural Reasoning and the Anglican–Muslim Encounter’, this issue, pp. 166–78.Google Scholar
18. Ahmed, ‘Scriptural Reasoning and the Anglican–Muslim Encounter’, this issue, pp. 166–78.Google Scholar
19. At the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Chicago, 19 November 2012, a session of the Roman Catholic Studies Group: ‘Is Comparative Theology Catholic?’Google Scholar
20. On the problem of the nature of the truth discovered in comparative theology – neither the same as nor unrecognizably different from what is learned by other forms of theology – see Chapter 7 of Comparative Theology.Google Scholar
21. Ben Quash, ‘Abrahamic Scriptural Reading from an Anglican Perspective’, this issue, pp. 199–216 (my italics).Google Scholar
