This is a more formal rendering of the 1993 Aquinas Lecture given at Blackfriars, Cambridge (January 28th). It is a revised version of an address given to Faculty and Students at a Colloquium in the Diviniry School, Vanderbilt University, during the Fall Semester of 1992.1 gladly acknowledge incorporating suggestions received on that occasion.

1 Such statements express the paradigm here; invocations, commands, threats etc. do not qualify.

2 In the Preface to the first edition, Ayer notes that in his thinking he is in tune with ‘those who compose the ’Viennese Circle‘…commonly known as logical positivists’ (p.42).

3 A classic example: R B Braithwaite's ‘An Empiricist's view of the nature of religious belief’ as in, e.g., Classical and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Hick, John, Prentice‐Hall, London etc., 1964Google Scholar.

4 ‘The term, of course, is Bakhtin's, and it riotously embraces indeterminacy, fragmentation, decanonization, selflessness, irony, hybridization… But the term also conveys the comic or absurdist ethos of postmodernism…, ’polyphony‘, the centrifugal power of language, the ‘gay relativity’ of things, perspectivism and performance, participation in the wild disorder of life…’; ‘Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective’ in Critical Inquiry, vol.12. Spring 1986.

5 Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p.316.

6 Thus my comments pertain directly to human persons. A comprehensive treatment would include non‐human animate and inanimate beings.

7 To avert which has been the overriding concern of the French Jewish thinker, Emmanuel Levinas. Yet in his endeavour to preserve the other ‘with an alterity constitutive of the very content of the other’, he so radicalises alterity, it seems to me, as to make it impenetrable. This impales us then on the other horn of the dilemma; see further. The quotation is taken from Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority, translated by Lingis, Alphonso, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1969, p.39Google Scholar.

8 Note, e.g., S J Tambiah's mention of the requirement to enter “subjectively” into the minds of the actors [of the context under scrutiny] and understand their intentions and reactions in terms of the actors‘ meaning categories…’, in Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p.111. Tambiah then goes on to refer, quite unsatisfactorily (since we are seemingly required to exclude ‘malformed individuals with birth or acquired defects’), to the ‘psychic unity of mankind’ or ‘human universals’ as the basis on which this might be attempted. It is hoped that the formulation in this article will be seen to encourage inclusivity rather than any kind of exclusivity in the quest for genuine human reciprocity.

9 The symbol and token of this generically shared open‐ endedness is the possibility of biological reproduction across racial barriers. This is why any ideology of sexual apartheid is both inhuman and dehumanising. When a way of life is systematically geared to divisiveness, isolation, discrimination, exploitation, etc., i.e. tends systematically towards a habit of non‐reciprocity, it depersonalises and dehumanises.

10 For this reason, in its full and proper implementation, constructive empathy is a distinctively human capability.

11 The belief and/or its practice that a particular religion (usually one's own), by virtue of its inherent superiority, exists to, or is entitled to, instrumentalise or otherwise systematically disempower the publicly accredited religious tradition(s) of others.

12 The more numerous and/or apparently gaping such incipient divides, the more cultivated effort will be required to attempt their bridging. In this enterprise such experiences as joy, pleasure, grief, pain, hunger, thirst, deprivation, anger, frustration etc., especially in their ‘foundational’ forms, i.e. with minimal interpretive content, as shared reference‐points for living, cannot be overestimated.

13 Indeed, as a feature of its non‐intrasiveness, its sensitive deployment will entail leaving the other alone, in non inter‐active privacy, in the appropriate circumstances. Yet, paradoxically, this too is a facet of reciprocity.

14 Are there situations where constructive empathy is a non‐starter? In the contexts of forms of insanity, say, or of what appears to be unspeakable suffering or evil? If a considered attempt is made to reach out in such contexts, it seems to me, the personal circumstances of the one reaching out assume a peculiar relevance. And any measure of successful reciprocity achieved in such unpromising contexts would stand as testimony to the astonishing extent of the range of human understanding and/or the heroic capacity for forgiveness.

15 See note 14.

16 Tambiah gives an account; op.cit., ch.6.

17 This implies readiness to ‘distance’ oneself, if this term is to be used (see Tambiah, op.cit., p. 111), not only from the situation of the other, but synchronously from one's own cognitive‐evaluative criteria as sacrosanct.

18 Yet in too many British institutions, including Universities, this mentality seems to prevail. In his commendable departure from this mould, viz. Christian Theology and Inter‐religious Dialogue, (SCM Press, London, and Trinity Press International, Philadelphia, 1992)Google Scholar Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus in the University of Oxford, laments: ‘I come to [the subject of inter‐religious dialogue] as a Christian theologian who for the last twenty years has taught in a Theology Faculty which contains no positions directly committed to the study or teaching of any religious tradition other than the Christian’, (p.1.)

19 It may well be that such study across the barriers of the Abrahamic and non‐Abrahamic faiths will be most rewarding, in that one can take least for granted, thematically and methodologically, the exploration of the cultural, linguistic, symbolic and other matrices.

20 In this process, constructive empathy evolves from a spontaneous and somewhat arbitrary function into a reflexive and attitudinal one.

21 There are, however, ideological approaches to the study of religion, some theological, which are pursued in such a manner as to make of a putative incommensurability the means to an ulterior end. One such approach is implied by theological exdusivism so‐called, viz. the belief that there are no salvific points of contact between a particular religious faith (usually one's own) and that of others. This is generally argued a priori on grounds of incommensurability between the privileged faith and that of others (with attempts at an a posteriori demonstration of this, e.g. by an analysis of the stractures of other faiths, being ideologically pre‐ determined). The ulterior end is not infrequently the implicit or explicit supremacising of the privileged faith, if not conversion and the more or less complete extirpation of the religion of the other. A good example of this approach is the still highly influential view of the Christian theologian, Hendrick Kraemer (taking his cue from Karl Barth). For a study of the history of the continuing influence of the Kraemerite stance in important Christian circles, see Wesley Ariarajah, Hindus and Christians: A Century of Protestant Ecumenical Thought, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, & Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1991). “The more one penetrates different religions and tries to understand them in their total peculiar entity,” avers Kraemer, ‘the more one sees that they are worlds in themselves, with their own centres, axes, and structures, not reducible to each other or to a common denominator which expresses their inner core and makes them all translucent’ (Religion and the Christian Faith, Lutterworth Press, London, 1956, p.76). Note, Kraemer does not deny that we can understand other faiths (the use of ‘artistic imagination’, ibid. e.g. p.49, will enable us to do this). Indeed, he believes that he can understand (‘penetrate’) them only too well (so that he can go on to judge that “in spite of all Hinduism's splendid piety and effusion of deep religious emotion and experience, the harsh word must be said that this is sheer religious utilitarianism or hybris [sic]‘; ibid, p.112). But the ‘understanding’ or ‘penetration’ is undertaken on the basis of a pre‐conceived notion of religion(s) as a ‘total, peculiar entity’’with their own centres‘ and ’inner core‘, viz. by implication, insuperably incommensurable. A scholarly study of religion will have to inquire more impartially, making use of historical, anthropological, philosophical and other means, whether religions are in fact unicentric or poly‐centric, impervious to one another or culturally porous, hard‐edged or fuzzy (not only as to their boundaries but also intrasystematically), and so on. As I read it, various types of scholarly evidence are converging towards establishing the second of the preceding alternatives. Kraemer's ‘penetrative’ ideology also does not have true reciprocity in mind in that it is intended self‐confessedly as destructive of religion: ’The object of this book has been to show that Biblical thinking, the whole world of attitudes and decisions and modes of being implied in the Biblical revelation, is a type wholly sui generis… In the furnace of Biblical thinking religion is at the same time abolished and radically revaluated', ibid, p.449. There are other stances bearing on the relationship between religions which seem to lend themselves to ‘religionist’ conclusions. One such may well be the view formulated by George Lindbeck in his The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (SPCK. London, 1984)Google Scholar. For Lindbeck, the Christian religion is a ‘cultural‐linguistic’ matrix in which adherents are learning the skill of speaking in the sole idiom which can shape one according to ‘the mind of Christ’, viz. in saving grace. This implies that non‐Christian modes of discourse are not salvific, and that their (even proficient) users are religiously illiterate if not barbaric. It is hard to form relationships of justice, love and peace in this context.