DIVINE ULTIMACY

 The Concept

Mankind, through religious language or reflection has been aware and consequently discourses about the Ultimacy, the eternal and unchanging reality which transcends material reality. It has been called by many names, as the Sacred, the Holy, the Supernatural, the Absolute, the Supreme, the Transcendent, the Existence, the One, the Being, the Truth, the Divine, the Ultimate Reality, and for the theist, God.

This Ultimate Reality is the object of belief. It is numinous or holy, beyond all the profane and ordinary reality, but overwhelmingly real and valuable.

After the Enlightenment the religious worldview in the Western academia was permeated by either an accommodation to the secular naturalism in the ninetieth century or a policy of denial to the contemporary findings of science that later would outcome as some form of fundamentalism, however appeared thinkers who challenged those views. The redemption of metaphysics by Edmund Husserl as a valid concept also fostered the digression on the subject of the Supernatural, allowing the academic research in the religious phenomena, not as a mere human product, but also as something mysterious.

The naturalistic approach to reality, denying the existence of anything over or above nature rejected many traditional religious tenets. Thinkers as Ludwig Feuerbach, Auguste Comte, John Dewey and Erich Fromm placed the Sacred as human cultural product and ended to develop a secular humanist religious thought, that yet retained the idea of the Holy, but limited in the humankind.

Not all the heirs of the Enlightenment would outcome with a rationalistic view on religion.  Schleiermacher, in common with many mystical paths, defined Religion experimentally as the feeling of dependence on the Sacred. The idealist philosophy of F. W. J. von Schelling and G. W.F. Hegel furthered the concept of the Absolute as the complete, perfect Ultimate Reality and linked it with finite, phenomenal universe and its processes.

The Sacred, as object of critical inquiry, would re-emerge in the early twentieth century. Almost contemporaneously, the theologian Rudolf Otto published The Idea of the Holy (1917) and the anthropologist Emile Durkheim his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), thus validating the perception and acknowledgement of the Ultimate Reality that human have in the religious phenomena.  Durkheim proposed that whatever is set apart or forbidden for sacred purposes was sacred per se. In Otto, the experience of something "wholly other” is the fascinating mystery, the Holy. Tremendum et fascinans, awe-inspiring, fearful, yet draws us toward it.  Later on as did other scholars of religion, Mircea Eliade furthered the analysis in his The Sacred and the Profane, adopting the concepts of separateness of Durkheim and the numinous of Otto.

The Place of the Divine

This Transcendence becomes attainable to the believer through sacred rituals, forms of language, thought (doctrine), art, personal experiences believed to be sacred, institutions (Church, Sangha), holy person, and religious symbolism.

The Divine is sought in the sacramental aspect of some religions in the inanimate objects (relics, statues), food (bread, wine), living beings (sacred animals, totem, trees, holy person), rituals (dances), but it does not mean that the object is the Ultimate itself.

There is another aspect of religions where the Divine is perceived in the course of history, social and individual, where the prophetic utterance conceptualizes and makes manifest the will of the Ultimate Being. The word is the medium to transmit the sacred, leaving a great importance to the doctrine.

Yet beyond the sacramental and prophetic perspectives, there is mystical expression of religion, where the individual awareness of the Divine is more important than right ritual or right belief.

Discussed Attributes

The various religious systems discuss the attributes to the Ultimate Reality.

· Transcendence. This higher Reality is beyond the ordinary, yet it has an immanent aspect.

· Order. In many religions this Ultimate Reality is embodied in the cosmical order: Dharma in Hindu and Buddhism, Tao in Taoism, the Word (logos) in Christianity, Torah in Judaism, Ma’at in the ancient Egyptian religion, Asha in Zoroastrianism and serves as the matrix ruling the visible universe.

· Personality. The Abrahamic monotheistic religions believe that God is personal, while in the eastern religions the underlying Absolute in the Universe is impersonal. Even materialistic worldview, such as Marxism, which denies the existence of a Supreme Being, believes in a maximum impersonal Truth and applies it in the pursuit of the Final Good in form of social justice, although does not bother to define what Ultimate Justice is.

· Infinity. Most of religions believe the Ultimate Reality is infinite, but some conceptions have a much more limited understanding. Open Theism; Process Theology; Panentheism; and finite Godism regard the Divine as the most powerful entity, but not as the all-powerful One; the most knowledgeable, but not as the all-knowing One.

·  Aseity. The self-existence of the Ultimate without depending on or of anything else.

TAXONOMY OF BELIEFS ABOUT DEITIES

Ontologically the Divine has a place in the religious imaginary, where It became object of worship and provider of the worldview for a given religion.

1.       Theism: The belief that gods or deities exist. Some theistic religions are: Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Bahá'í Faith, Sikhism and Islam.

1.1.     Monotheism: The belief in and worship of a single god.

1.1.1.  Plural Theism: God is in a complex form. Christian Trinitarianism, Kabalah, Hindu Smartism, Christian Gnostic Pleura, Ayyavazhi Trinity, some Sufi Islamic traditions.

1.1.2.  Oneness: God is in an only simpler form. Sunni Islam, Baha’i, Orthodox Judaism, Christian Unitarianism.

1.2.     Bitheism: two Divine realities.

1.2.1.  Ditheism: Two collaborationist and cooperative deities: some Siberian Shamanism Divine Twin Mythologies (Nenets, Chukchi, Kets), the Yin-Yang principle in the Tao.

1.2.2.  Dualism: two competitor deities: Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mandika (Mali) Mythology, many Native Americans Twin Deities.

1.3.     Polytheism: The belief in and worship of multiple gods or deities.

1.3.1.  Henotheism: The belief that there may be more than one deity, but one is supreme.

1.4.     Deism: The belief that a god or gods exists, but does not interact within the universe.

1.5.     Pantheism: The belief that the universe is equivalent to the Deity.

1.6.     Panentheism: similar to Pantheism, but the belief that the universe is joined into/within God. However, the Ultimate reality is greater and beyond the universe.

2.       Non-Theism: Absence of  an Absolute Being

Non-theistic religions: Confucianism and Buddhism.

2.1.     Atheism: An absence of belief that gods exist;

2.2.     Agnosticism: The belief the nature and existence of gods is unknown and cannot be sufficiently known or proven. 

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

The Earliest Traditions

The religious beliefs of the pre-literate societies, the so-called ‘primitive religions’ have very complex worldviews. The animistic worldview, common to many hunter-gatherers cultures, believes that all or most objects have a soul or that the entire world is Sacred. For the people of Oceania the Sacred goes beyond physical world, the mana this Divine force inhabits objects and individuals in different proportions, what is called animatism. In a further complexity, Shamanism in Siberian and Native America cultures the initiated enters in contact with the Transcendent One through trance and rituals, and manipulates (or intercedes with) the Spiritual Reality for practical purposes.

In African Traditional Religions there is not a line dividing the spiritual and natural world, but in the spiritual realm, there usually is a creating entity, which generally is not worshipped. The immanent manifestations, in the figure of spirits, orisha, ancestors, remembered by lengthy oral accounts and are invocated through rituals that includes dance, divination, sacrifices performed by religious specialists.

At the rise of state civilizations the religious expression of the Sacred found way in the ancient polytheism, usually the Ultimate Realities were deities linked to the fertility worship, natural phenomena, and acquired personality (or anthropomorphic characteristics). This was the case of the ancient religion of the Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and the Vedic Hinduism.

The Axial Age

Karl Jaspers called the axial age the period from 800 BC to 200 BC when occurred many transformations, including religious one, as the emergence of the Great Religions that were not limited to ethno-national boundaries. Among these transformations, it can be listed the birth of Upanishadic Vedanta thought, Jainism, and Buddhism in a more abstract development of the Dharmic religion; while in Iran emerged Zoroastrianism; in the Mediterranean basin had and the consolidation of the Hebrew monotheism; the religious thought of the Greek Philosophy; the syncretic mystery religions of the Hellenism; the inception of Christianity. A later comer would be Islam. Far East the Tao and the Confucianism teachings were decodified.

In India the prevalent thought of the Upanishad times was more abstract than the earlier Vedic, with the Holy being equalized to the universe.  Together with Buddhism and Jainism, the common concepts of karma, dharma, samsara, moksha, were defined and consolidated, later carried to other parts of Asia. In Hinduism everything is part of the impersonal uncreated Brahma, this monistic concept included the underling order- dharma – and the material reality was an entrapment, in the cycle of samsara, cycle of death and rebirth – until the right acts (karma) would lead to moksha (release). Being Monistic, there is not a delineated boundary between the Sacred and the profane.

The Chinese Traditional Religions were synthesized at this period in a more theoretical way in the Taoism and Confucianism. In the Taoist worldview there is no omnipotent being who created and controls the universe, but everything flows out from the impersonal cosmic order, the Tao, in an equilibrate fashion of the nature. In common with Taoism, the Confucianism has a reverence for the Tien (heaven), but even though it has rituals, sacred place and priests, it has not deities in western sense; rather the ethics is the Ultimate Good.

The first millennium before the Common Era Monotheism surfaced in the Semitic Israelites, out of a Canaanite religious background. It is believed today that earlier Hebrews did not have a solid monotheistic conscience, but were henothenists, worshiping YWHW as a mere national deity, with many backsliding to the neighbors’ gods. However, the tragedy of exile and captivity in Babylon served to the Israelite realize their God as not one among many, but the One, the only Transcendent reality, who had established a covenant with a particular people, Israel.

Parallel development in rejection of polytheism occurred among other people in the axial age, as among the Persians and the Greeks.

In Iran Zoroaster reduced the pantheon into two divine morally opposing entities and their myriad of angels and demons, with the benevolent Ahura Mazda as the Superior One, and with a scheduled encounter of all the living with the Sacred in an eschatological end.

Greek philosophers begin to challenge the polytheistic anthropomorphism of Greek Religion. Epicurians denied that the gods influenced the lives of men. Socrates was put to death in charge of being against the gods. The ancient Greek religious conception was replaced by a more abstracted, such that of Plato, who idealized the existence of a Monad, a supreme entity. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, perfect and simple Being that is the creative ground of everything other than itself and was passionless, different from the so-human-yet-powerful Olympic gods.

Many of those Greek philosophical method and phraseology was employed in Christianity, where the Ultimate Reality of Judaism took human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Neo-Platonism in combination of Neat Eastern Hellenized beliefs gave origin to the Gnostic system, where the created universe was regarded as inferior, and the ineffable Divine was a pleura whence emanated the many immanent spheres of reality, inclusive the physical one. This system can be described as Panenthistic, since the tangible universe was considered part of God. Similar to the dharmic Moshka, the release of the soul from matter was the main goal, and united oneself to the Cosmic Truth.

Islam came to be the call to the submission to the Only, with the tenet of tawhid (Oneness) of God the central doctrine. Muslims were important as the preserver and transmitter of Aristotle writings, that in Europe would contribute for a renascence of systematic inquiry about the Divine, through the Christian Scholasticism, Jewish rationalism in Maimonides and others and its rational counterpart in the Islamic thought of Avicenna, Averroes and Al-Ghazali, and all dedicated to the discussion about the nature of God.

Mystical systems during the Mediterranean Middle Ages offered newer perspectives. The Brethren of Common Life held a panentheistic view, what was shared by other Christian mystics in the West and East, and remarkably present in the Eastern Orthodoxy. At other revealed religions mysticism had their panentheistic exponents, as the some Sufi saints such as Ibn Arabi in Islam and the Kabala in medieval Judaism.

Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution

The Renaissance and Enlightenment in Western Civilization proportionate a revolution in the methodologies of research in all fields: philosophy was once again independent of religion; the Reformation gave a fresher look on the Christian Scriptures; empirical science was disassociated from speculative reasoning; the encounter of new lands and people offered a challenge to the Judeo-Christian European tradition. Many of the finer minds of the time dedicated to the subject of religion, among them Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Kant, the Encyclopedistes and Schleiermacher.

Baruch Spinoza was unique in his cosmo-religious thought defining God — an infinite, necessary and uncaused, indivisible being as the cause of all things and equals to nature, therefore Pantheist.

David Hume treated the Very Idea of God with skepticism, and appealed for a natural empiricism. He also criticized the then-prevalent Cosmological Argument, and discussed the problem of evil, rejected miracles, the immortality and materiality of the soul. In 1757 Hume published “The Natural History of Religion”, a ground-breaking work trying to explain the origins and evolution of religious belief. Under his scrutiny, the Absolute God was regarded as distinct from that one preached by the human religions. It still is discussed whether Hume was an atheist, agnostic or to what extent his skepticism was.

Immanuel Kant criticized the excessive reliance on reason and the previous attempts to proof the ontological existence of God. However, Kant presented an argument from Moral, and presented God as the Supreme and Ultimate Moral Being.

Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes and many of the Encyclopedistes defended the concept of the Watchmaker God, or Deism. The Great Architect of the Universe, to use the freemason terminology from that time, created the visible world, set its laws and let it go by itself, so any violation of its laws (such in miracles) would be a self-contradiction. God thus was a distant Reality, without intervention or providence.

In response to the Enlightenment rationalism, Schleiermacher rejected that religion could be based on morality, metaphysics or science but one should rely on the dependence of the Highest Power and experience was the way to rapport with that Reality.

Meanwhile in the Middle East traditions an autochthonous a renewal (and also the contact with different traditions, chiefly the colonizing Christianity) took part. In Sixteenth century India came out Sikhism, proclaiming that God—V?higur?—is formless, eternal, and unobserved, without the Hindu manifestations of avatars and the cyclical view of life. Other reform movements would occur in the Ninetieth century India. The Arya Samaj re-emphazied the scriptural Vedas and condemned practices and beliefs of polytheism, saw the murti as idolatry, animal sacrifice, ancestor worship, pilgrimage, Brahmin rituals, the belief in avatars or incarnations of God, the hereditary caste system, and the untouchables marginality.  Other contemporary Hindu reform movement that came to strict monotheism was the Brahmo Samaj that had as the first creed the existence of only one God, the creator and sustainer of the world, who is infinite in power, wisdom, love and holiness.

Also in the Nineteenth century Islam was shaken by reform movements with alternative views on God. The most successful was the Baha’i in Iran who preached that the Ultimate Oneness was personal, unknowable, inaccessible, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and almighty, and the source of all Revelation which is progressive in the ancient religions, passing through Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed and finally the Bahá'u'lláh, to proclaim the unity and equality of humankind since it was created by God.

The leap caused by industrial, socio-political and scientific revolutions in the middle of the ninetieth century transformed once again, the religious concept of the Europeans. Early comparative culture and religious studies was developing, with the translation of the sacred texts of Eastern religions. Materialistic views of history post-Hegel reduced the idea of the Sacred to a human socio-cultural creation, as stated by Marx and the Positivists. Higher Criticism in Germany made the theologians to rethink the role of religion and God in a more social purpose. Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God in the Western Civilization. God seems to be reduced to a human consciousness of the infinite, as in the words of Ludwig Feuerbach. Robert G. Ingersoll traveled extensively throughout North America diffusing agnosticism. Following that line, non-theism was then consolidated with the work of Bertrand Russell and others.

But not everyone agreed with that  “dry scientificism” and New Religious Movements such as Theosophy, Kaderc Spiritualism, Christian Science, Unitarian Transcendentalism proposed a link to the beyond the tangible reality.

Contemporary trends

Systematic studies of religion, through anthropological, sociological, psychological, comparative and phenomenological approaches developed throughout the twentieth century, pointing to the reasonability of the metaphysical aspect of the Transcendence.

Academic Christian Theology in the twentieth century after Otto had a rebirth in the discussion on the nature of the Transcendent God, with Neo-Orthodoxy and Neo-Evangelicalism facing Christian doctrines with reason and science. It also resulted in an existentialist inquiry by Paul Tillich about the ultimate concern after the Ultimate Ground of Existence, transcendent to space/time and the usual personalist theologies of Judeo-Christian tradition. This quest culminated the ill-named polemic of death-of-God theology in the 1960’s.

While theologians were discussing the death-of-God philosophers were re-considering the concept of God. The advancement of epistemology led to the realization of the limits of the ability to grasp reality and the language to express it. Topics about Hermeneutics and the Meaning became widely discussed. The confident knowledge of modernity gave place to a post-modern relativism. God in post-modern philosophy and theology is mysterious, not bound in the traditional definitions of historic religions, which are regarded as human constructs or even worse, idols. A new reading of traditional Abrahamic religion texts, now under light of structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, and deconstructionist literary optics gave novel interpretations about God.

Emmanuel Levinas wrote in Dieu et Philosophy that God is a secular ideal, the Infinite Other, that the scriptures revealed as the traditional God. Jacques Lacan inherited the Freudian hypothesis of God’s existence as comforting illusion, but his concept of Otherness, as the awareness of the real order, has some abstract connotation of Ultimate Reality, localized in the imaginary order. Roland Barthes considered the idea of God as both the Helper and the Opponent, abstractions of human construct. Michel Foucault had a negative perspective on religion, regarding it as exerting power regulating culture and society. Jacques Derrida in his late years dedicated to the subject of religion, under a deconstructionist scrutiny and his disciples, like John Caputo, Jean Luc-Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, continue to interpret (or deconstruct) religion and the Undeconstructible does not intervene physically or metaphysically in nature.

In summary, post-modern philosophy has defined god as a distant Other, placing is immanence in the dominion of symbolic realms of the Mind, and it is distinct of the traditional theism by considering the Ultimate Reality as not located in a supernatural reality of the religions. The ontological investigation about the existence or not of God in space/time is beyond question.

The on-going discussions about the nature of God, comprises the Eco-Cosmic Mind, finite Godism, Process Tought, and the Open Theism position and proper existence or not of God of the revealed religions.

The American scholar Theodore Roszak, based partially in environmental ideologies such as Gaia hypothesis, holistic philosophy, and the progressive-evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin, systematized a worldview where the Cosmos is as a living presence and mind containing all living beings. God is a realm encompassing everything, making the cosmic ecology a pantheist system. This view is also espoused by many New Religions Movements of Neo-Pagan and Nature Worship extractions as well as by many ecological activists. Arne Naess (Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, 1989) has systematized this pantheistic view.

Another contemporary thinker who abandoned atheism for some newer form of theism was Alfred North Whitehead, who proposed the Process Thought or Theology, which was later developed by Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb. In this conception God contains the universe but is not identical with it (some form of panentheism) and is affected by the actions that take place in the universe. The Ultimate Being is omnipotent but act through persuasion, leaving free will to the creation. God is the underlining order that lead the process of reality. Thus, process theology seeks to solve many problems brought by the traditional absolute attributes to God, such as the Problem of Evil.

A similar approach is the finite Godism of Peter Bertocci, an Italian philosopher who rejected the materialistic worldview as reductionist but yet gave a relative picture of God, who could have created the universe from pre-existent matter, is active in it, but limited, finite and incapable of bringing the desired good. This worldview is laid in many thought of Plato, William James and John Stuart Mill.

Post-Evangelical theologians such Gregory Boyd, John Sanders, Clark Pinnock advocate the Open Theism, doctrine where God is not exercising meticulous control of the universe, or does not exhaustively know the future, in a Christianized form of Whitehead’a Process Theism and Betocci finite Godism.

There currently is a very hot debated discussion about the existence of God reaching the wide public audience since Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist, published in 2006 The God Delusion defending that the concept of god as an ideological virus and regarding religion as source of evil. The response of Christian philosophers, theologians and apologists such as Alvin Plantinga and Alister McGrath, who re-asserted the traditional Christian belief in God and its traditional conceptions of personality and attributes.

Whatever be the definition, the Ultimate Sacred continues today a fascinating and mysterious reality to attract the attention not only of thinkers but religionists in general.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·         Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. New York: Ballantine, 2003.

·         Dewy, John. A Common Faith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934.

·         Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harvest/HBJ Publishers, 1957.

·         Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Harper, 1957.

·         Forrest, Peter. God without the Supernatural. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

·         Foster, John. The Divine lawmaker: lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

·         Geisler, Norman L.; House, H. Wayne; Herrera, Max. The Battle for God: Responding to the Challenge of Neotheism. Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2001.

·         Hughes, Glenn.  Transcendence and History. The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia, MO:  University of Missouri Press, 2003.

·         James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin, 1982.

·         Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. New York: Oxford University Press- USA, 2^nd edition, 1958.

·         Russell, Bertrand. Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957.

·         Schleiermacher, Friederich. On Religion. Transl. by John Oman. New York: Harper, 1958.

·         Tillich, Paul.  Ultimate Concern. London: SCM, 1965.

·         Wach, Joachim. The History of Religions in Types of Religious Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

·         Zock, Hetty. A Psychology of Ultimate Concern. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990.