The Universal Grammar of Religion

Huston Smith
with a Response by Henry Rosemontjr.

Given as the Fifth Annual Venerable Master Hsan Hua Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Institute for World Religions, Berkeley, California, March 2005. t is usual to say in such circumstances: "I am honored." But I am through with being honored. I am happy. I am happy to be with so many friends. I do want to begin by reminding you that this is the anniversary of China's invasion of Tibet, so, if I may, I would just like to propose a moment of silence as we join our hearts with His Holiness and the Tibetans in this time of their ordeal. Tonight's unseen guest is Noam Chomsky, who has described a universal grammar that is built into the human mind and structures every human language. What follows is my attempt to do the same thing with respect to religion. A brief quotation from the Chandogya Upanishad will provide an introduction: "As by knowing one lump of clay, all things made of clay are known, the difference being only in name and arising from speech, and the truth being that all are clay." I am proposing to lay out very briefly what I call the universal grammar of religion upon which all religions stand. I have numbered my points to make it easier to follow. One: Reality is infinite. The Infinite is the one inescapable metaphysical idea, for if you stop with finitude, you face a door with only one side, an absurdity. Two: The Infinite includes the finite, or we would be left with infiniteplus-finite and the Infinite would not be what it claims to be. The natural image to token the Infinite's inclusiveness is a circle. The Infinite is that circle out of which nothing can fall.
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Huston Smith Three: The contents of finitude are hierarchically ordered. Arthur Lovejoy titled his important study in the history of philosophy The Great Chain of Being and argued that its underlying idea was accepted by most educated people throughout the world until modernity mistakenly abandoned it in the late eighteenth century. The Great Chain of Being is the idea of a universe composed of an infinite number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the most meager kind of existence through every possible grade, up to the boundless Infinite. The ascent may be a smooth continuum, but for practical purposes it helps to divide it into categories. Aristotle's categories of mineral, vegetative, plants and rational is a good start, but it ends too soon because we human beings, rational beings that we pride ourselves on being, are only halfway up the chain. Four: Causation is from the top down, from the Infinite down through descending degrees of reality. Five: In descending to the finite, the singularity of the Infinite splays out into multiplicity. The One becomes the many. The parts of the many are virtues, for they retain in lesser degree the signature of the Infiniteof the One's perfection at the top. The foundational virtue is existence; to be more than figments of the imagination, virtues must exist. In the scholastic dictum, "esse qua esse bonum estbeing as being is good." It is good simply to exist. As for what the virtues other than existence Everything that IS OUtSlue a r e > India begins with sat, chat, anandabeing, consciousness, bliss. The West's ternary is the good, the US IS also ItlSlde US. true and the beautiful, and these beginnings open out into creativity, compassion and love until we arrive at Islam's Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God. The hundredth name on the Muslim rosary is absent because it is unutterable. Six: Reversing the drift of downward causation, as we look upward from our position on the causal chain, we find that as these virtues ascend the causal ladder, the distinctions fade and they begin to merge. This requires that the image of the ladder and chain be replaced with a pyramid. Flannery O'Connor titled one of her short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge, and this is so. God knows lovingly and loves knowingly, and so on, until, in the Infinite, differences, which symbolize separation, completely disappear in the divine "simplicity." "Simplicity" here is a technical term; the idea can be likened to a mathematical point that has no extension. To refer to that point, any virtue will serve as long as the word is capitalized, whereupon they all become synonyms. God is the conventional English word for the Infinite, but Good, True, Almighty, One and so on are all equally appropriate.

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The Universal Grammar of Religion Seven: When the virtues converge at the top of the pyramid, the religious worldview makes its most staggering claim: absolute perfection reigns. In Hegel's dictum, despite the fact that the world is in about the worst shape imaginable, in the eye of the cyclone all is well. This brings us face-to-face with the problem of evil. Human beings are capable of great nobility and horrendous evil. Our primary mistake is to put ourselves ahead of others. We cannot get rid of that error, but we can and must work to restrain it. Eight: The Great Chain of Being, with its links that increase in worth, needs to be extended by the Hermetic Principle, "As above, so below." Everything that is outside is also inside us"the Kingdom of God is within you." We intersect, inhabit, all the echelons of the chain of being. As Sir Thomas Browne recorded in his Religio Medici, "Man is a multiple amphibian, disposed to live, not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguishable worlds." When we look out, it is natural to visualize the good as up. Angels invariably sing on high and gods live on the mountaintop. But when we look inward, the imagery flips and the best things lie deepest within us. The complete picture shows the ineffable, unutterable, apophaticwhich is to say unspeakableGodhead at the top, descending to the personal, describable, cataphaticwhich is to say speakableGod, to angels, and from there down to the physical universe. But within us, value inverts and the divisions increase in worth. Mind is more important than body, our multiple souls more important than our mind, and Spirit, which is identical in us all, is more important than soul. Nine: Human beings cannot fully know the Infinite. Intimations of it seep into us occasionally, but more than this we cannot manage on our own. If we are to know confidently, the Infinite must take the initiative and show itself to us. It has to be revealed to us, because there is no commensurability between the finite and the Infinite. Nature does the same thing by building this universal grammar of languages into our heads. We did not create that. It came from outside. Ten: Revelations, such as the Bible, have to be interpreted, hence the science of exegesis: the critical interpretation of religious appearances and texts to discover their intended meaning. These interpretations progress through four stages of ascending importance: the literal, the ethical, the allegorical and the anagogie. First, the literal: What does the text explicitly assert?Jesus was crucified, or the Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree. Next, the ethical: What does the text explicitly tell us we should and should not do? Third, the allegorical meaning: Jesus speaking in parables. Finally, and most important, the anagogie: What is the capacity of the text to inspire?
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Huston Smith Eleven: All these factors were taken for granted until the rise of twentieth-century fundamentalisms and the literalism they are fixed on. This has generated so much confusion that it justifies a little excursus to indicate what the mistake was. And here science gives us a clue. Science has shown us that there are three great domains of size: the micro-world of the infinitely smallquantum mechanics; the macro-world that we live in where we measure distances by feet, yards and miles; and the mega-world where the measurements are in light years. Scientists know that there is no way to talk consistently about their domain of the micro-world and the megaworld using ordinary language. You run into contradictions at every point, like those that cartographers run into when they try to depict the globe on the two-dimensional pages of a geography book. You can't do it accurately. Now, the Infinite, God, whatever you want to call him, her or itpronouns never work for the Infinite, which is beyond genderis at least as different from our everyday world as are quantum mechanics and relativity theory, for the sufficient reason that the Infinite includes both of those. Scientists recognize that they cannot describe these domains consistently in everyday language, but they can get to it through technical language, which in science is mathematics: numbers and equations. The same goes for religion. The only way we can access the upper levels of reality leading up to God is through our technical language, which consists of poetry, music, dance, art and prose. Through these we can get a grasp on God. Twelve: There are two distinct and complementary ways of knowing: the rational and the intuitive. The life and career of Blaise Pascal throw the two into exceptionally sharp relief. When he exclaimed what was to become his famous aphorism, "The heart has reasons the mind knows not of," the mind he was thinking of was his scientific mind, through which he achieved fame for his theory of probability in mathematics and his work on hydrodynamics in physics. And heart was his word for the organ through which burst the epiphany that turned his concern from science to religion. He wrote: "Fire! God of Abraham... Isaac... Jacob. Not the philosophers and the learned... tears of j o y . . . my God, let me not be separated from Thee forever." But that he never intended to dismiss philosophy and learning in total is amply evidenced by his eighteen closely reasoned Lettres Provenales in which he examined the fundamental problems of human existence, and by the fact that he titled the entries into his notebook Penses, in which he spells out his conviction that the true function of reason is to attain the truth or supreme good. All of the religions of the world spell out the distinction between the rational and the intuitive carefully. In the West, intellect (intellectus, gnosis, sapentia) is not reason (ratio); in Sanskrit, buddhi is not manes; in Islam
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The Universal Grammar of Religion ma'rifah, situated in the heart, is not aql, situated in the brain. In Hinduism, the knowledge that effects union with God is not discursive; it has the immediacy of direct vision, or sight. Thirteen: Walnuts have shells that house kernels, and religions likewise have outsides and insidesouter, exoteric forms that house interior, esoteric cores. People differ in the way they relate to the two. The difference comes down to how adept they are with abstraction. Esoterics are comfortable with abstractions, while exoterics need ideas to be concrete and representational to be clear. It follows that exoterics like to think of the Infinite in personal terms, whereas esoterics, while subscribing to the idea of the Infinite-clothed-in-human-attributes, are at the same time aware of the danger that this can easily turn into anthropomorphism, into making God too human. So it needs to be supplemented by esoterism. We need God to be like us, or we could not connect with him, but we also need God to be unlike us, because we cannot worship ourselves. Fourteen: Finally, what we know is ringed about with darkness. It is a numinous darkness that lures, for we know that God sees it as light and at times we sense a kind of twilight zone around its edges. But to cognition the darkness remains. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. In relation to the infinite we stand as less than a simple protein in a single cell on a human W/Ji^f yj know is Hned finger. Though it is alive, that protein cannot know the cell in which it lives. How then can it conceive of the a h o u t aar]mess% skin, the knuckle or the finger's articulating joints; the intricacies of the ligaments, nerves and muscles; the electro-biochemical process of that finger of which it is a negligible part? And even if it could contain all that understanding, it could never conceive of the whole hand of which it is a part that can find expression in the fingering of a guitar, the fist clenched in anger, the delicate touch needed for surgical repair of the heart. It is only a simple protein, an amino-acid building block. So much less are we in this mass of the universe and beyond it, the Infinite. We are, again, born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. **

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Henry Rosemont Jr.'s response:

his is the third time I have had the privilege of being invited by the Institute for World Religions, whose work I applaud, to come to this most beautiful and most peaceful room to good friends on the left coast, where audiences have been friendly and compassionate while still being critical. To a certain extent I look forward to most of my invited lectures, but I truly enjoy being here. I want to thank everybody for inviting me, and of course the frosting on the cake is to share the podium, in unequal measure I am happy to say, with my old and dear friend, Huston Smith. In his lecture Huston has given us, as he always does, much to reflect upon. I believe it is fair to say there are "intimations of the Infinite" in his paper, and I am therefore going to follow him on his tenth point, where he says that intimations of the Infinite and Revelation as well have to be interpreted, hence the science of exegesis. The major claim I wish to put forward is that Huston's talk should be interpreted not as a series of purportedly factual statements about the physical universe, at some abstract level, as if he were siding with those astrophysicists who theorize that the universe must be infinite as opposed to those who claim it is not. Such an interpretation would then tempt us to ask whether his statements were factually true about the universe, which in my view would be, to quote a famous sermon of the Buddha, "A question not tending toward edification." Huston himself hints that this question is not to be focused on in his ninth point, where he says explicitly that "Human beings cannot fully know the Infinite," from which it must follow that human beings cannot fully know whether statements about the Infinite are factually true or not. A more fruitful approach to Huston's lecture is, I believe, to approach it as saying something to, for, and about human beings; to listen to it as an interpretive schema of a religious dimension of all human life, a way of responding to the world both in its parts and as a totality. In this reading the question to be asked is not whether his remarks are true of the physical universe, but whether they are a faithful expression of a spiritual impulse as experienced by human beings as they confront their physical universe, and are reflected in the sacred texts of their several religions. This question I answer affirmatively. Let me begin with Huston's beginning. It may strike some of you as odd, or at least whimsical, that Huston entitled his lecture by reference to the theoretical work of Noam Chomsky, and then began it with a reference to the Chandogya Upanishad. The juxtaposition is in my opinion, however, altogether apt, for just as the latter
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A Response to "The Universal Grammar of Religion" claims one lump of clay can suffice for knowing the essentials of clay, so too, has Chomsky always insisted that many of the rules, or principles, of universal grammar could be discovered by examining a single language, preferably the linguist's own. Chomsky's reasoning is simple and straightforward: if there are principles which speakers of a language or dialect demonstrably follow from childhood on, but which could not have been learned on the basis of linguistic experience or tutoring, then those principles must be a part of the cognitive endowment that all human beings bring to bear in acquiring their native tongue. Thus, while Chomsky calls his abstract syntactic schema "universal grammar," the name can be misleading at first blush, especially if it is taken to mean "grammatical rules or principles which hold throughout the universe," for that is not what he means. What he has devoted his linguistic life to studying are the specific mental structures by means of which all normal human beings come to be competent speakers of their native dialect fairly independently of intelligence or motivation, with minimal and often degenerate empirical inputs, and with virtually no instruction. Chomsky seeks, in other words, not principles which hold "throughout the universe," but what I have called "homoversal" principles, meaning "for all human beings, mentally and physiologically constituted as they are." And thus as I would modify Chomsky's claim a little bit, so I would modify Huston's and call it a "homoversal grammar of religion." In addition to a language-capacity mental structure, e.g., his "universal grammar," Chomsky has postulated similar specific mental structures embodying principles in such areas as music, personality discrimination, mathematics, facial recognition and other areas where human beings seem to behave quite skillfully and similarly in areas where there has been a paucity of empirical data that could account for how the skill was acquired and uniformly exhibited in virtually the same way by everyone across time, space and culture. It is important to emphasize this point, for Chomsky has often pointed out a number of features of universal grammar that do not seem to have any communicative function, being either redundant, reduplicative, overly abstract and/or not utilizable by human beings because of interference from other cognitive capacities. That is to say, several specific human abilities, capacities and ways of interacting with the world appear to have features that do not have any selectional advantage in the evolution of the species; we simply have those abilities and capacities. The principles of universal grammar, or homoversal grammar as I would call it, describe a certain feature of human beings: they are not at all to be seen as universal, in the philosophical sense of the term. In other writings I have extended the
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Henry Rosemont Jr. Chomskian model to the fields of ethics and aesthetics, claiming that here, too, we can find evidence of homoversal principles, or values, holding "for all human beings, mentally and physiologically constituted as they are." And I believe that is exactly what Huston is doing for the field of religion. Against this background I can begin to frame some questions for you, Huston, the first of which must be on the minds of everyone here tonight who knows you and your life and work at all well: how much of the magnificent vision you have given us in outline this evening is based on your experience as a practitioner of a multiplicity of spiritual disciplines in a variety of faiths, and how much is based on your life as a philosopher/scholar of religions and their sacred texts? I suspect strongly that the answer is not either/or but both/and. To the extent your spiritual principles are derived from a religious experience, or set thereofeven if derived from spiritual practice within a single faithyour principles might well be construed at least partially as absolutely general and not uniquely Christian, nor merely autobiographical, merely telling us something about Huston Smith and his faith tradition, any more than Chomsky's universal grammar tells us only about Chomsky, or only about English. If, moreover, you have had a multiplicity of religious experiences resulting from deeply immersing yourself in a multiplicity of spiritual disciplines in a variety of faith traditions, as I know you have done, then your lecture begins to illuminate even less the personal Odyssey of Huston Smith, and rather casts a new light on what we might call, analogous to our Chomskian "linguistic capacity," a "spiritual capacity," open to all human beings, mentally and physiologically constituted as they are. This possibility becomes all the more intriguing to contemplate when we turn to the philosopher/scholar Huston Smith, who has taught the sacred texts of the world's religions to generations of students, and whose book on the subject has sold over a million copies worldwide and has done much, I believe, to cut down on the amount of religious violence in the world, even though there is too much of it now. Those million copies of the book were sold largely because its author asked a rather simple question of each faith's sacred writings: How could an intelligent, decent human being believe the things said in those texts? And he gave decent, intelligent answers for every one of the world's traditions. If he had done nothing else, the world would still be deeply indebted to Huston Smith. Again, I believe Huston has used both the Chomsky and the Chandogya Upanishadwell together, for he will surely affirm that the fourteen points of his ontological vision can be derived by a careful study of the sacred texts of a single faith tradition. My own acquaintance with the many and varied 8
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A Response to "The Universal Grammar of Religion" sacred texts of the world's faiths is decidedly inferior to Huston's, but none with which I am at all familiar are incompatible with the ontological thrust of the lecture we have just heard. To be sure, the cosmologies of the world's religions are wildly inconsistent with each other, having in common only the fact that none of them can be made to square with the findings of modern science. But the differing religious cosmologies no more vitiate Huston's claim for a universal or homoversal grammar of religion than radically different languages like English, Japanese, Hungarian and Hopi in any way challenge Chomsky's concept of a universal grammar of human languages. Religious cosmologies are here metaphysical, there anologic; here clearly influenced by geographic and climatological features, there clearly by factors of language and accidents of history. It is physical geography that explains why African sculptors worked in wood while their Italian Renaissance counterparts chiseled marble. And at the same time we need culture and history to explain why, although marble is found in China as well as Italy, Chinese sculptors carved Bodhisattvas and not pietas. But to my mind the African, Italian and Chinese carver/sculptors are all simply expressing, in a concrete physical medium, their stance toward the universe qua universe, a stance clearly spiritual, and their works can be better understood by appeal to the principles of religious grammar that Huston's lecture explicates as definitive, again, of all human beings, physiologically and mentally constituted as they are. For myself, however few or many religious experiences Huston may have had, I admire altogether the scholarly analytical skills and keen sensitivity he has combined to see beyond the specific and cultural features deeply embedded in each religion's sacred texts, There are many rituals, symbols, liturgies, myths and legends, in order to describe in more general terms a decidedly human orien- for the referent tation toward the world. Huston has, throughout his life, described this orientation in all of his writings, in Beyond Spiritual sense. the Post-Modern Mind and Forgotten Truth no less than in his World's Religions. As he said in the lecture, "God is the conventional English word for the Infinite, but Good, True, Almighty, One and so on are all equally appropriate." And of course there are many other names in many other languages for the referent of our spiritual sense, which is called by many in the West the Infinite, owing to the peculiar development of mathematics in the Western intellectual world from Pythagoras onward. Huston also knows well the various appellations given to this referent in other traditions, from Nirguna Brahman to sunyata to Dao, and for him to reaffirm these traditions no less
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names ofour

Henry Rosemontjr. than his own for as long and as resolutely as he has done, suggests a sense of our co-humanity across time, space, language, geography and culture, a sense of our co-humanity on a par with our sense of awe, as he hints, in our confrontation with the universe. Now if my interpretation of what Huston has said and done in his lecture, and in much of his other work, is at all warranted, it follows that the significance of what he has said and done will be obscured if we insist on asking whether his ontological pronouncementsfor so they seemare literally true of the physical universe. But I also wish to bracket questions of literal truth for deeper reasons. The color spectrum infrared to ultraviolet is not in any sense true of the way of the universe; rather statements about the spectrum are, I would suggest, faithful to the powers and limitations of the human visual sensory organ to see colors within it, beyond which boundaries all is black for us. The same may be said for what is audible with our aural sensory organ. Further, the way nouns, verbs and modifiers can and cannot interact are not in any sense true of the universe, but the principles of universal grammar can be faithful to the way human beings communicate their visual, auditory and other sensations to one another, physiologically and mentally constituted as they are. Put another way, there may be a true theory of the universe, but it is the height of hubris to believe that human beings could ascertain what that theory was, given their particular organs for sensing an external world and ways of communicating their experiences of it. Perhaps intelligent life forms very, very different from us could correctly perceive the way the universe "really is" and describe it in languagebut that language would be altogether unintelligible to us. In just the same way, I want to suggest that the best way to construe Huston's grammar of religion is to see it as endeavoring to be faithful to the distinctively human stance in reaction to and relation to and cognizant of, what I join him in referring to as the Infinite, as he sees that stance reflected in the spiritual disciplines he has practiced, and the sacred texts he has studied, over the course of an exceptionally long and rich intellectual and spiritual journey. * * * An expanded version of this lecture and response, together with an epilogue, questions from the audience, and answers given by the speakers, will be brought out in book form by Open Court.

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