Book Reviews revealed all too clearly in their bafflement at the preoccupation with God and Incarnation evident in Luce Irigaray’s work, and their unremitting hostility to the largely female Vatican delegation at the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing if feminist theology got its teeth into shifting some of the roadblocks to humans’ flourishing. The ‘feminine divine’ of Melissa Raphael and Beverley Clack might, then, indeed come powerfully into focus, and not just as part of the project of reconceiving the borderland of feminist theology with malestream philosophy of religion, well overdue for revision as all that is. Ruth Page and Linda Woodhead both want feminist theology to kiss the religious illiteracy of secular feminism goodbye, but feminist theology needs some new tools to make a substantial contribution to core doctrines and practices, perhaps by following Woodhead’s suggestion that feminist theology needs to learn how to assess the empirical grounding of religion. If there is a future for feminist theology, it may well require some adventurous refocusing of its agenda, and some new tactics for accomplishing it! ANN LOADES Durham University doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0265, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
Adnan Aslan, Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy: The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Richmond, Curzon, 1998, £45.00 ISBN 0 7007 1025 6. A noticeable trend in inter-faith studies in recent years has been the increase in the number of analyses of Christian thought written by Muslim scholars. This trend is welcome, both because it goes some way towards balancing the vast body of Christian and European interpretations of Islamic thought, and because it subjects 2000 Academic Press
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Christian thinking to different, though not necessarily less valid, norms of judgment from those with which most Western readers are familiar. Adnan Aslan’s addition to this literature is an ambitious attempt to show how the ideas of a leading Christian and a Muslim philosopher of religion are not so widely applicable as they may at first appear. The author has chosen the main Christian exponent of the pluralist interpretation of the relationship between the religious traditions, and the person who in Islam comes closest to advocating this position. He examines their views on a series of inter-faith topics. But his intention goes beyond a comparison. In his introduction he explains his aim to be a Muslim response to the pluralist position, and it consists of criticisms of the various facets of Hick’s philosophy and a defence of traditional Islam against the changes that a pluralist restatement would require. In the end he is less courageous than he promises to be, but in refusing to compromise on Islamic truth, Aslan shows that, in this case at least, Hick’s theoretical paradigms cannot be smoothly translated into religious reality. Aslan begins by introducing Hick and Nasr, the one an heir of the European Enlightenment who has moved towards his pluralist position both from philosophical conviction and personal experience; the other an inheritor of Iranian Islamic thought who has come to favour the ‘perennial philosophy’, a metaphysical contention that within all statements of religious truth there is a core of unchanging wisdom. This contrast gives a clue at the start of the distinctive difference between the subjects of the study. It also offers a hint of the approach which Aslan must take to their ideas: he can subject Hick to rational analysis, while with Nasr’s thought he is ‘compelled either to endorse it or dismiss it altogether’. In the following two chapters, Aslan begins to delineate the thought of the two
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scholars. In chapter two he argues that Hick is fundamentally secular in his claim that religion is a human construct in response to the divine and is thus liable to change with circumstances. In contrast, Nasr emphasises the eternal, abiding elements in religion, and in asserting that these are imparted from the divine he can be called religious in his basic impulse. Then in chapter three, he takes issue with Hick’s claim that all forms of knowledge about the divine are no more than modes of human experience and lack any sanction as a revealed origin. At the same time he endorses Nasr’s depiction of human knowledge about God as a reflection of the imminent form of the Ultimate. Throughout his discussion Aslan is keen to subject Hick’s incidental references to Islam to particular scrutiny and to show that they fail to do justice to what traditional Islam has taught. This is understandable, but the alternative he offers, which is the metaphysical and incipiently mystical restatement of Nasr, leaves a gap of expectation that he does not appear concerned to fill. In chapter four, Aslan examines the two scholars’ reasons for regarding pluralist accounts of religion as necessary. And then in chapter five, he penetrates to the heart of their insights in a discussion of their understandings of the Real. Though they employ the same terminology, they adopt different approaches, with Hick proceeding upwards from the various human depictions of divinity to the reality to which they all relate and Nasr moving downwards from the One to its many manifestations. For Aslan, Hick’s account is deficient because it is unable to explain how human depictions and divine reality connect, whereas that of Nasr is weak in that it claims that the One is present in all the many names by which it is called, irrespective of what beliefs may be expressed in the various faiths. There are some bold criticisms here, especially the exposure of the difficulty faced by both
scholars in bringing the huge diversity of divinities into a unified description without distorting them beyond the point at which believers would no longer recognise them. These points are largely incidental, however, and there is a lack of full engagement with the two kinds of pluralism that might lead into Aslan’s own alternative formulation or an effective rebuttal. Chapter six exposes the central weakness of the book. Throughout, Aslan has presented Hick and Aslan as representatives of their respective faiths, but without asking in what way. By the end of chapter five, he appears to have realised that Nasr is not sound as a Muslim, and in this last chapter he more or less abandons him. Here instead, after summarising Hick’s reinterpretation of Christian doctrines with the modifications the philosopher’s pluralist position imposes, he parallels it with his own Islamic ‘pluralism’ derived from the Qur’an. But he seems to confuse the pluralism of his two subjects with the open and tolerant inclusivism that Islamic scripture and history undoubtedly exhibit. The best Islamic parallel he can find for Hick’s philosophical pluralism is in fact an inclusive liberalism that extends welcome to non-Muslims but still affirms the unwavering truth of Islam. His discussion is too brief to do justice to the distinction he seeks to make, and it fails to explore the many possibilities of Muslim scripture and thought. But Aslan is too defensive about traditional forms of his own faith to take this step. So while the book provides a creditable exploration of the two representatives of religious pluralism, it neither offers a full-scale rebuttal of their positions nor explores the possibility of what an Islam restated in pluralist terms might be. The pressing inter-faith problems which the two scholars, the subjects of the book, attempt in their different ways to solve thus remain unaddressed in a mainstream Muslim context, and the possibility of
Book Reviews a Qur’an-based pluralist theology of religions is not put to the test. DAVID THOMAS University of Birmingham doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0266, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
Carol S. Anderson, Pain and its Ending: The Four Noble Truths in the Theravada Buddhist Canon. Richmond, Curzon, 1999, xi+255 pp., £40.00 ISBN 0 7007 1065 5. In this book, an extensive revision of Anderson’s doctoral dissertation, the approach centres on ‘what people do with doctrines . . . in a religious community’ and ‘the ways in which doctrines serve explicitly non-doctrinal purposes within a community’ (p. viii). The practical and dynamic interaction between doctrine and community is where Anderson’s interest lies, she tells us. With specific reference to the Four Noble Truths, Anderson sees a threefold relationship among religious experience, doctrine and cosmology as providing a way to understanding the place of the Truths in Therava¯ da tradition, which incorporates their function in the religious community and the way the community has related them to particular religious experiences. Accordingly, she seeks to trace references to the Truths in Therava¯ da material, noting ‘pedagogical techniques and results that claim to lead to the attainment of nibba¯na’ (p. 2) and discussing the Truths as both doctrine and symbol. The introductory chapter includes chapter-by-chapter preambles, an introduction to the structure and content of the Therava¯ da canon, its language and the historical development of the canon, its commentaries and other non-canonical Pa¯ li texts. This is all fairly straightforward, but it is a pity that in discussing the dating of the canon in relation to the dates of the Buddha, no reference is made to Richard Gombrich’s important article, ‘Dating the 2000 Academic Press
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Buddha: A Red Herring Revealed’ (in H. Bechert [ed.], The Dating of the Historical Buddha, Part 2, Göttingen, Vanderdoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). Chapter one, on ‘Cultivating Religious Experiences: Doctrine and Dit*t*hi’, first makes the point that (with some noteworthy, and noted, exceptions) much scholarly work on Buddhism regards the texts as a ‘repository of doctrines’ (p. 30), without questioning the complex relationship between those doctrines and what Buddhists actually experience. The chapter therefore seeks to examine this relationship, and it does so by means of ‘the category of dit*t*hi’ (p. 32 and passim). The aim seems to be to question the sense in which it is appropriate to think of the Four Noble Truths as a Buddhist ‘doctrine’, in a narrow propositional sense, and to suggest that seeing them in terms of dit*t*hi more accurately reflects their complex frame of reference, not just as doctrinal proposition but also as symbol and effector of religious transformation. Chapter two recounts and compares the canonical accounts of the Buddha’s enlightenment and suggests that the Four Noble Truths, when present in such accounts, should be seen not as doctrine but as a symbol both of the Buddha’s enlightenment and of the possibility that enlightenment can be achieved by others. Chapters three, four and five focus on analyses of reference to the Four Truths in all three of the canonical pit*akas. Chapter six provides a survey of scholarly writings on the Four Noble Truths over the last two centuries, noting differences in interpretation of the Truths. A variety of academic disciplines is drawn on and interpretive schema are discussed, providing a useful set of references, though in this chapter these are very particular to early work in Buddhist studies. There is cited only one work after Étienne Lamotte’s 1958 L’Histoire du Bouddhisme Indien: Hajime Nakamura’s Indian Buddhism: A Survey with Biblio-
