Amy Frykholm: Welcome back to the final episode of season two of In Search Of, where we've been in search of truth. Over the course of these eight episodes we've wandered far and wide looking for truth in various disciplines, including biblical studies, history and journalism. We've expanded our minds, contemplating truth in physics; we've looked at truth on the ground in U.S. prisons, on the ground in pilgrimage, and on the ground in dreams.
Today, we'll look for truth as it emerges in inter-religious conversation. My guest is John Thatamanil, who's a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He's the author of Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity. And he's working on a book that was especially intriguing to me for this podcast called Desiring Truth: Comparative Theology and the Quest for Interreligious Wisdom.
John, welcome to In Search Of. Thanks so much for being here today.
John Thatamanil: Oh, I'm delighted to be here.
AF: I wanna start by talking a little bit about your journey into interreligious studies. And one way I like to talk about this on this podcast is, what were you in search of when you started on this path?
JT: I think I was in search of home. I came to the US when I was eight and a half years old, and I pretty quickly realized that most of the things I was told about what it means to be Indian came in the form of constraint, of what I could not do. Being a good Indian meant that I could not date, could not go to the prom, could not… there are many, many “could nots.”
The saying is that immigrants are sometimes more conservative than the places they left because back home in India, tradition moves on. But there is a way in which the immigrant is a kind of fossil. Whatever India was in place when they left. That's, that's what they know. And so this whole business of, you know, dating or courtship, you know, it's arranged marriage. There are these traditions; there are these nos. The food was great, but everything else was constrained.
So I thought, what does it mean to be Indian? And when you're an Indian Christian, your Christianity doesn't help, because that's just something more that you have in common with the majority religion of the United States. But the interest in other religious traditions–Hinduism, Buddhism–now that was something distinctively Indian that did not, to me, feel like a constraint, an “no.” It was a kind of depth that awaited me, that I found profoundly resonant.
And I was introduced to it because my dad's first cousin was my Sunday school teacher, and to his great credit, he assigned as the senior Sunday school class, what was then called The Religions of Man by Huston Smith, which is now called The World's Religions. And when I read the chapters on Hinduism and Buddhism, I was just captured. So that's that search for a deeper sense of what it means to be Indian. One that I could embrace, and rejoice in. That's, I think, what did it.
AF: And yet there was something really important to you about keeping your Christian tradition alive and your roots in the Christian tradition. Talk about that a little bit.
JT: Oh, absolutely. I often tell my students, many of whom at Union are recovering from various kinds of truly traumatic and toxic Christianity, that I was spared that phase. Right? I mean, imagine the sheer fact that somebody in my denomination could assign a world religions textbook. It already says something, doesn't it?
AF: It does. Absolutely.
JT: This is not a tradition that I felt as a kind of reactionary posture. It didn't require me to sacrifice my intellect. And it was a deeply social justice-themed tradition. The Mar Thoma Church is this curious concoction because it is influenced by the Anglican missionaries, the Church Missionary Society, that came to India. But the people that the Anglicans were trying to reform were the Syrian Orthodox.
And the Syrian Orthodox did not wish to be reformed. But a breakaway faction formed the Mar Thoma Church. And what resulted was a kind of hybrid church that kept the liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox Church, the sensibility of the Syrian Orthodox Church, the smells and bells if you will, but with a kind of Protestant-inflected theology.
But that combo was never anti-intellectual, was never fideistic, was never anti-reason. And so I never had to do a kind of jettisoning of my tradition in order to find something more satisfying. So my interest in other religious traditions is never prompted by a sense of something missing in mine, but a kind of sense of inexhaustible richness in the other.
AF: And it makes me sort of wonder if you would describe your interreligious conversation as predominantly an internal conversation or predominantly a conversation you've had with others?
JT: That's a great question. One of my mentors–not anyone I've met other than once at a lecture–is Raimundo Panikkar (or, you know, he kept changing his name towards the end of his life). Raimon Panikkar's dad was a Hindu from my part of India, and his mother was Spanish Catholic. He's a fascinating hybrid of East and West, both in his just biology and his personality and even his physical features. Wonderful human being.
Panikkar says that real inter-religious dialogue happens when it becomes intra-religious dialogue. When you've so taken in what you've learned from another tradition that a conversation opens up within you, then it becomes a real living and vital dialogue. So I would say that you're astute to pick up on that sense that a certain depth doesn't germinate until it becomes an internal conversation.
But it has certainly been a robust conversation with very particular people. I have a Hindu guru, Swami Paramarthananda, with whom I studied Sanskrit and Shankara and Shankara’s commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. So his voice is always in my mind.
My dear friend Anantanand Rambachan, who's a brilliant Hindu theologian who taught for the longest time at St. Olaf College. He's now retired. He's a dear friend and when I'm writing theology, his voice and his personality always sounds in my ears. So there are a number of people like that with whom I'm in living conversations. So it's not just about reading the text.
AF: And there's also a practical aspect of this for you as well, right? There are some practices that have become integrated into your life.
JT: Absolutely. In more recent years, the practices come from studying with John Makransky, Lama Makransky, who is part of a certain strand of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and that practice is a kind of Dzogchen practice. And that practice is something I try to do every day. I'm a lazy practitioner and there are some seasons in my life where I'm truly diligent at doing it daily and there are other seasons where I'm more intermittent. Thankfully I'm in a more regular pattern now.
AF: Well, it's interesting because I have often struggled with the question of whether my practice is more influenced by Buddhism or more influenced by something like centering prayer. And it sounds like you would say pretty, pretty straightforwardly that you find it more influenced by Buddhism. Is that right?
JT: Well, that's complicated. On Pentecost, I was ordained an Anglican priest. So there is a very profound sense in which one of my primary practices is Eucharistic life and now presiding at it. So that remains dear to me and more so than ever. But in addition to that, the Buddhist practice is also present.
So some of us use the term “multiple religious participation” to capture people like me. In the case of some of us, we even go so far as to talk about multiple religious belonging. If belonging is, you know, recognized by both sides of the fence, right? If you've taken a Bodhisattva vow with an authorized teacher and are welcomed into a Buddhist community without being kicked out of your Christian one, then you can say and claim a kind of double or multiple belonging.
I find it safer to say that I am someone who engages in multiple religious participation because I'm really truly at home within the Eucharistic life of the Christian Church, but I supplement that with my Buddhist practices.
AF: And, you know, there are a lot of people in the United States who aren't as clear about this as you are, but who still find themselves in an idiosyncratic position of searching, of finding different religious traditions attractive at different moments in their lives. Their reading becomes idiosyncratic maybe, or multiple, we could call it, maybe “multiple religious reading” starts to enter in or something.
JT: Yes.
AF: I wonder how you, how you evaluate that, because it seems like you've thought about this more thoroughly than a lot of people. And there's some anxiety hanging around about, you know, what I guess some people have called syncretic practice or about this sort of participation in a broader religious context that isn't always traditional, maybe.
JT: Yes. Yes. Another fine question. So, I'm a very playful and mischievous human. So you and your listeners are gonna have to put up with that. I often ask people an intentionally punchy question. I ask them, why is it that being Buddhist Christian is often flagged as a problem, but being a capitalist Christian is not?
And I mean that rather seriously. You know, suppose just, let's say non-technical, at least to begin with, and say that to be religious is a matter of what one does with one's desires–to what do I give my heart? Well, truth be told, there has never been a more effective way of disciplining the heart invented in the history of human religiousness than the market.
AF: Hmm.
JT: I put this sort of, again, simplistically, but I think it makes a point. You know, your pastor has, if you're in a mainline denomination, maybe 15 minutes for a sermon, and an hour long service, perhaps an hour and a half, to begin to shape your desires in, let's say, a Christ-like direction.
But the market has you while you sleep, ‘cause you dream capitalist dreams. The way in which many of us are taught, including professionals, religious professionals too, to advertise ourselves, to regard oneself as the product.
I mean, the way in which our desiring is comprehensively captured by the therapeutic regimes of market desiring, right? That should count as syncretic, right? Trying to combine that with Christianity is fundamentally incompatible because one is, you know, about serving others in love, and the other is fundamentally about making you into an acquisitive consumer.
I would say that that kind of syncretism apparently doesn't raise any red flags, but the far more nuanced business of working to address egoistic desire, which is fundamentally a shared concern in both Buddhist and Christian communities, that gets to be regarded as problematic.
I also tell my students, look, the only time that Jesus objected to any kind of syncretic life was with respect to those who attempt to worship both God and Mammon. He doesn't say to the Roman Centurion and to Samaritans and to all the sorts of boundary figures whom he encounters, “now you gotta be a good Jew, you see, before I'm gonna be able to address your religious needs.” He doesn't make that claim, but he does make the claim emphatically that you cannot simultaneously worship God and Mammon and most American Christians are quite fine with that.
And I'm not wagging the finger. This is true for me as well, right.
AF: No, that's wonderful. I've just, I have not thought about it that way. And that is such a great description of how we go about deciding what “other” gets included into our religious life or practice.
JT: Which is to say we are always already multiple and syncretic. We cannot not be that way. The aspiration towards singularity might be lovely, but it's difficult to pull off.
AF: …and dangerous at times, as I've observed.
JT: Indeed.
AF: Well, so I wonder why you see religious diversity as a promise for Christians and not a problem. This has been an important theme in your work, and I'd love for you to just lay it out a little bit for listeners.
JT: I do not believe that God has abandoned most of the human community from divine self-disclosure. I can't affirm that and simultaneously affirm that God so loved the world, right? If I'm truly, as a Christian, to affirm that core affirmation that God did in fact so love the world and does so love the world, then divine disclosure must be happening far beyond the boundaries of the Christian tradition.
And if that's true–and I take that to be almost a kind of axiom that I can defend theologically if the need arises, but I think it's fundamentally a matter of affirming divine love and grace–then how God engages in self-disclosure under different vocabularies, under different practices, under different modes of being, must matter.
Which is to say that there are things to be learned about the divine life, and of course, I'm speaking here as a Christian. I can imagine a Buddhist saying there are things to be discovered about Buddha nature, precisely because the other practices, in other ways, have another vocabulary, has other orientations.
So I genuinely believe there's more to be learned about the divine life because the other practices differently and has another vocabulary, has other categories, has other myths. And if I give myself to the other in love, I will be opened not merely to that person, but what the person treasures, what inspires that person, what gives that person life. And in this movement of love towards my neighbor, I will find myself caught up in a movement towards the mystery. So for me, I now say that there is no movement towards God without a movement towards my neighbor.
AF: And then what do you do when a religion makes universal claims? Like, for example, Jesus is the only son of God. How do you work with such claims within that kind of theology?
JT: That requires considerable work. Thankfully, I haven't had to do all that work because people have been at it since, at least, Vatican II, most prominently.
I mean, the classic way that probably is most familiar or likely to be most familiar to your listeners is a kind of inclusivism. That the logos, or the word that was made flesh in Christ is the logos, as John chapter one puts it. That is the light that illuminates every person, right?
So people are quick to go to, “I am the way, the truth and the life. There is no other way to the father than by me.” That's in John, which begins with precisely this affirmation that the word who was with God and who is God is the light that illuminates, not some people, but every person.
So the classical strategy within the Christian tradition is to say something like what we know in full, others have at least in part. This is a strategy as old as the Book of John, and certainly articulated by Justin Martyr who said that anyone who follows the logos, including Heraclitus and Socrates, is a follower of the Christ.
So though there have been long strategies in the tradition to say that the Christ is known to others, now most contemporary Christian theologians–or maybe I shouldn't make numerical claims–some of us in Christian theology have moved from that kind of inclusivist posture, which suggests that we know in full, others know in part, to a pluralism posture, a posture that says that there are many genuine disclosures of divinity, and that we will be richer when those are brought into dynamic conversation and cross-fertilization.
AF: In doing that and working toward that pluralism, you've also called into question this category of religion. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the concept of religion is constructed and where it gets in our way and, you know, what we should do with it.
JT: Yes. I just got through teaching one of my favorite classes–my students love it–called “Imagine No Religion.” It's not really about John Lennon. And I won't sing that song, which I don't actually think is all that great theologically, but…
AF: Right, that if we just didn't have God, then we would all get along that? You don't think that's really the case?
JT: No, but I am very serious about “imagine no religion.” I mean, to put the point in a concise way, we've long had our traditions, but our traditions have not long been religions. That's an important point.
Sometimes people misunderstand me as somehow saying that Christianity doesn't exist or Buddhism doesn't exist. That's not… so I'm making a point, made perhaps most lucidly by the anthropologist Talal Asad, who makes what is to me a convincing argument, that you can't have something called “religion” until you have something else, that is, its contrary term, namely the “secular.” Only when we have those two terms, which he calls conceptual Siamese twins or conceptual conjoined twins, only then do we have religion in anything like a recognizably modern sense.
What he means then is to say something like this, that we have to be taught that some parts of our lives are religious and some parts are not. So economics, the market, which I've already been going on about, well, you know, that's not religious. Politics–that's not religious. How we spend our money, therefore, is not religious.
So what counts as “religious,” right, are “the flight of the alone to the alone,” to use that lovely but problematic expression, right? Religion gets cordoned off into the inward realm and the public realm is handed over to the various sciences, social, political, economic, and presumably can be rationalized and bureaucratized and rendered secular.
Well, these categories simply would be unrecognizable for most of our traditions, for most of their histories. Otherwise you couldn't even have usury laws, right? You couldn't say that charging interest is against the will of God. You can't even have a God who's seriously interested in justice if you accept this conception of religion as a contrary to the secular.
So the first point I make when I'm talking about this theme is, we have not always been religions. And that's pretty key. When our traditions did get “religionized” and put into that religion box, the first tradition to get religionized, I think, was Protestantism. And so there are many features of what we think of as religion that are really features, perhaps first, of a Protestant tradition.
So if you're gonna be a good candidate for the world religions category, you've got to have a scripture. Well, that is already a problem. Remember that scripture plays various roles even within the Christian tradition. For whom does the translated vernacular scripture hold primacy? Well, Protestants, right? So there's a sense in which a kind of modern Protestantism becomes the template for what the religions ought to look like.
And so, Hinduism, you know, which is a vast sprawling family of related traditions, has to present itself as having something like a scripture. Well, what's that scripture? Typically the Bhagavad Gita is presented as, you know, a kind of centralized scripture. But that's not true for, you know, many Hindus. And for most of human history, most Hindus were not literate.
So our traditions get, I think, scripturalized, they get literalized, they get creedalized, they get reified, in the sense that the idea emerges that you can only belong to one religion at a time. That too just does not apply for most parts of the world. In China, you can routinely, depending on what is happening in your life, you know, if it's a funeral, the Buddhists are in charge of that. If it's veneration of the ancients, well that's a Confucian orientation.
The notion that you can only be one religion at a time is part of what it means to be a religion. We've baked that into our understanding of what gets to count as a religion. So the whole idea that, you know, you can only be one at a time is part of what we think religion means, in the way that people in the West think that marriage means monogamy. You know, it doesn't mean that in many, many parts of the world, but that's baked into our definition of what it means to be religion.
AF: And then it allows us to derive concepts like syncretic from that. Because obviously you have to start with something that's pure and stable and then you start messing with it, then that's the syncretic.
JT: Exactly. And so I'm saying we ought to be something like critical religion theorists. Do we really want to accept this category? I mean, we can't wave it away. We can't dispatch it. It's part of the architecture of our thinking, but we can become self-conscious about it and ask ourselves, what are we assuming when we think that our traditions are religions, and how does that hamstring our conversation with respect to learning from other religious traditions, right?
The very idea that theology is in-house discourse, theology is faith seeking understanding, but faith seeking understanding within the boundaries of a religion. Why buy that? I mean, would Thomas Aquinas? Would Gregory of Nyssa? Would Saint Augustine? Would any of the great theologians of the Christian tradition have recognized theology as this sort of in-house, domesticated, you know, “thinking within my religion” frame? I don't think so. They thought with anybody interested, so Augustine's conversation partners were vast–Manicheans, Platonists, Neoplatonists–and then of course with Aquinas we've got conversations with Aristotle and Jews and Muslims.
So the way in which even theology gets housebroken, and then maybe people like philosophers can go explore those other traditions, but theologians, you know, we stick within the walls of our tradition. I think that's also an artifact of the way we think or are taught to think with the category religion.
AF: And I'm guessing that you probably have some pretty practical experience of this, that if you sort of set aside this category of religion or set aside the idea that theology is an in-house conversation, that the conversation among faith traditions changes, shifts, and becomes something else. Becomes possible.
JT: Absolutely. One can actually be in the room with Hindus and Buddhists and Christians and talk and think together about shared questions. I mean, one of the questions that I'm often talking to my friend Anantanand Rambachan, and John Makransky, about, is, does the ultimate require multiplicity, or is it enriched by multiplicity?
This is a fascinating question. There are some in the Christian tradition that simply insist that God doesn't need creation. And that creation was a kind of spontaneous decision, but not emergent out of divine need. And that the infinite divine is in no way enriched by creation. But there are other strands, particularly process theological strands, that insist that the divine actually is enriched by the life of the world.
And it turns out that if you ask that question, it becomes an interesting and intriguing topic of conversation between Hindus and Buddhists who also typically have historically maintained postures that suggest that the infinite is unchanged and is not enriched by the life of the world. This is particularly true of certain strands of the Hindu traditions.
But that we can talk about these things, that we can learn from each other, challenge each other, and be transformed by those conversations, that's part of the promise of learning to think beyond a boundaried, fenced-in thinking.
AF: And it seems to have real implications for what the nature of truth is. And in your most recent work, you've been wondering about truth, which is great for me in this podcast. But you've called this a “post-truth moment,” first of all. And I'd just like you to talk about maybe what a post-truth moment is and then I'd love to just dive a little bit more into your understanding of truth as a concept.
JT: Oh, so we're gonna talk about the easy stuff now.
AB: Yeah, right. I just wanted to move on, you know, to the next level.
JT: Right. So, you know, post-truth was the word of the year. I think it was Merriam-Webster's dictionary that made that determination in 2016, in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. And so it became recognized by the dictionary folks as having an unprecedented new sort of currency in our common discourse. We were using the word a lot more and the literati were having to deal with it.
So when a word gets picked that way, we're recognizing collectively that something new has emerged. And what that means exactly is a matter of considerable scholarly debate. And I should just say that Stephen Colbert, the comedian, pointed out that he ought to get credit for this because he was talking about “truthiness” much earlier. And so he had a lovely bit on his show, I think, the day after Merriam-Webster's announcement. And if you haven't seen that, it's hilarious.
AF: I'll put it in his show notes so that everybody can look at it.
JT: Yeah. Good. It's available on YouTube. So he pointed out, and I think others too, that post-truth refers to a pervasive feeling that we are either unable to discern what the truth is, or that the very idea that one can tell that there is a difference between truth and falsehood begins to slip out of traction. We can't get a hold. We are no longer convinced that we can access truth, even if such a thing was there.
One way of talking about why that might be is to say, well, there's just so much information out there and that the information pool, available through, say for example, the internet, is so vast and polluted. Right. There's so much fake news and alternate facts and manufactured falsities that are in the common pool that it's like a polluted, you know, lake. You want to take a drink, but you can't get the water because of all the other crud that's in there.
So if there are various analyses available as to why it has increasingly begun to seem as though we can no longer ascertain that there is truth, or that one can even believe that there is such a thing anymore, and that if there is anything that passes for truth, it's whatever feels true to me. This is the point that Colbert makes. Right? What feels true is what's accepted as true, not what is true.
AF: And you seem to find the category of truth indispensable for what you do. Like, it would be pretty rough if you decided that you couldn't use truth or the concept of truth. Is that true?
JT: Oh, absolutely. I think for religious people from any tradition, God is truth. So how do you jettison the notion? So for us, the term truth is itself a religious term, not merely an epistemological term.
So it's not just a matter of figuring out whether it's raining outside or not, and how can I establish that, but it's related ultimately to being in right relation to what there is, and specifically the source of what there is for theists of various sorts. So there's no way I can get rid of truth.
AF: In one of the things that I read of yours, you started in an interesting place, in regards to truth, and that was in the relationship between desiring and knowing and how that's different in different traditions. And I wonder if you could walk us through this a little bit.
JT: Yeah. So one of the things that I am beginning to learn about, and particularly from my colleague and friend Donovan Schaefer, who is a religious studies scholar, philosopher, and affect theorist–he's got a wonderful, relatively new book called Wild Experiment in which he points out that the very idea that thinking and feeling are actually two separate operations is itself a questionable notion, right? That feeling is one thing and thinking is another. But this is one of the ideas that seems baked into certain ways of thinking that are part of contemporary western life, and the two are sometimes even rendered into opposition. If I'm to think clearly, I must feel less.
AF: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's critical to our conception of what thinking is.
JT: Right, that feeling is somehow fundamentally misguiding, or potentially so, and then thinking and rationality is where we begin to see apart from the pull of feeling.
Well, it turns out that there's no philosophically credible way of policing that distinction or even neurological way. It turns out that there's no part of the brain that is only doing thinking and not feeling. And that the installing of this bifurcation is, by the way, also related to that other word we were talking about earlier. The “religion” word. Religion might be a matter of feeling, but science and secularism and rationality, well, you know, that's the domain of thinking. So there's complicated networks between our earlier conversation and this one.
But if the very notion that thinking and feeling are two different things, and that feeling itself is a way of knowing, or that there are two sides of the same coin, then it might be that we need to attend to feeling very carefully because it might itself be a source of knowing. And it might not be the case that it's the enemy of knowing, but it might be that feeling needs to be tutored, right? That feeling needs itself to be educated, not merely our thinking.
In academic circles, some people have even started talking about critical feeling, rather than just critical thinking. And I'm fascinated that these flares and flickers are emerging in our common life that are pointing to the idea that feeling is not the enemy of knowing, but miseducated, untutored feeling might well be.
AF: Or feeling that is at the mercy, as we were talking about earlier, for example, of the marketplace, where your feelings are being tutored all the time, but they're being tutored by forces that maybe don't have your highest good in mind, or something like that.
JT: Absolutely dead on. So in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, I think it would be safe to say that every perception of anything whatsoever is said to be accompanied by a feeling valence. So if I'm looking at my table and I see a book, I don't just see that book. I see it accompanied and inseparable from a kind of up signal, like a kind of affirmative signal or a kind of, “ugh, that's, that's homework.” If it were something that I had to do because I didn't want to, it would have a sort of negative valence. So everything is accompanied by either a positive, negative or neutral valence.
So feeling tones are said to accompany every cognition and are inseparable from it. What we try to do in practice is attend to the way in which those feeling tones are shaped by egoism. Like, that book might be an absolutely lovely book, but because I've associated it with homework, right, my narrow, egoistic frame has led me to sort of misperceive it in an entirely negative key when it might actually be a treasure.
So part of what one does in order to know well and truly is to attend to the affects that are always accompanying our knowing, and tutor them and bring them into self-awareness, so one is not, as you put it in so lovely a fashion, at their mercy, particularly when they're not even registering, right, when they're just going off in a sort of egoistic way.
So tutoring feeling, and attuning feeling, is inseparable to the work of knowing.
AF: Okay, so is there a truth of that book that's on the table, or is it just a bunch of different perceptions? I mean, I guess this is a classic philosophical question and I don't… but still it seems to lead us to sort of question about truth, right? Like, is there a truth about the book that's on the table or is it just my feelings about it?
JT: I think there is. I think I will only be able to see it clearly to the extent that I am not constantly in the grip of a kind of reductive grasping of it from the perspective of my ego. If I'm not able to see it as it is, but only as it shapes and affects my fears and my desires, then I'm not seeing it.
Now the interesting thing in the kinds of practice that I'm engaged in, there seems to be a claim being made in Buddhist traditions that if I don't actually mobilize a kind of positive affect outward, a kind of loving kindness, and a kind of compassion, which are affective modes of being open… Right? Do you see what I mean?
AF: Yes. Yes.
JT: If I am not lovingly disposed towards the real, I won't see it.
AF: Ah, this is important. Yeah.
JT: It is. It's not a claim that I must become like Spock, which is a terrible way of misreading Buddhist traditions, right? I must become affectless and speak like this. “You know, well, Jim, that is not logical.”
No, on the contrary, in Buddhist discourse, there is this sense that a kind of falling open to reality can happen both cognitively and affectively. They're not really to be bifurcated at all. Mahayana Buddhist postures are about the unity of wisdom and compassion woven together, sometimes even depicted as male and female in coitus. So there's a sense that both have to be intimately wedded if I'm to be open to the real and lovingly disposed to the real.
So in practice, I'm cultivating a kind of undefended, non-egoistic openness to what there is so that I can see it clearly. This means that if I'm to know the world, I can't just open my eyes. I must actually undertake practices of transformation in order for me to see clearly.
And this is a point that is made strikingly by Michel Foucault in his relatively late lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject given in the year 1981-1982. In that book, he makes this astonishing claim that, prior to what he calls the “Cartesian moment,” and I'm doing scare quotes, that prior to the “Cartesian moment,” it was understood that in order to know the truth, you had to pay a price.
That is to say, you had to become different in order to know differently. You had to engage in practices of self-care. Spiritual disciplines, like askesis. You had to meditate. You had to do things differently so that you become the person who is capable of knowing the truth.
Foucault argues that modernity is the first moment, this Cartesian moment, where simply you could know just by knowledge alone and not by transformation, that you could know without paying a price, that you could know without becoming otherwise, by undertaking spiritual disciplines of some sort.
So, I think he's right. Certainly no Hindu or Buddhist would ever say that all you need to know the truth is just to open your eyes or undertake scientific inquiry alone. You have to get your ego out of the way to have a chance at seeing the truth. And in order to do that, you have to practice. You have to undertake the disciplines that dispose you towards the real in a way that the real can show itself to you.
AF: And then what I hear you saying, and I think it's really quite profound, that truth is then love and love is truth.
JT: Wow. Yes. I think there can be no bifurcation between truth and love. My patron saint for really operationalizing this in modernity is Gandhi. I think that if you read him carefully, there's something like a deep mathematical equation that can be pulled out from the whole of his corpus, and it reads something like this: the truth equals nonviolence equals love. For him, those were interchangeable propositions. And so the converse would apply that falsehood is itself a kind of violence, which is a kind of hate.
And I think that is part of his entire apparatus of spiritual living, and political activism, all of which he simply said was nothing but a quest for liberation. He in no way accepted that what he was doing in the political sphere was something called politics, different from his spiritual life. He just, because truth equals love which equals non-violence, then you have to structure social orders in ways that are non-violent rather than hierarchical and distorting of human life.
So, you know, there's a kind of non-dualism that sets in, or you can't bifurcate all these parts of your life into some kind of domains. So yes, truth equals love which equals nonviolence.
AF: And then I guess I feel like, by extension, post-truth equals violence equals hate, which I almost feel like we're sort of living or watching unfold in front of our eyes.
JT: Yes, Amy. I'm saying these things, but I'm still learning them, if you know what I mean.
AF: I do.
JT: And I think we have to sort of almost metabolize our way into this truth, right? There is a way in which what I'm saying seems to be anticipated in what I take to be one of the really– I think we all do–dramatic scenes in the gospel, right? Jesus standing before Pilate and Jesus speaks about the truth and Pilate says “truth? What is the truth?”
Those who wield power often are under the impression that the truth is whatever they say it is, because they can actually change the circumstances by imposition and fiat. And so, you know, truth seems to them to be an imposition, a thing they can do to the fabric of reality because they can say, “make it so,” and it gets made so, or so they think.
You see there that there's a kind of intimacy between Pilate's capacity to exercise controlling violence, and Jesus who just does not play that game. Right? He's trying to tell Pilate, “you know, if I were your sort of king, you know, I could exercise power, but I'm not your kind of king.” Pilate, of course, only hears the word “king” and says, “oh, so you are a king.” Right? Whereas Jesus is saying, “my kingdom is not of this world,” not of this world here meaning something like, where coercion and manipulation and imposition appear to dictate the facts of the circumstance.
Instead, Jesus is saying, “my kingdom is that of love,” which is synonymous with truth, which is letting things show themselves as they are in all their beauty and distinctiveness and appreciation and generosity rather than violence and manipulation.
AF: Thank you so much. I just loved this conversation. It's so rich and there's so many layers and I've learned so much.
JT: Thank you. It's been a treat.
AF: And thank you, listeners, for joining us for this final episode of season two of In Search Of. You can find all episodes at our website, christiancentury.org/insearchof. Take a moment, if you would, to support this podcast and The Christian Century by signing up for the newsletter, following us on your favorite podcast app, and rating the show. Meanwhile, what are you in search of? Email me insearchof@christiancentury.org. This has been a production of The Christian Century, a thoughtful, progressive, independent magazine for today.