Tastes of the Divine

Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion

Michelle Voss Roberts

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823257416
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

The intensity and meaningfulness of aesthetic experience have often been described in theological terms. By designating basic human emotions as rasa, a word that connotes taste, flavor, or essence, Indian aesthetic theory conceptualizes emotional states as something to be savored. At their core, emotions can be tastes of the divine. In this book, the methods of the emerging discipline of comparative theology enable the author's appreciation of Hindu texts and practices to illuminate her Christian reflections on aesthetics and emotion.Three emotions vie for prominence in the religious sphere: peace, love, and fury. Whereas Indian theorists following Abhinavagupta claim that the aesthetic emotion of peace best approximates the goal of religious experience, devotees of Krishna and medieval Christian readings of the Song of Songs argue that love communicates most powerfully with divinity. In response to the transcendence emphasized in both approaches, the book turns to fury at injustice to attend to emotion's foundations in the material realm. The implications of this constructive theology of emotion for Christian liturgy, pastoral care, and social engagement are manifold.

NOTES

Frontmatter

1. Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Devavāṇīpraveśikā: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Center for South Asia Studies, 1999), 5–8.

2. The work was likely composed between the second century B.C.E. and the fourth century C.E. Susan L. Schwartz, Rasa: Performing the Divine in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4.

3. Francis X. Clooney, “Passionate Comparison: The Intensification of Affect in Interreligious Reading of Hindu and Christian Texts,” Harvard Theological Review 98.4 (2005): 367–368.

4. Nandini Bhattacharyya-Panda, Appropriation and Invention of Tradition: The East India Company and Hindu Law in Early Colonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); and Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

5. Hugh Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 1.

6. Hugh Nicholson, “The Reunification of Theology and Comparison in the New Comparative Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77.3 (2009): 613–614.

7. For an overview of this “particularist” approach to religion, see Paul Hedges, Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and Theology of Religions (London: SCM Press, 2010), chapter 4.

8. Arvind Sharma, Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 45, 52.

9. Nicholson, “The Reunification of Theology and Comparison in the New Comparative Theology,” 616.

10. Ibid., 628–629.

11. Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry, 8.

12. Sharma, Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology, 19.

13. John S. Dunne, C.S.C., A Search for God in Time and Memory (London: MacMillan, 1967, 1969), viii–ix.

14. See Reid B. Locklin and Hugh Nicholson, “The Return of Comparative Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78.2 (2010).

15. Sharma, Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology, 25.

16. Christian pronouncements on the possibility of salvation in other traditions are especially subject to scrutiny, and comparative theologians tend to avoid them. See James L. Fredericks, Faith among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1999).

17. An accessible introduction to these practices can be found in Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). The issue of Christian hegemony in the discipline of comparative theology is fruitfully explored by an emerging group of scholars in Francis X. Clooney, ed., The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (London: T&T Clark, 2010).

18. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999), 56.

19. José Ignacio Cabezón, “The Discipline and Its Other: The Dialectic of Alterity in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the Academy of Religion 74:1 (March 2006): 30–31.

20. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1991), 38.

21. Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 58.

22. Francis X. Clooney, Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 187.

23. Paul F. Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2002), 141.

24. Cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The ‘End’ of Comparison,” in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, ed. Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 237–241.

25. I am spurred by Audre Lorde’s pointed charge that the guilt of the privileged is “all too often … just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protectio...