03/10/2021 – Robert Neville Part 1: Ultimates

What is religion? Simple question, complicated answer. Let’s see what Robert Neville has to say. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. This video is closed-captioned on YouTube if you so desire, and also the transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com. Robert Neville (he goes by Bob) is a many-decades philosopher of religion, most recently at Boston University from which he retired in 2018. In some circles, he is known as part of the Boston Confucians. He is a prolific writer with tons of fascinating ideas, but the big kahuna has been his three-volume series on philosophical theology, which isn’t really as much about theology as it is about explaining religion. Now this is very complicated stuff for most regular folks, I’m taking shoulder-deep in the weeds, but we’re gonna try and hit some highlights here and break it down for you. This episode we’ll talk about the first volume titled Ultimates. And then after that the next two episodes will be on the next two volumes titled Existence and Religion. Let’s dive right in!

All three books in Neville’s series have the exact same structure. Following an introduction to the book, they all have four parts and each part has four chapters, so each book has exactly sixteen chapters. The four parts of Ultimates are “Ultimates Defined,” “Ultimates Symbolized,” “Ultimates Demonstrated,” and “Ultimates Known.” I found the first two sections, “Defined” and “Symbolized,” to be the most interesting part of the book. In the series, Neville categorizes religions into three groupings by geography and classification: West Asian – focusing on the being of God often in terms of person, South Asian – focusing on consciousness, and East Asian – focusing on spontaneous emergence. There are, of course, religious traditions in all geographical areas, but most of them would likely fit into at least one of these classifications. His initial definition of religion is based on the concept of ultimacy. Religion is human engagement of ultimacy expressed in cognitive articulations, existential responses to ultimacy that give ultimate definition to the individual and community, and patterns of life and ritual in the face of ultimacy. So what’s the deal with all of this ultimacy? There are five ultimate realities that all humans share according to Neville. The first one is ontological – meaning it has to do with our very being, the fact that there is any existence at all. This is the ontological ultimate. The other four he refers to as cosmological ultimates – meaning after we have existence, then what? These are (1) form/value/obligation, (2) components/comportment/wholeness, (3) existential location/relation/otherness, and (4) value-identity/achievement/meaning . The categories of the religions as well as the categories of ultimate realities is how the story is told across all three of the books.

The first part, “Ultimates Defined.” How we as humans understand ultimate reality is through what he calls a sacred canopy, which is the entire apparatus of a religion, such as its beliefs and practices. The symbols used in each religion describe the finite side of the equation, but because there is an infinite side which is not fully determinate, it cannot be fully articulated, meaning each sacred canopy is but one way to engage with ultimacy. Within each religion there is pressure to accept its way of engaging with ultimacy and the degree to which one accepts those beliefs is often the degree to which one is accepted into that religion. This is where interpretation comes into play. Drawing from the thinker C. S. Peirce, Neville elaborates that signs have a three-part relation: (1) the object, (2) the sign, and (3) the interpreter connecting the sign with the object. The sign itself can’t be true or false, but the interpretation connecting this sign with that object can be true or false. Neville calls a broken symbol one in which the sign no longer connects anymore – meaning it is entirely metaphorical, devoid of ultimate meaning.

Then in the second part of the book, “Ultimates Symbolized,” he mentions that some symbols refer to a local territory, like Shinto in Japan for example, while others progressed in their view of reality and became expanded to the totality of the world. In some religions, there has been a slow drive towards explanations of ultimacy that do not need further justification. This has put pressure on those symbols to become more and more transcendent – really out there. The more simple the ultimate symbol was, the more likely it was to be really ultimate. But the symbols couldn’t always be understood as really out there. For many religions there has to be a more “down-to-earth” connection which related to our lives in an intimate way. This led to religions explaining causation in symbolically religious terms. If someone got sick, maybe it was a witch or karma, or if they unexpectedly got well, maybe it was a miracle. This is where things get really tricky. What is the relationship between things in the physical world and the sacred canopy such that this world has a religious dimension? No matter what the religion, or sacred canopy, there are always metaphorical limitations. What does “the hand of God” mean, for instance? But even though many followers of a particular religion may not be aware of various metaphorical limitations, it doesn’t affect the religious symbols having meaning for them.

Neville then gets into the issue of narrative. The challenge with religious traditions that have a heavy narrative focus, like Judaism for example, is that there are always other ways of telling the story. The Israelites, the Egyptians, or the Assyrians all might have different versions of the same narrative. This is why religious leadership needs to be more aware of, and communicate, the limits of narratives because if they are held on too closely, they can become easily broken, and then lose their meaning for a community. What are the moral truths of the story of Noah as opposed to searching for a huge boat on a modern-day mountain.

In the third part, “Ultimates Demonstrated,” Neville’s philosophy gloves come off and he hits with some rather heavy, difficult-to-follow, philosophical sections with the purpose of demonstrating why ontological ultimacy and cosmological ultimacy exists. What he refers to as the ontological act of creation, why there exists anything rather than nothing, connects with humans’ religious interpretation of that in different ways. The West Asian traditions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam do this in more of a personal way, the South Asian traditions again focus more on the consciousness of Brahman in its higher forms (which are personal gods and goddesses in its lower form), and lastly the East Asian traditions focus on spontaneous emergence and the various cycles of change. He argues that even though the symbols obviously have limitations, they can be used legitimately to refer to the ontological act of creation.

In the last section, “Ultimates Known,” he tracks what can and cannot be known about ultimacy. In China, the storm god Shang-ti, was eventually rejected in favor of explicitly non-personal concepts such as Heaven or the Dao. But though such religious symbols as Brahman, the Dao, or God have meaning, they are not literally true in a philosophical sense. The reason for this is that the ontological act of creation doesn’t come from “some thing,” it emerges out of “no thing,” making the religious symbols meaningful, but limited. This isn’t like The Wizard of Oz movie (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!). The important thing is that the symbols carry over the aspects of ultimacy to which they refer. Such symbols are “true” to the extent that they carry over such meaning to the interpreter. The best example of this is in South Asia, where there are many forms of ultimacy in the Indian gods and goddesses, but they do not all compete to be the “right” or “only” way of interpreting ultimacy in the same way that Western traditions do. In addition, for some religious adherents, the ultimate is engaged through a more mystical form, such as meditation or contemplation.

Okay, that was a super deep 300-plus page book summarized in less than ten minutes. How ‘bout that? Yeah baby! I actually skipped over a lot of stuff, but this was a good introduction to some of the themes in the book. The next episode we’re going to plunge into the second book, Existence. That’s it for today. I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.