The Good Is One, Its Manifestations Many by Neville Robert Cummings;

Author:Neville, Robert Cummings; [Neville, Robert Cummings;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438463414
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2016-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY DEFINED

My argument cannot move farther without paying attention to how to mark off religion and spirituality within the great ecosystem of human life. Defining religion is extremely controversial today, and I am going to offer only an heuristic definition, that is, one that is useful for making distinctions appropriate to talking about spiritual foundations and culture. Religion is the human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. By cognitive engagement I mean the gamut from myth and legend to sophisticated theology and philosophy, in many different forms in different cultures. By existential engagement I mean how individuals’ ultimate identities are formed in relation to what is ultimate in reality. By practical engagement I mean all the practices, both communal and personal, by which relations with what is ultimate are expressed and steadied.

The heart of the definition, of course, is the reference to ultimacy. Let me quickly present my hypothesis about this, though without much defense. The ultimate reality is an ontological creative act that creates everything that is determinate. No matter what you or anyone else believes the world is made of, from yin-yang vibrations to atomic particles, and no matter who turns out to be right, it has to be determinate. Anything determinate is contingent on being made together with anything else with respect to which it is determinate, which is what requires the ultimate ontological creative act. That act is not determinate in itself apart from its creating the world. It has been symbolized in the West with metaphors of the person, from the frankly anthropomorphic imagery of some of the Bible to transcendent concepts such as the One beyond any determinate distinction and Thomas Aquinas’s notion of God as the pure Act of to Be. South Asian religions similarly stretched metaphors of consciousness creating its content to symbolize the creative act. East Asian thought developed metaphors of spontaneous emergence such as the Dao that gives rise to a determinate world made up of yin-yang configurations or changes. I’ll quote the basic text because it is so important for Chinese spirituality. It is from Zhou Dunyi, the eleventh-century Neo-Confucian.

The Ultimate of Non-being and also the Great Ultimate! The Great Ultimate through movement generates yang. When its activity reaches its limit, it becomes tranquil. Through tranquility the Great Ultimate generates yin. When tranquility reaches its limit, activity begins again. So movement and tranquility alternate and become the root of each other, giving rise to the distinction of yin and yang, and the two modes are thus established. By the transformation of yang and its union with yin, the Five Agents of Water, Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth arise. When these five material forces are distributed in harmonious order, the four seasons run their course.2

The point is, from that which has no character of its own, the Ultimate of Non-being and the Great Ultimate, arise all the things that do have character.

The notion of an ontological creative act that creates everything determinate is very abstract, but also fruitful theologically.

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