Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World's Spiritual Traditions (review)

In April 2000, Henry Rosemont delivered the first Hsuan Hua Memorial Lecture at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley. The following year, this lecture—originally titled "Whither the World's Religions?"—was published by Open Court in this small book, Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World's Spiritual Traditions. The volume is divided into four sections: (1) the lecture itself, which has the new title "Rationality and Religious Experience"; (2) a commentary by Huston Smith; (3) response and discussion, in which Rosemont replies to Smith and takes questions from the audience; and (4) an epilogue, in which Rosemont makes revisions and expansions on the lecture based on the comments and discussion.

In section 1, Rosemont makes a bold claim: "By urging everyone to approach their own text tradition afresh, and alongside others, I am assuming what many of you might find implausible, namely, that in many basic respects all sacred texts are saying the same things, and contain the same truths we can all come to believe without in any way surrendering our rationality" (p. 11). Having said this, he nonetheless does not mean that we can accept the statements of religious texts as stating factual truths, much less that they are putting forward identical descriptions of the world.

Rosemont faces the epistemological difficulties of religion directly, saying that we cannot accept the statements of religious texts as factual accounts of the world. He reminds us that it is not merely the Abrahamic traditions that pose an epistemological problem for us: "It no less flies in the face of modern science to believe that the preserver god Vishnu once incarnated himself as Krishna, not merely to give counsel to the spiritual warrior Arjuna, but also, among many other exploits, to make love to 20,000 milkmaids in a single day" (p. 5). Even so, he holds that there is much truth in the sacred texts and narratives of the world's religions (pp. 31-32). As will become apparent in my later remarks, it is not altogether clear to me what sort of truth Rosemont is talking about, but it seems to be more a matter of a certain ego-reduction and a sort of mystical feeling than anything else.

Rosemont recognizes not only the epistemological objections to religion, but also the moral ones. He understands the violence and suffering that has been directly and indirectly associated with religion in human history. Yet, in this connection, he says:

[E]fforts to exorcise religion from the human realm because of the mischief that has been committed in its name is to throw out the baby with the bath water, and equally to suggest a third response, that there is no hope for the cross-cultural dialogues necessary for the creation and maintenance of a more peaceful and just twenty-first century until and unless everyone can come to understand how an intelligent and thoroughly decent human being might come to be, or remain, a subscriber to one or another of the world's faiths.

(p. 10)

It is the phenomenon of spiritual experience and not the doctrine or ontology of any tradition that Rosemont finds of philosophical interest. He thinks that instead of focusing on some purported factual knowledge about the world that we are to believe directly, we should instead concentrate on the instructions that the traditions offer about how to live purposively in the world and derive nonmaterial nurturance from it. "The basis of such nurturance is religious experience" (p. 17).

Rosemont begins his remarks on religious experience with a critique of Kierkegaard the purpose of which is to show that lived experience is of one piece. Rosemont attributes to Kierkegaard the position that there are distinguishable and autonomously separable spheres of existence such as the aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual. Speaking of Kierkegaard's three stages, he says that "Almost all of the world's religious traditions, especially the Asian, affirm...