Abstract

This chapter explores the capacity of the religious symbol of the Spirit to enrich and complicate thought about the one and the many across the religions. It begins by noting the extent to which the reality of Spirit is witnessed in various ways across religious traditions. It proposes Spirit as a broadly accessible and so especially apt symbol of divinity's relation to multiplicity for the work of comparative theology. The chapter also engages in a comparative theological reading of Sankara (an early medieval Indian Advaitan Hindu) and Catherine of Siena (a fourteenth-century European Dominican Christian). Drawing on these two seemingly disparate religious resources, it expounds four dimensions of Spirit that open the Christian tradition up and into the space of interreligious, comparative theological relation: Spirit as the matrix of creation; support for the logic of multiplicity; as interrelated love; and the destabilizer of static ontologies.

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