Canons: The Undergraduate Journal of Religious Studies (2019-2020)

CANONS

canons Textual/traditional/actual the undergraduate journal of religious studies

2019-2020 Mcgill university edited by: Leora Alcheck (Editor-in-Chief) Mateya Burney lucas coque claire grenier matthew hawkins lauren mayes esme nandorfy-fischlin abi wiggans

cover art by ariel shea

introduction Leora Alcheck, Editor-in-Chief Driven by Love: Gender and Devotion in the Songs of Female Bhakti Saints Esmé Nandorfy-Fischlin

2

Women in Mahāyāna Buddhism: Theological Doctrines versus Practiced Religion Pauline Crepy

17

The Tibetan Chöd Ritual: Its Foundation and Connection to Indian Rasa Theory and other Forms of Tibetan Poetry Elaina Grimm

27

Revisiting Wagoner’s Islamicization thesis: Islam and the other in ibn battuta’s riihla Taja De Silva

45

Women in Confucianism Victoria Guglielmi

57

The roots of our crisis can grow our solution Claire Grenier

65

The Ineffable Experience of God in the Self Lucas Coque

80

Out of Darkness into Light: Liberation and Illumination in Dante’s Paradise Hannah Cheslock

91

Identity, Ritual, and the Eucharist: Communion Among “Lapsed Catholics” in a Montreal Parish Isabella Daniele

98

Sacred Ski Resorts: Ignorance toward Indigenous Spiritualities Propagates Human Rights Violations Cassiel Moroney

112

Citations

120

Introduction • i

Introduction leora alcheck, editor-in-chief

It is impossible to begin an introduction to this collection of student papers without recognition of the extraordinary circumstances in which they were produced, edited, compiled, and published here. The COVID-19 crisis, while felt more gravely in places beyond academic institutions, has overwhelmingly changed the ways in which students engage with our studies. In this sense, “work” has assumed an entirely new form for many of us. The publication of this journal, I hope, can stand as a testament to the endurance of McGill’s students in their continued determination to pursue rigorous learning, critical engagement with their subjects and with each other, and excellence in their fields.

Moving beyond achievement in the technical and formulaic elements of undergraduate writing, the papers in this year’s edition each demonstrate vital principles of modern, critical scholarship on religious subjects. The questions asked by each author in this journal demonstrate what the next crop of scholars will choose not only to teach, but also to preserve. As a wave of renowned scholars of religion—many of them pioneers in their field, responsible for both the methodologies and knowledge that shape our studies—begin to retire, it is again time for a reevaluation of what has been done and for a reimagining of religious studies as a discipline. Each of the papers here speaks to this and to larger issues of scholarship, but also to the political, social, and cultural moment of this past year.

The theme of this year’s edition of Canons comes organically from the papers published here. “Textual/Traditional/Actual” arose from my first attempt to write an introduction which speaks to each paper individually; in each description, I struggled to find creative language to phrase the fact that each of these papers critically engages with the materiality and performativity

Introduction • ii

of religious traditions in contexts that are dissident, faithful, contradictory, adherent, manipulative, and innovative to the textual and dogmatic elements of each subject. In this sense, Textual/Traditional/Actual is a collection of papers which are deeply concerned with the determinations of religious actualities and actualizations, interrogating our priorities in constituting religious subjects.

In “Driven By Love: Gender and Devotion in the Songs of Female Bhakti Saints,” Esme Nandorfy-Fischlin examines the lives of women bhakti saints and their devotional poetry through the critical lenses of gender, memory, and piety.

Beyond challenging the assumptions about women’s experiences and piety in patriarchal contexts, she recenters the testimonies from these women themselves to do so; this is something many could learn from in their studies of religions.

Pauline Crepy’s “Women in Mahāyāna Buddhism: Theological Doctrines versus Practiced Religion” also complicates the experiences of women in religion, here looking at Mahayana Buddhism as practiced and understood in a number of different places. In her discussions of doctrinal and theological disunity, the nature of textual and traditional transmission, and the dissonance between textual dogma and lived experiences, Crepy exhibits a critical engagement with how we constitute and prioritize attributes of a religion.

“The Tibetan Chöd Ritual: Its Foundation and Connection to Indian Rasa Theory and other Forms of Tibetan Poetry,” contributed by Elaina Grimm, offers an in-depth record and explanation of the Tibetan Chöd ritual, a multi-sensorial practice of expelling the idea and dichotomy of the “self.” In her own introduction she speaks to the potentiality of breaking down concepts of otherness in our current political landscape; this reaffirmation of our own context as readers is deeply significant in both why and how we study religion. The portrait she offers of the ritual is rich in its discussion of the utility of prayer and its mediums, not just for Tibetan Buddhism as a religion, but also for the individual practitioner.

The connections she traces between rasa theory, the Chöd ritual, the concept of implicature, and elements of performance exemplify the key feature of her paper: the dynamic and embodied playing-out of a vital tenet of faith.

Taja De Silva offers an immensely important re-thinking of the processes by which a society transitions from one tradition to another en masse in her paper “Revisiting Wagoner’s Islamicization Thesis: Islam and the Other in Ibn

Introduction • iii

Battuta’s Rihla.” In redefining ideas of force and coercion in the processes of conversion and adoption of a new culture, De Silva reexamines the cultural transition from Hinduism to Islam in fourteenth-century India. The definitions, strategies of examination, and insights she provides are critically timely in the current North American political climate. The role of texts in speaking to social, cultural, and political realities as testimonies laid out by De Silva is an important exercise in historical reflection—I believe this can be used for looking toward the future as well.

In “Women in Confucianism,” Victoria Guglielmi examines the development of patriarchal regulation of women’s lives during the Han dynasty.

Her comparison between the actual foundational texts of Confucianism, their interpretations in canonical forms, and historical evidence from the Han dynasty exhibits a deep dissonance in the case of women. Her argument that the tradition “was infused with ambiguities that allowed it to be molded to the benefit of the existing patriarchy” does not have to be limited to Confucianism. Evaluating other traditions through this lens can not only afford us a truer understanding of the lives of women in the past, but can be wielded in a number of ways as we explore modes of deconstructing patriarchy in the present.

The relationship between climate crisis, Christian values, and the variegated North American Christian communities is a subject gaining increased attention as the climate continues deteriorating; however, Claire Grenier’s “The Roots of Our Crisis Can Grow Our Solution” is a unique contribution to the conversation. She dissects the complicated tangle of North American denominational dynamics, biblical values, Catholic institutional influence, and different Christian attitudes toward science, nature, and policy with notable ease, making sense of a facet of the climate crisis which desperately needs such expression. That she weaves her personal experience as a Canadian Catholic into the paper is a gift; it reminds us that the products of religious studies are often deeply personal. The climate crisis feels urgent to many students—here, Grenier productively imposes that pressure onto North American Christian communities as well.

Lucas Coque’s paper “The Ineffable Experience of God in the Self” offers a meeting point for three disciplines, phenomenology, theology, and philosophy;

Introduction • iv

in many senses, his paper feels like a conversation borne of the unique context of the undergraduate classroom, where students across specializations are gathered.

His integration of Silvia Jonas exhibits an important inclusion of new scholars and scholarship in reassessing fundamental concepts of religious experience.

Coque shows that we need not abandon the “classics” in the present study of religion, instead offering a successful model of integrating and confronting them with the new ideas which continue arising across disciplines.

In “Out of Darkness into Light: Liberation and Illumination in Dante’s Paradise,” Hannah Cheslock re-reads Dante’s Paradise with a close attention to the role of Beatrice. Cheslock’s paper contributes to the important stream of work reassessing the roles of women in narratives of deeply mythological and theological journeys, seeing Beatrice not just as the object of Dante’s misoriented love but rather as a crucial agent in his ascension. While much scholarship has focused on the presence and even the function of women in classical works, the imperative remains to examine, reexamine, and examine the examinations across the texts that shape Western culture; here, Cheslock assumes that responsibility and executes the task fruitfully.

Unlike other editions of Canons, this year we decided to publish a thesis excerpt to exhibit the work students have committed to the most in their time at McGill, and Isabella Danielle’s “Identity, Ritual, and the Eucharist: Communion Among ‘Lapsed Catholics’ in a Montreal Parish” exemplifies the achievement such dedication yields. The paper, which explores the relationship of families at a Montreal parish to their celebrations of First Communion for their children and ongoing participation in parish life, offers a much-needed, testimonialdriven analysis of how Catholic experience is constituted in Quebec today.

Her complication of the idea of “lapsedness” speaks to the individual process of self-identification with the Church, drawing from day-to-day interviews and academic research, and constructing a portrait of dynamic personal and institutional Catholicism.

Cassiel Moroney’s paper, “Sacred Ski Resorts: Ignorance Toward Indigenous Spiritualities Propagates Human Rights Violations,” tackles the relationship between belief and space in the context of Canadian law. Their analysis of the case Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia speaks not just to an

Introduction • v

isolated incident, but to the larger mechanisms by which we have defined and continue to (re-)define religion. The essay is remarkably timely as Canada turns toward the Wet'suwet'en camp, and questions about the dynamics of sovereignty, oppression, and faith take on a renewed importance in social and academic discourse on Indigenous peoples.

My hope is that these papers together can signify to their readers, as they did to me, that the constellation of student interests is dynamic and energetic.

The frequent appearance of the prefix “re-” in my descriptions does not represent a stagnation in student research—to the contrary, it represents recognition of the continuum on which we are formulating religious studies as a discipline in the present.

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nandorfy-fischlin • 2

Driven by Love Devotion and Gender in the Songs of Female Bhakti Saints

e s m é na nd o r fy- f i s c h li n

Devotional songs composed by women in India tend to invoke controversial themes in ways that disrupt, challenge, and reconfigure societal norms which have historically operated against the freedom and autonomy of women. Poetic expression, devotionalism, and the function of gender are all points of intersection within the study of female saints who sought to express their devotion (bhakti) through poetry. Bhakti, in its simplest definition, is a form of religiosity governed by loving-devotion. Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, Lal Ded, Mirabai, and Bahiṇā Bāī represent only a few of many women whose life stories and poetry have broadened the ever-growing definition of bhakti. These four figures vary in the time and place they inhabited, the language they spoke, and the traditions they were a part of, but they are connected by a shared set of factors: they are women who are remembered as saints, who use poetry as a means to express and enact their devotion, and whose voices are preserved in collective memory. Although female bhakti saints have not always received scholarly attention commensurate with their popularity, recent scholarship has been instrumental in uncovering the diversity of women’s voices. Dean Accardi, Elaine Craddock, Karen Pechilis, John Stratton Hawley, and Preeti Ashok Parasharami have done important work on individual female bhakti saints; however, few have juxtaposed women’s voices with one another.

By examining the life stories and poetry of four female bhakti saints, this essay seeks to unearth the patterns in women’s devotional poetry without neglecting or oversimplifying the nuances that distinguish their individual identities, intentions, and devotional paths. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to exhibit the disjunction between biographical and scholarly depictions of female bhakti saints and the portraits women paint of themselves in their poetry. The second, to illustrate the ways in which the act of writing devotional poetry enables female bhakti saints to demonstrate their knowledge of prevailing gender norms, interrogate their validity, and manipulate or fully reject them in order to fulfill these women’s devotional needs. By comparing how others have depicted female bhakti saints to how these women portray themselves, I aim to refute the claim that women’s devotion is homogeneous and to recast women as

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subjective agents who pursue and fulfill their devotional aims despite adversities.

Prior to beginning research for this paper, my encounters with female bhakti voices were limited to the poems of Mirabai, scholarship on bhakti and gender, and poetry written by men who assumed a female voice to express viraha, a form of devotionalism used to express the longing and love of a devotee separated from the divine. Consequently, I was expecting to encounter a recurring narrative in women’s poetry in which erotic or sexual language is used to describe the plight of a forlorn lover waiting to be united with her chosen deity. Initially, this essay was prompted by the question: What is the relationship between gender and devotion?

It quickly became apparent that there is no singular answer to this question, for women’s voices are abundant and diverse. In order to encompass this multiplicity, I broadened my focus and tackled a different set of questions. How do secondary sources depict female bhakti saints? How do women defy these accounts and problematize preconceived notions of women’s devotion? Do female bhakti saints operate within or outside of societal norms in order to pursue their devotion?

In an attempt to synthesize the vast material on Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, Lal Ded, Mirabai, and Bahiṇā Bāī, I have structured this essay in three parts. The first, “Hagiography and Collective Consciousness,” uses Lal Ded as a case study to demonstrate the dynamic role hagiographical accounts play in the ways female bhakti saints are remembered and constructed by collective memory. The second, “The Householder and the Ascetic,” discusses a recurring tension between the desire to devote one’s life to god (bhakti) and the expectation that a dutiful woman must fulfill her role in society (dharma). Although female bhakti saints are confronted by a system that interferes with their devotional pursuits, each woman differently responds to her obstacles. The third, “Paths to the Divine,” uses poetry as a means to explore how these four female figures conceptualize their chosen god, express their relationship to the divine, and take distinct theological stances. This section also compares the range of women’s religiosities to an androcentric narrative that works to undermine their agency, power, and religious achievements.

Hagiography and Collective Consciousness Hagiographical accounts of female bhakti saints have been in circulation for centuries.

In fact, hagiographies on the life of Lal Ded predate the other evidence for her poetry itself.1 Thus, the ways in which Lal Ded has been portrayed in hagiographical accounts 1. Dean Accardi, “Orientalism and the Invention of Kashmiri Religion(s),” in International Journal of Hindu Studies 22, no. 3 (2018): 412.

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are integral to how she is envisioned today. By tracking some of the major changes throughout Lal Ded’s hagiographies, this section exposes the difficulties in uncovering a historically accurate account of female bhakti saints.

The problem with historical writings, especially hagiographies, is that they are studies and representations of the past. In the words of Walter Benjamin, “To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”2 The past is a volatile and malleable subject to begin with since it can never be reproduced or experienced in the same way. This is even more complicated when one tries to recollect the past of another individual’s life.

Therefore, we must think of hagiography—the preservation and idealization of a saint’s life—as an art of constructing the past, a craft by human beings who are removed from their subject and driven by specific motives. Dean Accardi’s historiographical work on Lal Ded illustrates the blurred nature of history. He argues that the lives of saints cannot be studied “in isolation from the people and texts that memorialize them.”3 By surveying the variations of Lal Ded’s hagiographies with a critical eye, Accardi exposes the agency and objectives of her biographers to show that their accounts are neither transparent nor unbiased.

The earliest account of Lal Ded’s life comes two hundred years after the time in which she is said to have lived. This account is found in the Persian anthology, Tazkirat al-‘Arifin, written in the sixteenth century by members of the Suhrawardī Ṣūfī Order.

In Tazkirat al-‘Arifin, Lal Ded is depicted as “an elite ascetic mystic capable of assessing others’ spiritual rank, directly engaging the greatest masters of her time as an equal, and passing on the most powerful spiritual teachings, practices, and techniques to those with the greatest potential for high advancement.”4 In this hagiographical account, a direct connection is made between Lal Ded and the founder of the Rishi Order, Nund Rishī, which suggests that Lal Ded was engaged with and influenced by multiple religions and traditions. Lal Ded is estimated to have been born in fourteenthcentury Kashmir, an era that saw, for the first time, the reign of a Muslim dynasty.

Under these circumstances, Kashmir was a place of religious diversity, wherein different religions and traditions intersected. As Accardi points out, this multireligious environment is understood by some to be a part of Kashmir’s “unique, non-communal cultural heritage defined as Kashmiriyat. . . . For advocates of Kashmiriyat and many 2. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Dennis Redmond. Frankfurt School, 2005, https://www. marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.

3. Dean Accardi, “Embedded Mystics: Writing Lal Ded and Nund Rishi into the Kashmiri Landscape,” in Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 253.

4. Ibid., 254.

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Kashmiris more generally, Lal Ded and Nund Rishi are viewed as two of the greatest exemplars of Hindu-Muslim communal harmony.”5 Four centuries after Tazkirat al‘Arifin, Lal Ded was depicted under a very different light, mainly by George Grierson, Lionel Barnett, and Mukund Ram who cast her as an exclusively Hindu poet, “devoid of any connection—religious, historical, or social—with Islam.”6 This exclusionary approach to Lal Ded’s religiosity is a relatively recent reconfiguration of her life story that carries significant consequences. The depiction of Lal Ded as a Hindu saint erases her connection to multiple religions and circumscribes “Hindus and Muslims into two distinct and mutually exclusive collective identities incapable of nuanced interreligious understandings.”7 As we will see later in this paper, in the poetry attributed to Lal Ded, she advocates for religious plurality and acknowledges the validity of different methods to reaching one’s chosen god. The historiography of Lal Ded exemplifies how attempts at uncovering a linear history in hagiographies frequently entails some form of exclusionary process whereby the complexities of the lives of women saints are glossed over. Durre Ahmed says this tendency “frequently becomes a rather destructive sort of scholarship which establishes its theses through a reduction in the scope of possible meaning.”8 Thus, in an effort to address the nuances of female bhakti saints, we must attend to the transformations of their life stories throughout history and accept the inescapable fact that history, or a historical figure, is steeped in the unknown.

Although it is nearly impossible to detect whether the life stories of female bhakti saints are historically accurate, they have nevertheless captured popular imagination for centuries. Since the task of exposing an objective, factual identity of saints is next to impossible, we must take poetry and myth as modes that are equally or more productive at uncovering the lives of saints. In the contemporary Kashmiri context, Lal Ded and Nund Rishī are sincerely remembered by many as having spoken “kindly and passionately in common Kashmiri to everyday people and allied with the downtrodden in opposition to illegitimate authorities.”9 Furthermore, “phrases and lines from [their] poems . . . are treated as maxims and spoken often enough to constitute the commonsense of the land.”10 The life stories and songs of Lal Ded and Nund Rishī, along with other bhakti saints, were transmitted over the course of history and transformed by several processes 5. Ibid., 247-8.

6. Accardi, “Orientalism,” 411.

7. Ibid.

8. Durre Ahmed, “‘Real’ Men, Naked Women and the Politics of Paradise: The Archetype of Lal Ded,” in Gendering the Spirit: Women and Religion & the Post-Colonial Response (London: Zed Books, 2002), 170.

9. Accardi, “Embedded Mystics,” 255.

10. Suvir Kaul, “The Witness of Poetry: Political Feeling in Kashmiri Poems,” in Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 302.

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and influences: the repeated production of hagiographies, later interpolations and modifications of these accounts, translation activities, oral transmissions, and political incentives. In time, these processes remodeled the figures they memorialized in order to suit the context in which their biographies and songs circulated. In the context of Lal Ded and Nund Rishī, Accardi argues that “the cumulative result of these retellings is a weaving of these saints deeper and deeper into the fabric of Kashmir and Kashmiri identity, thus rendering them synonymous with Kashmir itself.”11 The relationship between the stories of saints and their presence in collective memory is symbiotic. These stories shape a community’s identity by crystallizing commonalities of feelings within a group; in turn, people shape the stories by being active agents in how they tell and transmit them.

The Householder and the Ascetic Examining hagiographical writings and understanding how stories are preserved in collective memory are two valid methods of studying the lives of female bhakti saints.

Another means of learning about their lives, beliefs, aspirations, struggles, and accomplishments is to study poetry that has been credited to them. There is also value in juxtaposing the ways in which women are represented by others with their own selfrepresentations. By drawing on traditional accounts of their lives and their attributed poems, this section reveals the shared concerns and nuances between these different perspectives. In order to do this, I focus on a recurring theme that plays an important role in both their life stories and poetry: the tension between the path of the ascetic versus the path of the householder.

In his famous article “Talking to God in the Mother Tongue,” A. K. Ramanujan argues that for “the woman saint, life is a search, restless, dramatic (even operatic), a search outside the bonds of family and household.”12 He suggests that the path of devotion for female bhakti saints entails the abandonment of her societal role as a dutiful wife and householder. This argument is grounded in the assumption that women are faced with a dichotomy between dharma (duty) and bhakti (devotion). In other words, Ramanujan suggests that a woman who chooses the path of bhakti must reject her position in society, whereas the woman who chooses the path of dharma is unable to fully pursue her devotion. Against Ramanujan, I demonstrate how the lives of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, Lal Ded, Mirabai, and Bahiṇā Bāi defy his dichotomy by demonstrating there is no singular way in which women approach the struggle between the dharma of 11. Accardi, “Embedded Mystics,” 262.

12. A. K. Ramanujan, “Talking to God in the Mother Tongue,” India International Centre Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1992): 63.

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a dutiful wife and bhakti-yoga (the path of devotion).

The life of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār exemplifies a unique way in which bhakti and dharma are intertwined rather than being mutually exclusive. Born in the sixth century to a well-to-do trading family, she later married a rich merchant. She was known by the name Punitavati during her marriage, in which she was simultaneously a dutiful wife and devoted to Śiva. This is a well-known story about the power of Kāraikkāl’s devotion and her ability to serve her husband: One day, her husband acquired two mangoes and asked her to serve them to him when he came home for lunch. Before he arrived, Kāraikkāl offered one to a Śaiva holy man. When her husband came home and ate one of the mangoes, he asked her to bring him the second. In a moment of crisis, she turned to Śiva for help and a mango miraculously appeared. Apparently, This one was so much more delicious than the first that her husband was suspicious and asked his wife where she’d gotten it. She reluctantly told him, but he doubted her story and asked her to repeat the miracle in his presence. Again, Punitavati prayed to Shiva, and another mango appeared; her husband was terrified of her power and fled without releasing her from her wifely duties.13

After this incident, it is said that her husband moved to a different city, remarried, and began a new family. When Kāraikkāl found out where he was, she went to visit him and her biography states that he and his new wife bowed down to Kāraikkāl and revered her as a goddess. According to Craddock, this story upholds the normative expectation for a woman “to be devoted to her husband and her home” since “Punitavati does not forsake her wifely role until her husband has officially renounced her.”14 Craddock’s claim focuses on her submissiveness to gender norms rather than the power of her devotion. I would argue, instead, for a more nuanced interpretation of Kāraikkāl’s transformation from householder to ascetic, since it is her miracle that drives her husband away in the first place.

Throughout the course of Kāraikkāl’s life, she was always devoted to Śiva: Always have I kept God, my sweet lord, as a sweet treasure in my heart; I have taken him as my savior and I experience bliss; is anything an obstacle for me?15

Kāraikkāl’s spiritual development shows that she is able to adapt her religiosity to the 13. Elaine Craddock, “The Anatomy of Devotion,” in Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 133.

14. Craddock, “The Anatomy of Devotion,” 132.

15. Karen Pechilis, Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India (New York: Routledge, 2012), 150.

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context of her life and overcome obstacles that come her way. Pechilis’s work on Kāraikkāl follows Accardi’s claim that we must be critical of hagiographies when studying the lives of saints. According to Pechilis, Kāraikkāl “does not describe her day-to-day activities, which permitted her biographer Cēkkiḻār to imagine a conflict between her bhakti and ordinary gendered social expectations, yet her poetry provides no evidence that she shared such a bifurcated view of her own life.”16 As I have demonstrated, her story is not as simple as Ramanujan or her biographer have suggested, since it is not a question of choosing the path of bhakti over dharma, but instead shows that her devotional strength and her husband’s fear were the catalysts for her transformation from dutiful wife to servant of Śiva.

Bahiṇā Bāī is another female bhakti saint who blurs the division between devotion and duty. Bahiṇā Bāī was born in the seventeenth century and is said to have been married to a thirty-year-old Brahmin astrologist and distant relative when she was three or four years old, becoming a mother by the age of eleven.17 Unlike many other female bhakti saints, Bahiṇā Bāī remains a largely understudied figure, partly due to the fact that “there is no hagiographical literature about Bahiṇā Bāī.”18 Parasharami’s thesis “is the first full-length work that utilizes her devotional songs to understand both her life and the socio-religious implications of her literary output.”19 Although there is little material on Bahiṇā Bāī, a remarkable amount of information about her life is preserved in the poetry attributed to her. Bahiṇā Bāī takes her own life, as well as her past lives, as a source of artistic inspiration; she is her own muse. Bahiṇā Bāī uses poetry as a means for exploring the dimensions of her relationship to both her husband and her lord Viṭhobā, a localized form of Viṣṇu. Like Kāraikkāl, Bahiṇā Bāī demonstrates that there is no singular model of female devotion, and that women operate within their circumstances by acting creatively and with agency in order to fulfill their devotional pursuits. In the beginning, Bahiṇā Bāī saw bhakti and dharma as oppositional modes of being in the world and was deeply troubled by the thought of having to choose one over the other: To leave a husband is against the teachings of the Vedas, and thereby one can never acquire the supreme spiritual riches.

16. Karen Pechilis, “Affect and Identity in Early Bhakti: Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār as Poet, Servant, and Pēy,” in Bhakti and Power: Debating India’s Religion of the Heart, ed. John Stratton Hawley, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Swapna Sharma, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 35.

17. Preeti Ashok Parasharami, “Writing from the Inside: Domesticity and Transcendence in the Works of Bahiṇā Bāī (c. 1628-1700),” (Master’s thesis, McGill University, 2006), 4.

18. Ibid., 3.

19. Ibid., 1.

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At my door there seemed a great serpent hissing at me. How could I live under such conditions?

It is the teaching of the Vedas, that one should not neglect one’s duty, but my love was for the worship of God (Hari).20

This outlook substantiates Ramanujan’s argument because she sees her duty, as prescribed in the Vedas, as compromising her ability to worship Viṭhobā. Bahiṇā’s devotion was always at odds with her husband’s orthodoxy. Similar to the miracle of Kāraikkāl, Bahiṇā was able to have visions of Viṭhobā and receive teachings from him which then drew crowds of people to come see her. Like Kāraikkāl’s husband who ran away from her, Bahiṇā’s husband planned to leave her, not out of fear for her miracles but because he was afraid that his own reputation would seem lowly in comparison.

In the end, however, her husband does not abandon her but instead undergoes a transformation of his own and begins to value the power of bhakti. Following her husband’s re-evaluation of her own path, Bahiṇā modifies her own devotionalism by merging her devotion to Viṭhobā with her duty as a wife. In a verse directed to Viṭhobā, she says: In worshipping thee I can still be true to my duty of devotion to my husband.

Thou, O God, must thus think also.

The Supreme spiritual riches are surely not contrary to the Vedas.21

Bahiṇā Bāī shows that dharma and bhakti can be practiced simultaneously and that one’s religious pursuits do not have to be compromised by marriage. Bahiṇā Bāī’s story contributes to the plurality of female devotionalism in a variety of ways. Not only did she carve out “a religious path for high-caste women that legitimated and valued domesticity as an expression of bhakti,” she also redefined “the home from its prevailing denotation as oppressive space to a liberating space.”22 Though Bahiṇā Bāī was able to manipulate Brahmanical hierarchies and societal norms, other female bhakti saints found marital life and the domestic sphere as unfavourable conditions in which to practice their devotion. In the same way Bahiṇā struggled in the beginning of her marriage, the sixteenth century poet Mirabai felt the 20. Ibid., 62.

21. Ibid., 61.

22. Ibid., 2, 69.

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same tension between her devotion and her marriage to the extent that they could not be reconciled. The stories of Mirabai’s relationship to her in-laws play a big role in the way she is perceived in collective memory. Mirabai’s unwavering devotion to Kṛṣṇa made it so that her relationship to her in-laws was unresolvable. According to Priyada’s hagiography, Mirabai transgressed customs and disrespected the family by not bowing to her mother-in-law when she came to live with them and did not worship their family’s chosen deity. Due to her disrespectful behaviour, the family attempted to kill her with a cup of poison. In Priyadas’s telling, it is the rana (“ruler” or “head of the house”) who tries to kill her, but it is not specified whether it is the father-in-law or her own husband who is to blame. Mirabai is saved by none other than her lord, the Mountain Lifter, who turns the poison into sweet nectar. Eventually, Mirabai escapes her abusive in-laws and becomes a wandering ascetic. According to tradition, Mirabai was worshipping in a temple one day when all of a sudden Kṛṣṇa “drew her into his own image, and she was never seen again.”23 In sum, female bhakti saints are frequently faced with obstacles that challenge their devotional pursuits. In the case of Kāraikkāl, she did not see her own life in such a bifurcated view. It was less of a challenge for her than it was for her husband to come to terms with her powerful devotion. Thus, it is possible to say that Kāraikkāl’s devotion only grew, in terms of taking a central role in her life, once her husband left her.

For Bahiṇā Bāī, the path of devotion was at first embattled with the responsibilities of domestic life. In time, she reconceptualized the relationship between the two so that she no longer saw them as incompatible, but rather as complementary modes of living. Bahiṇā Bāī shows that a woman does not have to be dislocated from society in order to pursue her religious goals. Lastly, the same tension between bhakti and dharma was troubling for Mirabai until she decided to pursue her own path and reject the life of a dutiful wife. Thus, female bhakti saints operate both within and outside of societal norms depending on their own choices. Although female bhakti saints are faced with a system which primarily favours men while restricting women’s autonomy, they nevertheless each find their own way to pursue their devotion.

Paths to the Divine Devotion is integral to the religiosities of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, Lal Ded, Mirabai, and Bahiṇā Bāī, but it takes on different forms for each woman. In order to explore the 23. John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, “Mirabai,” in Songs of the Saints of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 127.

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diversity of paths that can be taken to connect to one’s chosen god, this section looks into the following questions: What gods were these female bhakti saints devoted to and how did they conceptualize their forms? What is their relationship to the divine and how might this differ from men’s depiction of a woman’s relationship to god? These questions are addressed in their poetry and the answers that arise problematize the ways female bhakti saints have been studied, depicted, and imagined by male scholars, biographers, and poets.

A. K. Ramanujan has argued that female saints are all born with devotion ingrained in their hearts. In “Talking to God in the Mother Tongue,” his intention is to differentiate the devotion of women from that of men, thereby suggesting that gender is the principal determinant of one’s devotion. In his words, “Male saints frequently go through a conversion and discover god. But the women are in love with their god from the outset. They do not have to be converted. They are already in love with god and he is the only husband they will ever recognise.”24 The assumption that female saints are born as lovers of god has four major implications. The first, that women do not choose to take up the path of devotion but are inherently driven to pursue their devotion simply because they are women. This assumption is destructive to the agency, creativity, and diversity of ways in which women find their own path. It simplifies the work that women do in order to achieve the status of saints. Second, by depicting women as passive receptacles endowed with devotion from the outset, Ramanujan further divides women from men, for he conversely portrays the latter as active, assertive, and creative agents who must work to become saints. Third, his argument insinuates that women are unable to be married to a human being if they are devoted to God, since “he is the only husband they will ever recognize.”25 As we have seen in the case of Bahiṇā Bāī, she proves that a woman can in fact be married and remain devoted, which is why she is called both wife and saint.26 Lastly, Ramanujan only considers how female saints see god as their lover, thereby reducing the various ways in which women themselves imagine their relationships to their chosen god.

There is a recurring narrative that casts women as “beings who naturally give themselves to talk dedication or surrender,”27 who “wander and travel alone, give up husband, children, and family.”28 As demonstrated, this narrative has been reiterated in hagiographies, as in the case of Cēkkiḻār’s biography of Kāraikkāl, as well as scholarly 24. Ramanujan, “Talking to God,” 67.

25. Ibid.

26. Anne Feldhaus, “Bahiṇā Bāī: Wife and Saint,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50, no. 4 (1982): 591–604.

27. Pechilis, “Affect and Identity,” 28-9.

28. Ramanujan, “Talking to God,” 56.

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studies on female saints, such as Ramanujan’s article. It is also a narrative that permeates much of the poetry of male bhakti poets, such as Nammāḻvār, one of the twelve Āḻvār saints from Tamil Nadu. In Hymns for the Drowning, a collection of Nammāḻvār’s poems translated by Ramanujan, there are several poems in which Nammāḻvār assumes the voice of a woman. Nearly every time he takes on a female persona, it functions to express viraha, the love of a woman separated from her chosen deity. In Indic literary theory, the aesthetic emotion that coincides with viraha is śṛngārarasa, love that is “characterized by total self-surrender of the lover in an exclusive passionate union with the divine, often heightened by periods of intense separation.”29 Consider the voice of the speaker and the imagery in one of Nammāḻvār’s poems wherein he assumes a female voice: Evening has come, but not the Dark One.

The bulls, their bells jingling, have mated with the cows and the cows are frisky.

The flutes play cruel songs, bees flutter in their bright white jasmine and the blue-black lily.

The sea leaps into the sky and cries aloud.

Without him here, what shall I say? how shall I survive?

Set at night, the sorrowful lover stands alone among copulating pairs. The unions between bulls and cows, bees and flowers, and sea and sky emphasize the speaker’s loneliness and longing for the Dark One, an epithet for Viṣṇu, who never comes. Nammāḻvār is not the only male poet who expresses śṛngārarasa; Kabir and Surdas are others who assume a female voice in order to evoke the emotion of love for both the speaker and the poet. For male bhakti poets who assumed a female persona, “the image of the tenacious woman whose strength is learned in love and suffering was the one that seemed most relevant to the religious needs of male figures in the bhakti world.”30 If this was the persona that 29. David Buchta and Graham M. Schweig, “Rasa Theory,” Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism 2, (May 2018): 628.

30. Hawley, “Mirabai,” 119.

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men used most frequently to represent the relationship between women and god, it suggests that men believed this to be the predominant form of female devotion. This shows how the male gaze is limited in its scope of imagining women’s devotion since it subsumes them under one selfsame voice.

There are, however, women’s voices who also enact love for their deity by expressing their longing for him. In one of Mirabai’s songs, she sings: “my love’s in a distant land / and wet, I stubbornly stand at the door.”31 In another, she says: Hey, I’ll write my love a note, crying crow, now take it away and tell him that his separated love can’t eat a single grain.

His servant Mira’s mind’s in a mess.

She wastes her time crying coos.32

Here, Mirabai uses a common Sanskrit genre called saṃdeśa kāvya, or “messenger poems.” In this verse, Mirabai takes on the role of dispatcher, Kṛṣṇa the Mountain Lifter is the addressee, and the crow is her messenger. Saṃdeśa kāvya is a genre that centres around the themes of communication, participation, love, and connecting the human with the divine—all of which are central for bhakti-yoga as well.

Though Mirabai and other female bhakti saints express viraha in their poetry, it is not the only way in which women express and enact their devotion. Bahiṇā Bāī takes a drastically different approach to Mirabai. By merging her devotion to Viṭhobā with her devotion to her husband, she embodies the union which Mirabai longed for—she is married to both Viṭhobā and her husband: Keeping my proper duties in mind, I’ll reach God by listening to the scriptures I’ll serve my husband—he’s my god My husband is the supreme Brahman itself.33

In the case of Kāraikkāl, she rarely represents her relationship to Śiva as a lover.

Instead, she lives as his servant: “I am one of the ghouls among His good ganas.”34 Furthermore, Kāraikkāl represents Śiva’s omniscience, magnitude, and power by drawing on mythological imagery: Call him 31.

32.

33.

34.

Ibid., 135.

Ibid., 136.

Feldhaus, “Bahiṇā Bāī,” 597.

Craddock, “The Anatomy of Devotion,” 135.

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ruler of the heavens king of the gods master of the domain holiness of the highest knowledge savior whose neck was blackened by poison I call him lord of my heart.35

Unlike Bahiṇā Bāī who depicts her relationship to her chosen deity as a marriage, “Karaikkal Ammaiyar relocates this [marital] behaviour in the cremation ground, where she serves Shiva as her lord.”36 For Kāraikkāl, Śiva is the one lord who is above all others.

In her poetry, she calls those who do not devote themselves to “the One” fools and is adamant on establishing the supremacy of Śiva over other deities. Unlike Kāraikkāl, Lal Ded envisions a world wherein there are multiple paths that can be taken in order to reach god and acknowledges the validity in devoting oneself to gods other than her own, as long as devotees are driven by love. Lal Ded says, “Śiva is everywhere, know Him as the sun / Know the Hindu no different to the Muslim.”37 In another vaakh, she says: Śiva or Keshava or Buddha Or Brahma the lotus-born He calls himself Let Him cure me of the sickness of this world He or he or he or he.38

Lal Ded breaks down the boundaries between different religious paths by validating Hinduism, Islam, and other religions.

Lal Ded uses abstract terms to describe Śiva but also represents him in his form as Naṭarāja, the cosmic creator whose joyful dance in the charnel grounds is the source of cosmic cyclicality and ceaseless change. Thus, Lal Ded portrays Śiva as both nirguṇa (without form) and saguṇa (with form). Unlike Mirabai who envisions Kṛṣṇa as a distant lover, or Bahiṇā Bāī who sees Viṭhobā as her husband, or Kāraikkāl who illustrates Śiva as her master, Lal Ded most commonly refers to Śiva as her teacher. Thus, she takes on the role of student and uses poetry as a means to interact with Śiva by asking him questions. In relation to the androcentric view which disregards the agency of women, Pechilis makes a convincing argument about Kāraikkāl which is applicable to other female bhakti saints: “Kāraikkāl pēy was 35. Pechilis, Interpreting Devotion, 27.

36. Craddock, “The Anatomy of Devotion,” 145.

37. Neerja Mattoo, The Mystic and the Lyric: Four Women Poets from Kashmir (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2019), 41.

38. Mattoo, The Mystic and the Lyric, 57.

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speaking a deeply affective self-determined identity through her habitation of a selfdefined devotional subjectivity.”39 The voices of female bhakti saints are abundant, and even within their individual poems, we can sense a variety of identities, philosophies, and theological stances.

Conclusion By uncovering the ways in which the life stories of female bhakti saints have been represented throughout history in hagiographical writings and by comparing them to the ways in which women portray themselves in the poetry attributed to them, my aim has been to demonstrate that histories are not written without bias and that the intentions of a historian and a hagiographer, whether religiously or politically motivated, at times overlook the nuances and truths that can be detected in the poetry itself. Nevertheless, the hagiographies of these women have had lasting impacts on the ways women saints are remembered. The poetry credited to them remains important and alive in communities which continue to recite their songs today. Neerja Mattoo points out that Lal Ded’s songs are part of a living oral tradition, as “folk singers begin their performance with Lal Ded’s vaakhs.”40 In this way, “poets are cultivators and curators of public memory.”41 The poems of these women strike a powerful note on behalf of all women who are survivors of systemic violence and oppression based on their sex. The tension between bhakti and dharma is a recurring theme in their poetry, which illustrates the ways in which women are conscious of prevailing gender norms, interrogate their validity, and modify or reject them in order to fulfill their religious pursuits. Finally, the act of expressing oneself through poetic songs is a means for women to explore the complexities of their own lives, beliefs, desires, achievements, and theological stances. It is also a form of devotion in itself—a type of prayer. Not only do Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, Lal Ded, Mirabai, and Bahiṇā Bāī offer poetry as a form of devotion to their chosen deities, they also offer their lives. In the words of Mirabai: Singing of Ram, your servant Mira has offered you an offering: her body and her mind.42

39.

40.

41.

42.

Pechilis, “Affect and Identity,” 29.

Mattoo, The Mystic and the Lyric, xiv.

Kaul, “The Witness of Poetry,” 309.

Hawley, “Mirabai,” 139.

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Esmé Nandorfy-Fischlin is a Canons editor and contributor completing an Honours in Asian Religions and a Major in English Literature. Prior to studying at McGill, Esmé travelled through the Asia Pacific region where she began learning about the lived religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Now finishing her fourth year at McGill, she is pursuing her interests in Sanskrit literature and poetry, its literary influence on vernacular languages, and its presence in the contemporary world. She is particularly interested in devotional poetry and the intersections among religion, the state, and gender.

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Women in Mahāyāna Buddhism Theological Doctrines versus Practiced Religion

pa u l i n e c r e p y

An Introduction to Gender in Mahāyāna Buddhism The question of gender in Buddhism is a rather complex one, as perspectives relating to the role and hierarchy of gender are diverse, and in many cases, contradictory.

Adding to this complexity, Buddhist conceptions and understandings of gender vary across contexts, cultures, and schools. Whilst several Buddhist doctrines emphasize the androgynous nature of human beings as significant in reaching enlightenment, some assert instead the transformation from female to male in rebirth. Others affirm the separation, yet complementarity, of genders.1 However, most prevalent across Buddhist doctrines and schools of thought is the contention that women are inherently subordinate to men. In such texts, the female is viewed as impure and as a threat to celibacy. According to such claims, women in their female forms are emphasized as being unable to reach enlightenment.

Doctrines within Mahāyāna Buddhism vary in their overarching theological understandings and practices. These differences can be partly attributed to the lack of an original or universal text, which has led to the development and diffusion of diverging and oftentimes conflicting doctrines.2 As a result, making universal claims about Mahāyāna Buddhism is an impossible task. The same can be said for the role of gender within Mahāyāna, as understandings of the role of women and their ability to attain Buddhahood have developed over time and throughout various local contexts.

Mahāyāna Buddhism is generally construed as being the most positive and inclusive Buddhist school regarding the roles of women.3 This is because it pays greater attention to lay Buddhism and emphasizes universal Buddhahood.4 However, many Mahāyāna doctrines have vehemently denied women the agency to attain Buddhahood.

1. Rita Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 226.

2. Li Jingjing, “Introduction to Mahāyāna Origins,” Religion 344: Mahāyāna Buddhism (class lecture, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, January 10, 2019).

3. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, 57.

4. Diana Y. Paul, “Buddhist Attitudes toward Women’s Bodies,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 1 (University of Haiwai’i Press, 1981): 63.

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In some cases, texts such as the Pure Land Sutra assert that women have to spurn their womanhood and be reborn as men in order for their enlightenment to be validated.

Interestingly, Rita Gross emphasizes that such negative attitudes towards female birth are not based on sentiments of a misogynistic nature, but rather, “on pity and compassion for beings occupying a difficult and often painful slot in the scheme of things.”5 Nevertheless, the evidence that many theological texts emphasize misogynistic views relating to women cannot be disputed. For example, Asanga’s Boddhisattvabhumi argues that “all women are by nature full of defilement and of weak intelligence” and thus cannot attain Buddhahood.6 To make sense of gender within Mahāyāna Buddhism, this paper will analyze the contradictory nature of womanhood prevalent in two texts at the core of Mahāyāna faith—the Lotus Sutra and the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra. This paper will first examine gender through theological, mythical, and doctrinal lenses. These theological texts, however, do not contextualize the role of women in Mahāyāna Buddhism in relation to religious practice, but rather are mythical accounts of female “characters used allegorically and fictively to prove doctrinal and ideological points.”7 These texts were widely distributed and as a result, contributed to the construction and later development of the faith. Therefore, they are pertinent because they contextualize the role of women within Mahāyāna Buddhism, even if only in doctrinal terms. The life of Eshinni as well as nunhood in Japan within the Pure Land context are two pieces that are particularly critical in filling the gaps left incomplete by the religious texts mentioned above. These authentic accounts of nunhood provide a theological understanding of the role of women and illustrate how gender was understood within religious practice itself.

Although these doctrines tend to accentuate negative views of women or remain quite contradictory in their stances, in practice, women found their faith to be a means of declaring independence from the societal roles otherwise imposed on them. Gender occupies an extremely complex web of realities within Mahāyāna Buddhism, but it is clear that the Mahāyāna faith provides some women with a relatively impartial space for them to practice their religion and exercise their agency.

Mahāyāna Sutras Gender in the Lotus Sutra According to Paul Williams, many East Asian Buddhists believe that the final teaching 5. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, 60.

6. Ibid., 61.

7. Ibid., 57.

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of the Buddha is included in the Lotus Sutra.8 Therefore, this scripture is regarded as highly influential in the formation of Mahāyāna Buddhism. A detailed analysis of the Lotus Sutra provides the historian or theologian with insight on particular beliefs of the Mahāyāna faith. When entertaining the question of gender within Mahāyāna Buddhism, one must therefore turn to the Lotus Sutra to examine and understand the complex nature of female representation within Buddhism.

However, the role and nature of women remains rather contradictory in the Lotus Sutra. Where gender is emphasized, there is both a rejection of the female as the cause of temptation and great difficulty, and an assertion that women too can become enlightened. In the section “Assurance for the Five Hundred Disciples,” the Buddha provides assurance to Purna, an arhat, and other close disciples that they will one day attain Buddhahood. The Buddha then emphasizes that the disciples who attain Buddhahood will have “a single buddha-land made up of as many three-thousand great thousandfold worlds as there are sands of the Ganges. . . . There will be no evil ways there, and no women. All living beings will be born through transformation and have no sexual passion.”9 By emphasizing that the Buddha-land will be free from evil and women, the Buddha creates a link between immorality and women, thereby suggesting that women are inherently corrupt. The Buddha further stresses that in order to live in the Buddha-land, one must not have sexual passion. In the subsequent passage, the woman is portrayed as an object of temptation and distraction. A woman cannot be present within the Buddha-land, as her presence will prevent the Buddha from fully devoting himself to his practice and to the betterment of others.

Although the Lotus Sutra oftentimes portrays negative attitudes towards women and their ability to reach Buddhahood, a few select passages emphasize the exact opposite. Most relevant is the story of the dragon princess in the chapter “Devadatta,” in which Manjushri Bodhisattva proclaims that a little girl is able to become a Buddha immediately. This is a particularly critical section of the Lotus Sutra because it asserts that both men and women have the potential to attain Buddhahood. The climax of the story occurs when the dragon girl declares to a monk and a bodhisattva “that if they look—if they really look using their spiritual eyes—they too will see her as a Buddha.”10 Upon reaching Buddhahood, she says: Having heard him, I can become awakened.

Only the Buddha can bear witness to this.

8. Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (New York: Routledge, 2008).

9. Gene Reeves, The Lotus Sutra, A Contemporary Translation of a Buddhist Classic (Sommerville: Wisdom Publications, 2008), 208-9.

10. Ibid., 252.

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I will reveal the teaching of the Great Vehicle to save living beings from suffering.11

Here, the potential for women to attain Buddhahood is made absolutely clear. The dragon girl has stood up to her two male critics and demonstrated that she too can become a Buddha. Based on the overall message of this section, I conjecture that this section of the Lotus Sutra was written to convince monks that women have the potential to attain Buddhahood. Prior to her awakening, the princess suffers as she overcomes numerous hurdles which prohibit her from being enlightened. In effect, she is described as being too young and as suffering from the vices of womanhood.12 Moreover, she is connected to the nag, or snake, which “reinforces the female element, since snakes are often identified as cobras, symbols of fertility or abundance, who inhabit watery depths.”13 It is important to note that the dragon king’s daughter transforms into a male once she is enlightened. Although this can be interpreted as a rejection of womanhood, her transformation into a male occurred after she had gained enlightenment in her female form. Her transformation is a way for her to demonstrate her Buddhahood in a way that her male critics could understand. This chapter discredits the idea that women cannot reach enlightenment and teaches that all people, irrespective of gender, have an equal chance in attaining Buddhahood through the power of the Lotus Sutra. A similar positive section of the Lotus Sutra emphasizes that both men and women are present listening to the Buddha’s teachings: They are the group of five hundred bodhisattvas And the four groups, Men and women of pure faith, Who are now before me listening to the Dharma.14

This text and the story of the dragon princess contradict the first passage analyzed.

This tension begs the question: What exactly were the theological attitudes towards women and their attainment of Buddhahood? Even though there are contradictions throughout the Lotus Sutra, the potential for female enlightenment is emphasized in various chapters. The “Perseverance” chapter, for instance, states that the Buddha 11. Ibid.

12. Ann A. Pang-White, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2016), 312.

13. Ibid.

14. Reeves, Lotus Sutra, 252.

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predicted that his aunt along with six thousand nuns would become future Buddhas.15 Various passages of the Lotus Sutra emphasize equality between genders and as a whole, the Lotus Sutra is “known for freeing the mind from the fetters of discriminatory dualism including gender discrimination.”16 The negative passages about women are thus overshadowed by a generally positive understanding of the possibility for men, as well as women, to attain Buddhahood and enlightenment.

Gender in the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra The role of gender in Mahāyāna Buddhism becomes even more complex and interesting when we turn to the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra, a fundamental doctrinal text of Pure Land Buddhism. A critical passage of this text, Vow 35, reads in translation from the original Sanskrit: Lord, let me not awaken fully to supreme and perfect awakening if, after I have attained awakening, any women in the countless, incalculable, inconceivable, imponderable and measureless Buddha-fields in every direction who, on hearing my name, have faith, conceive the aspiration to awakening, and spurn their womanhood should, when they depart this birth, become women again.17

According to Paul Harrison, this text argues that in order to become awakened and attain Buddhahood, a woman must spurn her womanhood. Harrison’s interpretation of the text is at its very core misogynistic, since it assumes that women are excluded from the Pure Land if they do not shed their femininity. In order to be enlightened, women must be reborn as males; this asserts the idea that women are lesser than men in all respects and not worthy of enlightenment. However, this passage makes no direct statement about rebirth in Sukhavati, unlike Harrison’s initial assumption. Rather, the passage simply sets forth the conditions women must fulfill in order to reach enlightenment: have faith, become a bodhisattva, and loathe their womanhood. The last condition, while clearly misogynistic, does not deny women from the Land of Bliss, as initially put forth. This passage does not explicitly state that women must be reborn as men in Sukhavati. As Harrison notes, this text is quite general in that it refers “to blessings enjoyed by beings in other Buddha-fields, not by those who have been or will be reborn in Sukhavati: such advantages as a feeling of happiness, the power of dharanis, the homage of all and sundry, splendid clothing, unimpaired faculties, meditative powers

15. Pang-White, Bloomsbury Research Handbook, 341.

16. Ibid., 351.

17. Paul Harrison, “Women in the Pure Land: Some Reflections on the Textual Sources,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 26, no. 6 (1998): 555.

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and noble birth.”18 After careful analysis, this passage does not appear to be quite as misogynistic as Harrison initially assessed it to be.

It is critical that we take into account the various translations of this passage from Sanskrit, as it is understood differently depending on the language and the cultural contexts in which it is transmitted. As Harrison asserts, although the Tibetan version is quite identical in its translation to the Sanskrit one analyzed above, there are differences in the various Chinese versions of the text. According to Harrison, there are five Chinese versions: T.361 by Zhi Qian, T.362 by Lokaksema, T.360 by Sanghavarman, T.310.5 by Bodhiruci, and T.363 by Faxian. When observing T.362, the second vow appears to resemble Vow 35 in the Sanskrit translation the most: “When I become a Buddha, may there be no women in my country. Women wishing to come and be reborn in my country will forthwith become men. . . . If this vow is not fulfilled, I will never become a Buddha.”19 Women do not have the ability to be reborn as women and must be reborn as men to become bodhisattvas or arhats. Women cannot attain Buddhahood if they do not spurn their femininity and become men; this again emphasizes the concept of the impure, perhaps even evil female, who is lesser than her male counterparts.

Overall, the Sukhavativyuha Sutra is less egalitarian than the Lotus Sutra, and its many translations—and thus understandings of gender—differ across contexts and cultures. Although there is no clear chronological order in the development of the role of women within the Sukhavativyuha Sutra, a closer analysis of these various texts and their translations prove that there were many different interpretations about gender in relation to the attainment of Buddhahood. This is critical in understanding the ways in which gender was viewed in a theological context, and the ways in which various schools of Buddhism and differences in cultural understandings of gender impacted doctrines.

There is a passage in the Sukhavativyuha Sutra that is both intriguing and potentially contradictory to the above understanding of the sutra, for it emphasizes that those who are reborn in Sukhavati are to be accompanied by nymphs.20 This passage states that the inhabitants of Pure Land mansions “stay in those mentally created palaces, with a retinue and a following of seven thousand nymphs, dallying, disporting and diverting themselves.”21 The presence of nymphs comes as quite a surprise since, as demonstrated by the translations and various interpretations of the vows above, the presence of women in Sukhavati was not allowed. However, this does not quite illustrate 18.

19.

20.

21.

Ibid.

Ibid., 557.

Ibid., 559.

Ibid.

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a positive image of the female and the possibility of her attaining enlightenment after all, as women are said to “form part of the sensual (or frankly sexual) attractions of these higher samsaric planes; their function is to serve—or service—those fortunate enough to be reborn as gods.”22 Thus, these understandings of nymphs only further negate the agency of mythical women, as they appear in the Sukhavati solely as a means to benefit enlightened men. As Harrison asserts, this passage on nymphs is exclusive to the Sanskrit and Tibetan versions of the text, with no mentions in the Chinese translations.23 Once again, there is a discrepancy regarding gender between translations and variations of the same text. The various understandings of gender across translations and contexts demonstrate why theological texts cannot be the main source of analysis when determining the functions of gender in Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Doctrines do not have one voice; rather, they articulate many different interpretations of the core faith, depending on the social context from which they emerge and current attitudes.

Pure Land Buddhism in Japan and the Life of Eshinni Pure Land Buddhism is the devotional cult of Buddha Amitabha, who vowed that if he attained Buddhahood, all those who had faith in him and called upon his name would reside in Sukhavati, the Land of Bliss, alongside him.24 According to the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra analyzed above, only men can be reborn in Sukhavati. As James Dobbins emphasizes, “Pure Land doctrine contained some of the same androcentric assumptions of other forms of Buddhism that relegated women to an inferior position.”25 Shinran Shonin was the founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism. His wife, Eshinni, wrote a set of letters to her daughter Kakushinni, which were discovered in 1921. These letters provide insight into Shinran’s life and spiritual devotion, but also shed light on the role of women at the level of practiced religion.

Contextualizing the agency that Eshinni enjoyed as part of her religious devotion elucidates the relative independence of women in the late Hein period. Eshinni was born in Japan in the twelfth century and died in the thirteenth century, a period in which male-centered marriages were slowly beginning to dominate wife-centered matrimony.

In the latter, women were supported by their family’s resources and were able to remain 22. Ibid., 560.

23. Ibid.

24. Li Jingjing, “Pure Land Buddhism,” Religion 344: Mahāyāna Buddhism (class lecture, McGill University, Montreal, February 12, 2019).

25. James Dobbins, “Women, Sexuality, and Pure Land Buddhism,” in Letters of the Nun Eshinni: Images of Pure Land Buddhism in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 74.

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in their homes after marriage. Divorce and marriage were both vague terms, with no clear ritual officialising either. In addition, in Japan’s medieval period, marriage was understood to be an alliance between two households, rather than a complete merge of resources. This meant that in the cases where marriages were wife-centered, the women held much of the socio-economic power and influence, as she controlled the wealth of the family and maintained her own property. According to Dobbins, Eshinni’s marriage seems to be wife-centered, as her letters discern a remarkable level of independence and financial liberty compared to Shinran. This indicates first and foremost that women practicing Pure Land in Japanese society had agency which extended even to some independence from their spouses. This type of female agency is also displayed by Eshinni’s daughter, Kakushinni, who became the “de facto founder of the Honganji, one of Japan’s most important and influential temples in later centuries,” a chapel she created for Shinran after his death which became a place of pilgrimage.26

Both Eshinni and her daughter Kakushinni became nuns as part of their religious development. According to Dobbins, what it took to become and live as a nun significantly varied across cultures in the medieval period. Some women became nuns as a result of age or widowhood, withdrawing from their social status and devoting themselves to their religious faith. For orthodox Buddhists, becoming an experienced and mature nun required “a set of ordination procedures that included donning robes; tonsure, or shaving the head; and having a set of 348 vows administered before a formally convened assembly of ten full-fledged priests and ten full-fledged nuns.”27 The nunnery was regulated by male clerics and women therefore lacked independence in the religious realm. In Japan, however, this model of the nun never fully developed, as government-sponsored nunneries were not established on a large scale. Although there were very few Japanese women who were fully ordained as nuns, many women “lived peripatetic lives as nun preachers, popularizers, and entertainers. . . . In short, the number of women embarking on the nun’s path was substantial, as long as nunhood is defined broadly.”28 Being a nun was for many women an escape from the traditional roles ascribed to women: that of the wife or the mother. With nunnery, there came a certain degree of agency which was uncommon in other contexts. From a woman’s perspective, nunhood “represented liberation from external demands imposed on them.”29 To become a nun and to renounce one’s sexuality and femininity was thus to declare independence from societal roles imposed on women.

26. Ibid., 82.

27. Ibid., 83.

28. Ibid., 84.

29. Ibid.

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Therefore, female independence in Japanese Mahāyāna Buddhist faith seems to be coherent with the independence that Eshinni and Kakushinni held in their private socio-economic spheres. Neither of them became cloistered nuns, and instead chose to devote themselves to their faith in their own homes as part of their day-to-day lives. As Dobbins states, “there were numerous people of quasi-clerical identity in the early Pure Land movement. . . . Such people commonly cut their hair and wore robes, but they did not go through full ordination procedures.”30 Eshinni sustained a symbiotic relationship between nunhood and marriage, as she understood marriage not as an impediment to her devotion to religious values, but rather as an extension of them. Eshinni’s letters, as Dobbins states, show that she “saw no contradiction between her identity as a nun and her dedication to family and household.”31 Although the doctrines analyzed above uphold a negative image of women and their inability to reach enlightenment or to be reborn as women in the Pure Land, it seems that Eshinni’s beliefs transcended such conceptions of the female in Buddhism. As Dobbins highlights, Eshinni viewed the Pure Land as naturally equal—whether it be between good and evil, or male and female. Eshinni’s letters are valuable because “they convey the view that women have the same access to the Pure Land that men do” and “reveal a discrepancy between idealized religion expressed in doctrinal axioms and practiced religion functioning among believers.”32 Eshinni’s life and experiences illuminate an important aspect of Buddhist faith; although the doctrine may have at times been misogynistic, and that such principles surely affected some women, the common view was that women were able to be born in the Pure Land as women, or at least live a prosperous life of religious devotion.

Conclusion The abundance of interpretations of fundamental Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrines demonstrates how the role of women within the confines of the doctrine is not just varied, but also contradictory. These inconsistent attitudes towards women sheds light on the continuously evolving and diverse role that women have occupied within Mahāyāna Buddhism. Many texts are misogynistic in their remarks on the ability for women to attain Buddhahood. However, a few texts and passages within them repudiate such claims, either by providing general claims which do not explicitly state that women cannot be born in the land of the Buddha or by emphasizing the equality between men 30. Ibid., 88.

31. Ibid., 90.

32. Ibid., 105.

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and women.

The understandings of female enlightenment and the role of gender within the Buddhist context differ depending on the cultural context, translation, and even time period of the text in question. The life of Eshinni in the Pure Land context sheds light on practiced religion, complementing the study of theological texts. Although women tend to not fare well in Buddhist doctrines, Eshinni’s agency and understanding of marriage and nunhood provide evidence that some women were, in practice, autonomous and active in Buddhist faith. Critical to the study of gender within the Mahāyāna Buddhism is the understanding that women did in fact occupy important and active roles within the confines of the faith. In some cases, religious devotion was an act of liberation and independence from gender norms imposed by societal traditions.

It is vital that those studying gender in Mahāyāna Buddhism do not discount female agency across cultural contexts where the faith is prevalent by solely paying attention to theological doctrines. As I have argued in this paper, gender occupies an incredibly complex place in Mahāyāna Buddhism—one that, although generally negative in the doctrine, is understood differently in practice.

Pauline crepy recently graduated from McGill University with a BA Joint Honours in Political Science and Latin American & Caribbean Studies. She is currently pursuing a Dual Masters Degree at Sciences Po Paris in International Development with a Specialization in Diplomacy and the London School of Economics in International Relations.

She is currently Research Director at London Politica, the world’s first student-led political risk advisory. She has previously worked with the Permanent Secretariat of the Community of Democracies, the Bulan Institute for Peace Innovations, and Kennedy Berg LLP. Her research revolves around development aid, and focuses on how to render such policies more sustainable and effective by first advancing proper methods of development evaluation. Her main focus is rendering development policies more targeted and efficient, with a particular interest in postconflict areas.

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The Tibetan Chöd Ritual: Its Foundation and Connection to Indian Rasa Theory and other Forms of Tibetan Poetry

elaina grimm

For many, it may be challenging to think of the world in terms not related to the self.

People often subconsciously identify their position in life through their relationship to other people or material items. This understanding of the world centered around the idea of the individual, however, can be counterproductive to combating ideologies such as racism and xenophobia, which define the self through its difference from the “other.”

What if there was no such “self”’ around which to base one’s understanding? What if the world is much more interconnected than it may appear? Actively deprogramming the mind of the frameworks of duality is the goal of the Tibetan Chöd ritual which is “one of the more widely performed meditative techniques in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions.”1 It is popular among Tibetan Buddhists of all four sects, Nyingma, Gelug, Sakya and Kagyu, but it involves meditative visualizations that are profound exercises into the realm of detachment and which are thus not readily available to the novice practitioner.2 Chöd practice is based in the logic of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, and its goal is the severance of the practitioner’s attachment to the self. This essay will explore the background of the Chöd ritual, including its founder and philosophical grounding, before moving on to connect Indian aesthetic theory with other Tibetan traditions of poetry and performance. The multidimensionality of both Chöd and Indian rasa theory can be grasped, as the many conflicting ideas within rasa theory parallel the depth of the Chöd ritual. Chöd’s ability to embody several conflicting ideas within rasa theory both supports the complexity of Chöd practice and bolsters Mahāyāna Buddhism’s ideas of nonduality and emptiness.

Background on the Ritual Chöd traces its roots back to Machig Lapdron, an important Tibetan figure who, it is 1. Michael R. Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear: Contemplative Dynamics of the Tibetan Buddhist GCod Tradition,” Contemporary Buddhism 6, no. 1 (2005): 38.

2. Lee Susan Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music: Chod Dbyangs as a Tool for Mind Cultivation,” Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences 9, no. 26 (2015): 56.

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claimed, was “an incarnation of Yeshe Tsogyel, the eighth-century consort of Guru Padma Sambhaha who brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet.”3 Machig lived in Tibet during a particularly stimulating period of its history; there was a “great renaissance of Buddhism” during the eleventh century which carried religious pilgrims and scholarly exchange between India and Tibet, leading to innovations in culture and spirituality.4 During this time, Machig made contributions to the expanding Buddhist experience by applying the principles of the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sūtras to meditative practice. The root of Machig’s interest in the ideas of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra traces back to her history as a professional reader in her youth. In Tibet, households would employ the skill of professional readers who could read at a remarkable pace to come to their home to recite scripture as a way of accumulating merit and improving their karmic standing.5 Machig read on behalf of her teacher who received requests for readings from lay people.6 The Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra was one of the primary scriptures read during these recitations, and Machig was one of the fastest readers around at the time.7 The Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra “describe[s] how to realize the essence of ‘wisdom,’ or the ‘emptiness’ of all phenomena,” a concept which Machig took to easily.8 Despite her already profound understanding of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, Machig’s insight was more fully awakened upon meeting and learning from Lama Sonam Drapa and Padampa Sangye, who helped her dive deeper into the sūtra and pushed her to connect with the text beyond just reading it proficiently.9 Her profound understanding of the “emptiness” of all things lead to her being seen by many as “an emanation of the Great Mother,” with “the Great Mother” referring to “the anthropomorphization of the wisdom realizing emptiness.”10 Wanting to help others realize the truth of emptiness, Machig implored the advice of Padampa Sangye who reportedly told her to: Confess all your hidden faults.

Approach that which you find repulsive.

Whomever you think you cannot help, help them.

Anything that you are attached to, let go of it.

Go to places that scare you.

Sentient beings are limitless as the sky.

3. Tsultrim Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” in Women of Wisdom (Snow Lion Publications: 2000), 143.

4. Ibid., 144.

5. Ibid., 144-145.

6. Ibid., 144-145.

7. Jeffrey W Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art: Visualizing Music in the Tibetan Sacred Ritual Music Liturgies,” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 1, no. 1 (2015): 35.

8. Ibid. 34-35.

9. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 145.

10. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 35.

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Be aware.

Find the Buddha inside yourself.11

Taking this advice to heart, Machig developed the popular Chöd meditation technique which aims to rid practitioners of attachment to the self by strategically using fear to solicit potent emotions that the practitioner then dismisses. Machig’s work on Chöd practice solidified her legacy as a pivotal Tibetan Buddhist figure.12 As the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra was of central importance to the training of Machig Lapdron, it is no surprise that the philosophical basis for Chöd can be found within its teachings. Mahāyāna Buddhists believe that human nature in reality is both omnipotent and empty, and that until the nature of existence can be understood as empty, unhelpful thoughts that perpetuate a belief in the self and the concept of “other” trap humans in an endless cycle of rebirth known as saṃsāra.13 The negative thoughts and actions which trap humans in saṃsāra are known as kleśa, “defilements,” and they are seen as arising “from attachments, the presence of external objects, and a wrong conception of them.14 Mahāyāna Buddhists believe that this misconception of the world leads to mental dichotomies that do not actually exist, and there is thus a need for some ritual or practice to break those dichotomies and restore the reality of total interconnectedness and emptiness to the practitioner’s mind. This need to sever perceptions of difference and attachment is emphasized in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, which teaches that “there is no self-essence, that we are ‘void of a self.’ If we are void of a self, there is no reason to be egocentric, since the whole notion of a separate ego is false. Therefore, we can afford to be compassionate, and need not continually defend ourselves or force our desires onto others.”15 This idea of cutting off the ego and the concept of the self as found in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra is integral to the Chöd ritual. Thus, it can be seen why “Chöd is the tantric embodiment of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra.”16 Tantric methods also serve as part of the philosophical basis on which Chöd stands. Tantric practice “involves ‘bringing the result into the path,’” and Chöd, as we will see in the following discussion, closely follows this idea of bringing the goal of severance of dualities into people’s practice. It does this by drawing the realization of a non-existent self into stark reality through vivid mental imagery and visualizations

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Ibid. 60, citing pha dam pa sangs rgyas, d. 1117.

Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 144.

Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music,” 57.

Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 38.

Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 146.

Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 34.

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elicited by the combination of song-poems and instrumentation.17 The premise of the Chöd ritual can now be understood as bringing about enlightenment through the destruction of conceptual dichotomies, such as “self” and “other.” During the ritual, practitioners “utilize situational fear and their instinct for self-preservation to clearly elicit the innate notion of self, a self that the adept feels must be protected from harm. The purpose of the rite is to “cut” through that notion.”18 The name “Chöd” means “to cut,” which is indicative of the goal of cutting off misconceptions about dualities.19 This objective can be seen in the following passage of the one of the most essential texts of the Chöd tradition, The Essence of Enlightened Awareness:20 This discursive thinking is difficult to relinquish, It is the propensity of prolonged habituation, It is the single cause that generates The variety of suffering that comes into existence. Here in this charnel ground Of gathered psycho-physical constituents, Are the elemental forces, their bases, And what they’re based upon.

For the yogi who actualizes the direct indication of the sense capacities and their objects — Here, in this place of flickering mental fluctuations, The variety of fleeting thought activities are cut-through.

For as long as this demon of discursive thinking is not cut-through, Until then, continue with your severance.21

As the passage highlights, mental misconstructions lead to the defilement of the mind and the trapping of a person in a non-enlightened state, requiring a way to uproot, or cut, these misconceptions. Chöd not only serves as a way to conquer the “demons’ connected to the ego,”22 that plague the individual, but is also a “personal test of [a practitioner’s] level of bodhicitta, which is defined as the altruistic resolve to relieve all 17. Ibid., 49.

18. Ibid., 33.

19. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 146.

20. Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 37.

21. Ibid., 44-45, citing 22. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 146.

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beings of suffering by attaining Buddhist enlightenment for their sake.”23 Practitioners of the Chöd ritual seek more than just personal enlightenment; they seek enlightenment for the benefit of others. Once they have understood the ultimate truth they can help bring others to the same realization of the world, making the practice of Chöd a compassionate act.24 The utility of the ritual thus lies in its ability to bring practitioners to Buddhahood.25

Chöd in Practice Chöd practice is a process involving many integrated components which all work together to bring about the idea of the self and to subsequently “cut” that idea. Not only does the practitioner engage in meditation, but they also sing composed song-poems and play several instruments which aid in the practitioner’s cultivation of knowledge.26 There are several lineages of the Chöd tradition which each have their own particularities in the ways ritual is performed, but the overarching idea of cutting off attachment to the self and the tools used in the ritual, such as the song-poems and instruments, are similar for these varying lineages.27 There are also varying levels of Chöd, as Machig Lapdron herself taught of the outer, inner, secret, and suchness levels.28 The outer level of Chöd involves the performative tasks of singing song-poems, playing instruments, and dancing or gesturing with the body.29 While the outer level of Chöd practice is taking place, inner Chöd is also happening, as the practitioner meditates and works on severing their attachment to their body by reflecting on the nature of reality in an effort to reach an understanding of the emptiness of all things.30 These outer and inner levels—the physical level and the mental level—of Chöd are going to be the primary focus of this analysis, as they are the more observable levels of the practice.

The Chöd ritual is a long practice that takes the ritualist visually along the full path to enlightenment. The song-poems that a Chöd practitioner recites generate specific visualizations that the practitioner needs to experience to evoke the proper emotions for severing attachment. The song-poems take the ritualist through scenes that depict their consciousness exiting their body from their head and transforming 23. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 33.

24. Connor Weston, “Watch Chöd Self: An Examination of Chöd, Its Practitioners, and Its Music,” Independent Study Project, SIT Graduate Institute/SIT Study Abroad (2016), 57.

25. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 60.

26. Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music,” 57.

27. Weston, “Watch Chöd Self,” 57.

28. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 36.

29. Ibid., 36.

30. Ibid., 36.

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into a ḍākinī, a female spirit or energy source which may take on a frightening form, who then decapitates the practitioner.31 The visualization instructions of this part of the ritual can be seen in the following excerpts of the song-poem titled Dedicating the Illusory Body: My mind emerges from the heart of the gurudeity, In the aspect of a ḍākinī holding a curved knife.32 My old body falls down, abandoned; Appearing whitish and oily, it covers a billion worlds.33

The emphasis in the second excerpt on the fact that the visualized body of the practitioner is now their “old body” underscores how the ritual aims to take the idea of the self and break it apart. The ritualist’s skull is then envisioned as a large cup holding the cut-up pieces of the practitioner’s body which is offered to beings of every kind, including ḍākinīs and demons, to consume.34 The visualized presence of threatening guests coming to feast on the body initiates “the practitioner’s habitual tendency to protect himself [which] is to be thwarted by realizing that there is no ‘self’ left to protect.”35 Realizing that there is no substance to the reified ideas the mind creates, the practitioner meditates on the emptiness of the body, the emptiness of the creatures eating the dismembered body, and the emptiness of the offering process itself.36 This ritual reinforces the understanding of the true nature of all phenomena as empty and helps to break the ritualist’s attachment to the idea of the “self.” The ritual ends with more meditation on emptiness “and some ending prayers for the eventual enlightenment of all beings.”37 The process of calling the ḍākinīs and demons to come feast on the body is significant in that the demons themselves represent causes which perpetuate the cycle of saṃsāra. The demons are referenced in this passage from The Essence of Enlightened Awareness: The Four demons are subdued 31. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 146.

32. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 49.

33. Ibid., 49.

34. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 146.

35. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 34.

36. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 146.

37. Ibid., 146.

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By the brilliance of the Mahāyāna teachings.

To be beyond saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, acceptance and rejection, This is the meaning of the perfected spiritual practices.

To take adversity as the path, This is the teaching of the mother-lady.

To make antagonists your friends, This spiritual advice of severance was composed Realize the words as well as their meaning.38

The self-reflexive qualities of the practice are represented in the poem’s calls for “taking adversity as the path” and making “antagonists your friends.” These lines reference the idea that causes of human discomfort and fear need to be skillfully utilized to evoke the emotions of the substantialised or reified self in order to subsequently sever those attachments.39 The severing of attachment also applies to cutting away the four demons referenced in the first line of the stanza. The four demons are the “Demon that Blocks the Senses,” the “Demon which Cannot be Controlled,” the “Demon of Pleasure,” and the “Demon of the Ego.”40 These demons, respectively, induce the practitioner’s fixation on objects as separate entities, produce to feelings of desire for them (which is attachment to pleasure), make people’s thoughts wander endlessly, and lead people to falsely reify the idea of the “self.”41 The defilements that beget the perpetuation of saṃsāra, such as attachment, misconception, and ignorance, are thus notably made into physical beings by the song-poems through the symbolism of the demons. The use of such symbolism allows the practitioner to cut off the source of these defilements at the same time that the demons lose their power as vehicles of fear.42 Symbolism and metaphor are thus important tools of the Chöd song-poems in helping the practitioner realize the truth of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra.

In addition to the song-poems sung during Chöd practice, instruments accompany the vocal performance, and these instruments are imbued with symbolic meanings which enhance the power of the sung mental visualizations. Practitioners have four methods of sound production in the Chöd ritual, one of which is the voice that chants the song-poems as well as the tantric mantra “phet.”43 The content of this 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 40-41.

Ibid., 41.

Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 147.

Ibid., 147.

Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 38.

Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music,” 57.

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vocal aspect of the ritual will be analyzed in the later part of this essay. The other ways in which the ritualist can make sounds include the playing of the ḍamaru drum, the Tibetan bell, and the thighbone trumpet.44 The ḍamaru drum has two drum heads that are simultaneously struck by a pair of balls hanging from the center of the drum as the practitioner swings it, and this two-sided aspect of the drum symbolizes both “the masculine and the feminine” and “the inseparability of absolute and relative truth.”45 By having a symbolic meaning of which the practitioner is aware, the holding and playing of the drum thus reinforces the ideas of emptiness and non-dualism that the ritual aims to expose. The Tibetan bell symbolizes “the primordial space of the feminine,” and this symbolism also adds to the cultivation of the truth of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra in the mind of the practitioner.46 The thighbone trumpet is played at the crucial moment in the visualization process where the practitioner summons the demons to feast on their lifeless body.47 This connection of the thighbone trumpet to the process of offering the body to the demons (who when unassociated with fright stand in as a visual for the banishing of mental defilements as described above) joins the practitioner holding the trumpet to the goal of the realization of emptiness. The various ways in which Chöd ritualists make sound have symbolic meanings that further the effect of the visualizations and the meditative practice as a whole.

The sounds of Chöd are not the only symbolically important aspects of the ritual, as Chöd is practiced in specific places that also serve acute purposes in conjuring specific mental states. Chöd is traditionally performed in places that instill fright in people such as “cemeteries, haunted places, temple ruins, ramshackle dwellings, the meeting of two paths in a forest, etc.”48 There are a few reasons for holding the ritual in these fright-inducing environments. The first reason for doing so is that these locations are understood to be places where spirits reside.49 This believed proximity to spirits helps Chöd practice in the sense that it both can add to the scare factor of the environment and make it easier for the spirits to come and feast on the offered body of the ritualist. A second reason these settings are chosen has to do with the fact that fear brings ideas of the self to the surface of one’s mind as the instinct to protect oneself is activated.50 The arousing of this instinct allows the practitioner to see that they do in fact have a reified 44. Allione, “Machig Lapdron,” 148.

45. Ibid., 148.

46. Ibid., 148.

47. Ibid., 148.

48. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 33.

49. Ibid. 33., 50. Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 46.

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sense of self, and this identification helps the practitioner work towards eliminating that conception. It follows then, that a third reason for practicing Chöd in frightening places has to do with the fact that “one of the signs that defines evidence of successful severance is freedom from fear.”51 Thus the arousal of fear serves not only as a way in which to bring the idea of the self to the surface where it can be analyzed, but also as a measure of the success of repeated Chöd practice. The less fear one progressively feels, the more one is able to tell that their meditative practice is effective.

Evidence of Chöd traditionally being performed in frightening settings can be found in The Essence of Enlightened Awareness, which states: While in charnel grounds, desolate valleys, Sanctuaries, alone, in an abandoned house, or elsewhere, Where is your mind?

While asleep in places of fear, Despair, or terror during the darkness of night, While the gods and devils of despair assemble And paranoid thinking arises, Cut-through doubt, dispel obstacles, And enhance your spiritual practice at that moment!52

However, the ritualist can graduate from the stage that necessitates practice in fearinducing places, since the ritual can evolve over time to not just take place in certain environments and as certain moods are cultivated, but as a part of everyday life.53 In a similar way to how the final stages of some tantric meditation practices are “no meditation,” in which practitioners can transform every second of life into the effortless living of the path of enlightenment, Chöd practitioners can become so advanced that they “visualize the real life as the Buddha pure land and see everyday noises as the sacred chants of Chöd dbyangs (melodies), and “phet” singing—taking all opportunities in life to be trained in purity of mind.”54 The setting of the ritual is important for Chöd practice, but some highly advanced practitioners are able to grasp the truth of emptiness so well that they can practice anywhere and everywhere, not just in places that arouse fear.

Chöd’s Connections to Other Aesthetic Traditions Chöd is a unique tradition; it draws upon tantric ideas to deprogram the mind of the 51.

52.

53.

54.

Ibid., 46.

Ibid., 43.

Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music,” 59.

Ibid., 59-60.

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illusion of dualities in a manner more extreme than other forms of meditation, but it is also connected to other Indic and Tibetan traditions by shared similar techniques and principles. Connections to Indic ideas of rasa will be examined from both the side of the song-poems and the instrumental aspect of the ritual before moving on to analyses of the connections Chöd has to Tibetan traditions such as mgur and monastic ritual.

Rasa theory is complex and comprises the work of many who advocate for many different conceptualizations of the production of emotion in aesthetic works.

Indic aesthetics are centered on the idea that emotional experience defines the beauty of an artistic endeavor.55 The production of emotion in dramatic performance was conceptualized by Bharata in his work Nāṭya Śāstra.56 Bharata asserted that the construction of emotion in drama is a calculated procedure which involves the precise “conjunction of factors, reactions, and transitory emotions.”57 These carefully crafted components of emotional construction come together to create the overall emotional experience of art, also thought of as the “taste” of a piece.58 This idea of many components forming a work’s overall “flavour” explains why rasa is translated as “taste.”59 It is important to note that the Nāṭya Śāstra places the burden of the emotional experience on the performer as they are the ones crafting these emotions, not the audience.60 This idea of an objective, calculated emotional production in art was gradually appropriated by poetic scholars, beginning in the sixth century.61 This adoption of rasa theory and its insertion into the world of poetry challenged the existing idea of rasa as emotions that can be seen. Rasa theory was now an element of both the visual world of the theatre and the mental world of literature.62 Several theories of rasa in poetry were asserted; some theorists such as Udbhata viewed rasa as a form of written ornamentation similar to other literary tools such as simile and rhetoric, while others, like Anandavardhana, viewed rasa as a more complicated outcome of a procedure known as “implicature.”63 Using implicature, an emotion is not expressly stated in the piece but conveyed by the understanding of the implications of a phrase or passage.64 Despite rasa’s new conceptualizations, the theory of it as an objective, calculated 55. Kapoor, Kapil, and Nalini M. Ratnam. “Literary Experience as Object of Knowledge,” In Literary Theory: Indian Conceptual Framework, (1998) 96.

56. Pollock, Sheldon. “Introduction: an Intellectual History of Rasa,” In A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, (New York: Columbia UP, 2016) 7.

57. Ibid., 7.

58. Ibid., 8.

59. Ibid., 8.

60. Ibid., 9.

61. Ibid., 9.

62. Ibid., 9-10.

63. Ibid., 11-12.

64. Ibid., 11-12.

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process did not fade with these initial poetic thinkers. Subjectivity would be later inserted into rasa theory by Bhatta Nayaka who asserted in his work The Mirror of the Heart that rasa was experienced by the reader and made up of the specific emotional factors going on in their life, not by the specific emotional features imbued in the poetry.65 Rasa theory is complicated, and depending on the thinker, it can be seen as either a “property of a text-object, a capacity of a reader-subject, [or] also [as] a transition between the two.”66 There is great merit in diving into the intricacies of the varying positions asserted regarding rasa, but this essay will focus on the select few outlined above and their relation to Chöd ritual practice. It will examine how rasa is imbued in the text of Chöd song-poems, instruments, and music, and the interaction of these these features of Chöd ritual.

Chöd song-poems can be examined for rasa from both the perspectives of performance art and poetry. As discussed above, rasa theory began as a theory examining emotional production in theatre. Chöd ritual can be understood as being “extremely performative . . . in all of its sādhana [spiritual practice] and ritual manifestations. It is like a performing art, both in its performance in ritual practice contexts and in the unusual life path of the Chöd adept.”67 With this understanding of Chöd as a form of theatrical performance, the experience of the fearful emotion conjured by the singing of the song-poems and their instructed visualizations can be understood to be experienced by the performer as a result of the carefully constructed emotional elements of the songpoems’ ritual performance. The locus of emotional experience being in the performer fits with the original conception of rasa as a calculated theatrical product, resulting in the song-poems arousal of the necessary fearful emotions that will then be manipulated by the practitioner to cut off the root of attachment. There is also a notable emotional effect of the loud, sharp, “sporadic and repeated vocalization of the Tibetan word ‘phet’ (pronounced ‘pay’) which acts as the sharpest sounding weapon to cut the ego.

In Chöd teachings, phet is predominantly used during recitations of chöd dbyangs to cut through thoughts in which ego is rooted.”68 The use of phet recitation in disrupting the practitioner’s impure thoughts could be construed as the destruction of rasa, as it cuts through the idea of the ego engendered by the emotional uprisings that the song-poems bring about. However, this interruption of harmful emotion is a way of cultivating the rasa of Santa (tranquility), which is based on the emotional experience of renunciation 65. Ibid., 16-17.

66. Ibid., 26.

67. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 39.

68. Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music,” 57.

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and indifference.69 By cutting off emotions of attachment, the emotional equivalent to the realization of emptiness can be achieved. This highlights the importance of the performance of the song-poems in the arousal of emotions that the “phet” sound can then cut, leading to the experience of enlightenment. These two facets of rasa, the performance and the “phet’”recitation, in the song-poems are of critical importance in the successful practice of Chöd.

In examining Chöd song-poems from the perspective of rasa as it was seen in poetry, a connection can be made with Anandavardhana’s implicature theory. As Jeffrey Cupchik states, during Chöd practice “each melody evokes a mood (Skt. rasa) appropriate to the meditation. Assigned purposefully to a particular meditation section, the melody sustains the mood for the duration of the meditation subritual section.”70 The melody works in conjunction with the actual words of the song-poems in the creation of situationally necessary emotional states. Music has the power to make people feel excited, calm, nervous, and so forth, depending on the way in which it is produced or sung as aspects such as tempo and volume differ, and thus the melodies of the song-poems can be seen as a form of implicature that instructs the practitioner on how to feel without express instructions. The visualizations of the song-poems use implicature in a similar way as the practitioner understands the tone the images are conveying without having to be told what that tone is, relying only on implied emotions like fear. This can be seen by the fact that “the imagery employed is consistent with the notion that in this tradition fear is aroused artistically, which cues terrifying imagery for the purpose of spiritual realization.”71 The practitioner is not told to feel fear upon sight of a demon, but they do because, as this quote indicates, this emotion is created artistically. This aesthetic creation of emotion can be seen as an example of rasa as implicature.

Chöd song-poems can also draw on the work of other rasa theorists, such as Udbhata, who see rasa in poetry as literary ornamentation. An example text of a Chöd song-poem conveying a message of wisdom through rasa-as-ornamentation can be seen in the symbolic use of a tree in this passage of The Essence of Enlightened Awareness: When the trunk of mental activity has been severed By the blade of view, meditation, and conduct— All the branches of discursive thinking that arise In the mind will naturally cease.

69. Kapoor and Ratnam, “Literary Experience as Object of Knowledge,” 105.

70. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 45.

71. Ibid., 56.

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Just as through warm light rays All moisture and darkness vanishes - Through the dawning of pristine wisdom, You will journey along the successive phases Of the paths and stages to relinquish faults.72

This passage metaphorically equates the branches of a tree with the tendency of the mind to think an endless variety of unhelpful thoughts, and the cutting down of this tree at the trunk with the realization of the truth of emptiness and enlightenment.73 Additionally, the comparison between the realization of the wisdom of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra through the disappearance of ignorance and the process of water evaporating in sunlight serves as a simile which furthers the practitioner’s understanding of the effectiveness and importance of Chöd ritual practice. Chöd song-poems draw on the theories of rasa as both a theatrical and poetic concept, and, as will be shown next, the instruments used in the Chöd meditation also contribute to the creation of rasa (emotion) in the practitioner.

The instrumental aspect of Chöd song-poems are posited by some scholars as being essential in the emotional production of the ritual. It has been asserted that the Chöd ritual skillfully and creatively takes advantage of the “human inclination of attachment.” which the Buddha’s teachings see as a negative inclination that needs to be rooted out, here done through music that allows the mind to “focus and concentrate more easily and efficiently without being led astray by disturbing or defiled thoughts.

In this higher concentrated and clear-minded state, the sacred text with its profound meanings can be precisely chanted and better absorbed by the practitioner.”74 The ability of the instruments to tap into the harmful human tendency to attach here serves to further the meditative process by allowing the mind to attach to the words of the song-poems instead of to any wandering thoughts that may arise. Beyond the concentrative ability that the instruments can provide, Jeffrey Cupchick asserts that the instruments themselves are central in the cultivation of an emotional experience. In his ethnomusicological research on Chöd ritual performance, Cupchick found “that music functions not as a secondary aesthetic gesture, a mere accompaniment to the written poetry, but in fact can be considered as a primary text—and a primary conduit for the participant’s development of specific emotional states and visualizations that can lead to meditative insights.”75 Cupchick sees the music’s contribution to the emotional 72.

73.

74.

75.

Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 45.

Ibid., 45.

Chong, “Tibetan Buddhist Vocal Music,” 58-59.

Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 32.

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experience as being just as important as that of the song-poems. One example he gives of music’s ability to cultivate rasa is that eerie echoes of the music can instill fear in the practitioner in just the same way that practicing the ritual in a frightening location or seeing frightening imagery can, thus conjuring up the necessary sense of self to be severed.76 Cupchick asserts that the power of the instruments is rooted in the actual sounds they produce as well. As he says, “An advanced Chöd practitioner understands the hourglass-shaped drum (ḍamaru) to be not merely symbolizing but producing the sound of emptiness. Because sound is produced, it is impermanent and therefore empty of self-existence.”77 The transient nature of music is seen here as conveying the desired knowledge of emptiness to the practitioner. The fact that the instrumental music has the capacity to convey this message of ultimate importance makes the instruments just as useful as the song-poems in achieving the goal of Chöd.

When conducting interviews with actual Chöd practitioners, however, Connor Weston found that there was no consensus on how important the music was in generating the emotional experience of the practice.78 What he did find “was a sort of distinction between beginning practitioners . . . and more experienced Chödpas.”79 Beginning practitioners tended to place more importance on the emotional experience of the music than more advanced ritualists did; sometimes advanced Chödpas, Chöd practitioners, even felt that the music was a hindrance to their practice.80 This can be seen through the example of Rakra Tethong, a former Gelugpa monk who has “a concern that the beauty of music can be distracting and detrimental,” making meditation harder and less efficient.81 This distinction between the utility of music in emotion cultivation for practitioners of different levels does not dismiss Cupchick’s argument about music’s ability to produce rasa, but it does indicate that his argument should be taken with the caveat that it may not be universally applicable to all Chöd practitioners. More research should be done on this topic.

There is an argument to be made that the song-poems and the music can work together in producing rasa. The musical accompaniment can be seen “as a multilayered, intertextual energizing of the poetic text, which brings the liturgy to life in the mindspace of visualization.”82 The two elements may compliment each other instead of 76. Weston, “Watch Chöd Self,” 53.

77. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 44.

78. Weston, “Watch Chöd Self,” 54.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid., 55.

81. Ibid., 55.

82. Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 46.

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competing for the title as the center of emotional production. An example of this partnership can be seen in the excerpt of the song poem Dedicating the Illusory Body by Machig Lapdron: From the pathway of the supreme channel, I eject [my mind] into the guru-deity’s heart [above] Phat! (x5) My old body falls down, abandoned, Appearing whitish and oily, it covers a billion worlds.

Phat! (x5) My mind emerges from the heart of the gurudeity, In the aspect of a ḍākinī holding a curved knife Like a vulture circling above meat, holding the curved knife, [I swoop down and] from the crown to the groin, I cut.83

As Cupchick explains, the imagery of a circling vulture is complimented by a melody that sounds like the flapping of vulture wings.84 The mental image is rendered more realistic by the music in this instance. In this sense, “the music reflects the emotion of the words that are chanted or sung.”85 This idea of rasa as being the product of two sources working together to produce a unified emotional experience echoes the ideas of later rasa theorists who saw the production of rasa as not lying solely in the subject or the audience, but rather in the interaction of the two, or as Pollock puts it, “Rasa precisely resembles the ‘taste’ it metaphorically references, which may be regarded as existing at once in the food, the taster, and the act of tasting.”86 Here, rasa may not solely be a product of the song-poems, the musical accompaniment, or the practitioner’s state of mind as all three may necessarily come together to create the aesthetic experience.

Chöd song-poems also have a connection to other Tibetan and Indic forms of writing. The similarities of these song-poems to the Tibetan mgur tradition have been noted by several scholars. Mgur is a poetic genre of Tibetan writing that was influenced by the Tibetan glu genre. Glu, itself meaning “song,” is a form of poetry which is sung.87 Glu song-poems were not always religious in nature, but the mgur it inspired 83. Ibid., 53-54.

84. Ibid., 51.

85. Weston, “Watch Chöd Self,” 53.

86. Pollock, “Introduction,” 26.

87. Roger R. Jackson, “‘Poetry’ In Tibet: Glu, mGur, sNyan ngag and ‘Songs Of Experience,’” in Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. José Ignacio Cabezón, (New York: Snowlion Publications, 1996), 370.

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increasingly became “religious songs with an experiential component,’’ a description that brings to mind the Chöd song-poems as well.88 There is a further similarity between the mgur poems and the Chöd poems in that both works tend to repeat melodies through different stanzas of the poem being performed, giving the piece a unified feel despite the “[changing] poetic content.”89 Chöd song-poems are remarkably different from mgur song-poems, however, in that Chöd song-poems are much longer than mgur song-poems.90 This is due to the fact that the practice of Chöd involves the recitational traveling of the entire path to enlightenment, while mgur performance only takes the practitioner along a small part of it.91 It is also possible to trace a line of influence back to the Sanskrit dohā tradition.

This genre of Indian poetry asserts its influence on Chöd via the mgur tradition as “mgur spiritual song-poetry is derived from the Sanskrit tradition of poetic literature, the Indian mystic writings of the dohā tradition that fostered such compositions as Saraha’s ‘Royal Song.’”92 One of the most famous and influential mgur writers, Milarepa, drew inspiration from the dohā tradition brought to Tibet by his guru, Marpa.93 As the influence of the dohās is present in the mgur tradition, the influence of the dohās can also be found in the Chöd tradition.94 Noting the similarities between Chöd and these other traditional forms of Tibetan writing gives insight into the idea that Chöd itself aims to communicate; there are no dualities as all things are interconnected, and Chöd’s connection to older traditions only supports that idea.

There are interesting comparisons to be made between Chöd performance and Tibetan monastic ensemble ritual as well. There are several notable differences between the two traditions; Tibetan monastic ensemble ritual relies heavily on vocal chanting as opposed to the singing of melodies, is performed by large groups with orchestral accompaniment as opposed to the predominantly solo recitation and instrumentation that happens in Chöd practice, and is performed in monasteries or associated institutions instead of places people would not normally venture as is done in Chöd.95 Another interesting point of difference lies in the fact that Chöd is performed by many female practitioners, while monastic ensemble ritual is traditionally the

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

95.

Ibid., 372 Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 55.

Ibid., 35.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Jackson, “Poetry in Tibet,” 373.

Cupchik, “Buddhism as Performing Art,” 35.

Ibid., 39-40.

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business of monks.96 While there is a difference in the number of instruments used in the two rituals, with the monastic ensemble ritual using an orchestra while Chöd rituals are performed by soloists or small groups, “the Chöd ritual instruments are at least categorically representative of the instruments used in other Tibetan monastic ensemble ritual performance traditions. Similarly, all these performance traditions deliberately lack a chordophone (stringed instrument), as it is considered too worldly for religious ceremonial contexts.”97 This continuity is interesting as, despite all of the differences between the two traditions, the instruments represented in the Chöd ritual place it squarely within the context of other Tibetan traditions. This is important to note as it provides a further example of how, despite Chöd’s unique appearance, Chöd is in fact identifiable within a larger framework. Chöd being identifiable as part of a whole goes against the idea of there being an inherent “self” even to the ritual, reemphasizing the ideas of nonduality and emptiness (of inherent ‘self-nature’) again.

Conclusion Poetic imagery lies at the heart of the Chöd practice as developed by Machig Lapdron.

The power required by the song-poems to conjure the visualizations necessary to arouse the required emotion of fear, which is then severed, must be strong in order for the ritual to be effective. This power has been noted as coming from the rasa of the song-poems themselves and from the ability of the Chöd instruments to add to the manufacturing of such rasa. The fact that the Chöd tradition can be seen as similar to and distinct from other aesthetic traditions and can be proof of many different theories of rasa reinforces the Buddhist principle of nonduality by showing that it is possible for one thing to be many things simultaneously. If one thing is many things, then there is no inherent “self,” which is the wisdom of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. Enlightened people understand that there is no such thing as the “self,” and Chöd has the power to guide practitioners along the path to enlightenment. Even for non-Buddhists, social capital stands to be gained by understanding the principles of the ritual. As this paper has shown, “by going to the source of fear and terror, the power of the gCod [Chöd] approach comes from not emphasizing the manifestations of terror—those ‘terrorists’ or ‘demons’—but rather through cutting the deeply embedded notions of ‘other’ at the core of conscious awareness.”98 In a world in which popular imagery plays on ideas such as “self” and “other” to create the fear that fuels ideologies such as racism and xenophobia, the 96. Ibid., 40.

97. Ibid., 42-43.

98. Sheehy, “Severing the Source of Fear,” 46.

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principles and goals of Chöd practice could be efficient in breaking down the basis on which these problematic ideologies are founded. Chöd has the ability to help all people live more compassionately, Buddhist practitioner or not, due to its ability to cultivate the rasa of tranquility and to engender understanding and compassion.

Elaina grimm is a recent graduate of McGill and hold BA in International Development and World Religions. She is fascinated with how the poetry of East Asian religious traditions, specifically Buddhism, can be examined not only as a belief system but as a diverse writing system and cultural tool. Elaina is currently pursuing a graduate program in Nonprofit Management and Leadership.

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Revisiting Wagoner’s Islamicization Thesis Islam and the Other in Ibn Battuta’s Rihla

t a j a d e s i l va

In his essay “Sultan among Hindu Kings” from 1996, Phillip B. Wagoner seeks to portray Islamicization as “a larger process of fundamental cultural change.”1 In opposition to dialogues which support of conversion agendas, Wagoner presents the concept of “Islamicization,” which he claims to be comprised of three main characteristics of cultural change: First, Islamicization refers to a political strategy, by means of which indigenous elites attempt to enhance their political status and authority through participation in the more ‘universal’ culture of Islam. Second, this participation is effected through the adoption of certain Islamic cultural forms and practices… [therefore] Islamicization has nothing to do with religious conversion or syncretism. . . . [Third,] Islamicization does not necessarily occur ‘at the expense of’ indigenous cultural traditions.2

In this essay, I critically engage with Wagoner’s Islamicization thesis by examining the characteristics of Islamic influence in India as they appear in Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth century work, Rihla. Battuta’s text is central to my analysis because it offers an authentic firsthand account of his experiences in India during the process of Islamicization. In doing so, the Rhila provides a laudatory perspective that details a culture of Islam as it overwhelms and supplants local Hindu cultures. In the Rihla, Battuta positions himself as an observer and a participant within what Wagoner called “the Islamicate political lingua franca that dominated the world of the Indian Ocean.”3 Consequently, this paper will use the Rihla to assess the validity of Wagoner’s model of Islamicization. To do this, I will refer mainly to three episodes from the Rihla: Battuta’s time as a political servant and the Islamicization of court proceedings; Battuta’s descriptions of Indo-Islamic architecture; and Battuta’s interactions with Muslims compared to non-Muslims.

My analysis of the Rihla both supports and revises Wagoner’s Islamicization thesis. On the one hand, Battuta demonstrates that Islamicization was indeed a cultural process, that is, that there was no contemporary, explicit policy of forcible conversion 1. Phillip B. Wagoner, “‘Sultan among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1996), 854.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., 864.

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in India. Rather, Battuta presents Islamic culture as an emerging global norm. This is done by establishing the ubiquity of Islam and by contrasting narratives that focus on Islam with those that center on Hinduism. Through comparing these narratives, Battuta discerns and justifies the legitimacy of Islam over Hinduism, relegating and reframing Hinduism as regional aberration. Battuta’s partiality for Islam makes it evident that he is not simply a neutral observer. Through his biased rhetoric on Islam’s cultural supremacy, Battuta utilizes cultural evaluations to promote an overarching superiority of Islam. To this end, the Rihla’s establishment of Islamism as the norm exemplifies the processes of Islamicization through the mode of cultural change, and employs an apologetic narrative in order to do so.

Battuta’s advocacy for Islam’s supremacy indicates that Islamicization was not as voluntary as Wagoner would suggest, but practically a compulsory conversion through cultural imperialism, acting as a form of coercion. Cultural imperialism, in this context, is the process by which imposed, foreign cultural elements dominate public life, leading to a transition away from preexisting cultural norms to the imposed culture through implicit mechanisms of judgment, division, exclusion, and oppression. The new culture is mandated not by making the preexisting culture illegal, but through offering social and institutional opportunities which are limited to adherents of the supplanting culture and restricted from those who do not conform. For example, a preference for Islamic culture within the court required the forcible adoption of Islamic norms in order to maintain full access to public spheres of the Islamicate; this becomes evident in Battuta’s account of the contemporary legal courts, which favoured the cultural aspects of Islam structurally and in particular matters where it came into tension with Hindu norms.

Battuta takes the cultural Islamicization of India as a testimony to the normality of Islam. For Battuta, Indic Islamicization implicitly serves as apologetic to Islam by showing its normality and its success in having spread to India, a region considered to be the geographical periphery of the world to most at the time. Battuta uses the normalization of Islam to establish Islamic superiority on worldly, secular grounds, and justifies this superiority by contrasting it with the strangeness of deviant Indian culture rather than by invoking theological arguments. The Indian context perfectly serves his apologetic purposes because, for Battuta, the contrast between Muslims and Hindus proves his evaluation of the astronomical difference between them.

Ultimately, this paper accepts Wagoner’s thesis of Islamicization as a process of cultural transformation. However, it criticizes the idea that this involved no form of forced conversion, expanding the idea of force to include implicit coercion, as

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exhibited in fourteenth century India. Using Battuta’s Rihla, I show that although there was no policy of conversion targeting indigenous religion, there still existed significant systemic pressure for non-Muslims to conform and convert. By positioning contemporary Islam as the superior culture, its proponents of marginalized native, nonMuslim cultures and propagated sweeping stigmatizations of Muslims as worthier than Hindus. Narratives furthered by Battuta exhibit, explain, and authorize the emergence of an immense pressure to dissociate from the widely disavowed Hinduism, mobilizing a forceful conversion of Hindu locals through cultural imperialism. While Wagoner’s concept of a cultural Islamicization leaves room for variations, Battuta details an instance here in which this process of Islamicization is characterised by implicit and explicit pressures of conversion, at the significant expense of indigenous Hindu culture.

Battuta’s description of these narratives functions as a legitimation and apologetic of Islamicization.

Islamic Influences in Delhi Courts Wagoner and Battuta both speak to elements of the cultural processes of Islamicization within the court systems of Islamic India. Support for Wagoner’s argument can be drawn from Battuta’s time in service to Sultan Muhammad Ibn Tughluq as a qadi and from his interactions with the Court of Delhi. However, Battuta’s description of court proceedings provides additional support for an alternative type of forced conversion through cultural pressure or cultural imperialism. To illustrate this claim, I highlight three key elements of the Sultan’s court as they appear in the Rihla: the person of the Sultan and his impact on the geopolitical landscape, the Sultan’s preference for Muslim over non-Muslim representatives, and finally, the Sultan’s implementation of Shari’a.

First, Battuta’s appreciation for Muslim leadership is clearly visible in his favourable description of Sultan Muhammad Ibn Tughluq, who ruled from 1325 to 1351 A.D. The Rhila’s portrayal of the Sultan is one of a devout Muslim and ideal ruler who combines rigor and mercy, as well as humility and authority, in just proportions. Battuta also writes of the Sultan’s positive relationship with his subjects who, in admiration, would repeat “stories of [the Sultan’s] generosity and courage and of his cruelty and violence towards criminals.”4 Battuta displays his own feelings of admiration when he writes that “for all [the Sultan’s merits and popularity], he is of all men the most humble and the readiest to show equity and to acknowledge the right.”5 Thus, Battuta’s opinion 4. Ibn-Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354, trans. H. A. R. Gibb, ed C. F. Beckingham, vol. 3 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 657.

5. Ibid.

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of the Sultan is that of unsubtle approval for the manner in which he carries himself as a Muslim and appears to his subjects.

Above all, Battuta’s approval for the Sultan is rooted in the ruler’s quality as a Muslim and his adherence to Islamic ideals in governance. Battuta writes that “ceremonies of religion are strictly complied with at [the Sultan’s] court,” and praises the Sultan for being “severe in the matter of attendance at prayer and in punishing those who neglect it.”6 For Battuta, this enforcement of Islamic practices is evidence of the Sultan’s piety and a positive indication of the Sultan’s agreeable character and rulership. Here, Battuta relies on the existing precedent of Muslim piety—a precedent that extended beyond the scope of the Rhila—as a measure of goodness that negatively affected general perceptions of non-Muslims. Further, the religiosity of the Sultan and the seriousness with which he understood and applied his Islamic faith is more than likely to have contributed to the creation of the Islamicized culture of fourteenthcentury Delhi that would eventually generate the long-term processes of Islamicization described by Wagoner. Indeed, Muhammad Tughluq’s Islamic government, at least in Battuta’s account, acted as a form of cultural imperialism and facilitated a widespread adoption of Islamic norms.

The Sultan’s favoritism of Muslim foreigners, the second exhibitive characteristic, becomes evident immediately upon Buttuta’s arival in Delhi. Battuta promptly becomes the recipient of the Sultan’s generosity when he is granted a personal meeting with the Sultan and elevated to the prominent court position of qadi, a member of the court who oversaw the sentencing and implementation of Shari’a. The role of qadi also designated Battuta as a member of the Delhi elite. This partiality for Muslim outsiders is acknowledged as a larger pattern, as Battuta writes about the Sultan’s practice of “honoring strangers and showing affection to them and singling them out for governorships or high dignities of state.”7 Battuta states that “the majority of [the Sultan’s] courtiers, palace officials, ministers of state, judges, and relatives by marriage are foreigners, and he has issued a decree that foreigners are to be called in his country by the title of ’Aziz (Honorable).”8 Here, the Rihla speaks to the construction of a hierarchy in which Muslim foreigners are superior, followed by local Muslims, and lastly non-Muslims at the lowest tier. Thus, Battuta became an elite member of Delhi society and was allowed some control within Delhi courts, despite being exceptionally under-qualified for the role and generally ignorant of local contexts.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 595.

8. Ibid.

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Battuta himself recognized that he was ill-fitted for the role of qadi, stating clearly that he was unsuitable for the position due to his minimal knowledge of Persian—the primary language of the Court of Delhi. Rather than seeking a more suitable candidate, however, Muhammad Tughluq opted instead to hire translators who would essentially do the work of qadi themselves, but with Battuta as their advisor and the one to “[sign] all the documents.”9 Battuta also received a generous salary, despite having the majority of his duties reallocated to translators funded by the Sultan.

The Sultan’s over-willingness to accommodate Battuta as a qadi is further evidence of a hierarchy which assigned Arab-Muslims such as Battuta to the highest tier, followed by Indo-Muslims, who remained above Hindus. Indic-Muslims began at a disadvantage and were incentivized to strive towards a foreign, “greater” Islamic identity. This also inevitably resulted in a constant building of pressures placed upon non-Muslims to also adopt elements of Islam or else remain inferior to others within the hierarchy. This hierarchy was not solely cultural, but reinforced by different economic and institutional strategies. For example, Battuta mentions the “alms tax (zakat)” that only non-Muslims are required to pay.10 Zakat, along with favoritism for Muslim workers, further alienated local Hindu populations by creating an untenable financial burden for non-Muslims. In this way, Muslim populations were granted the opportunity to gain economic superiority over non-Muslims, while the latter were materially incentivized to convert via a form of coercion.

The Sultan’s creation of clear class divisions along religious lines undoubtedly shifted the Court of Delhi towards representing Islamic norms and facilitated a continuous pressure to adopt Islamic characteristics. Wagoner argues that these divisions between classes would encourage “indigenous elites” to Islamicize in order to “enhance their political status and authority.”11 Here, Wagoner presents Islamicization as a voluntary cultural change that occurs in response to an altered political climate. In agreement with Wagoner, I argue that a changed political climate would indeed lead to Islamicization. However, I propose that these larger social changes and individual decisions of conversion were, in fact, products of a type of forced conversion. Those who chose to convert, adopt Islamic cultural expressions, or Islamicize reaped the benefits of a new elite social status and economic opportunity; those who did not were, in cultural, legal, and economic ways, both implicitly and explicitly, penalized for their refusal to conform to a religion which challenged their own.

9. Ibid., 748.

10. Ibid., 605.

11. Wagoner, 864.

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Battuta’s observations of the Court of Delhi’s enforcement of Shari’a while in service to the Sultan as qadi constitute an important third piece of evidence. As is the common theme of the Rihla, Battuta continues to gauge his appreciation for the Court of Delhi based on its convergence with his Islamic ideals. While acting as qadi, Battuta wielded the power to enforce Islamic norms upon the subjects within his court, regardless of their being Muslim or non-Muslim. Therefore, Battuta was able to directly control the behaviour of non-Muslims within and beyond his court, and to compel them to conform to Islamic standards.

In the Rhila, Battuta describes how access to the Court of Delhi favoured Islamic cultural practices by restricting services from those who refused to conform. Further, Battuta writes about how he participated in his own acts of Islamicization as qadi, using his position of power to impose Muslim norms upon non-conforming Hindus: Their womenfolk do not cover their heads, not even at one side. Most of them wear only one apron from the navel to the ground, the rest of their bodies being uncovered…

When I was qadi… No woman was admitted to my presence in a lawsuit unless her body was covered.12

We can infer from this example that although there was no explicit legislation to convert non-Muslims, the performance of Islam and its norms became required in some official institutional contexts. Battuta admits to making efforts to “put an end” to the “immodest” clothing style of the Hindus, wherein he imposes his own beliefs, which reflect principles of Muslim life, by condemning and prohibiting manifestations of the local Hindu culture.13 To this end, Battuta imposes an outright ban of traditional Hindu garments and even enforces a punishment: the restricted access to his services as qadi. Thus, Battuta himself is an active participant in a type of forced conversion through cultural imperialism, whereby everyday non-Muslim cultural practices become impracticable under Muslim institutions.

It can be assumed that because Battuta had the ability to discriminate against the Hindus as a qadi, those in similar positions would have been granted the same liberties, and were allowed to target non-Muslims in an identical manner. The result of this, alongside other similar mechanisms, was a widespread removal of Hindu locals and their culture from participating in state proceedings through prohibitive rules and the further classification of them as deviants. The Court of Delhi became, inextricably, an exclusionary environment for non-Muslims and an institution governed to the benefit 12. Ibn-Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354, trans. H. A. R. Gibb, ed C. F. Beckingham, vol. 4 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 827.

13. Ibid.

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of Mulsims. Thus, it is clear that local Hindus in traditional clothing were regarded as “immodest and barbaric,” unfit to present themselves in the Court of Delhi—a phenomenon that would essentially shun Hindus away from participation in the public sphere.14 The ostracism of Indian culture described in the Rihla contradicts Wagoner’s claim that Islamicization need not occur at the expense of local cultures when local cultures are, in actuality, gradually supplanted or suppressed.

Islamic Architecture The Rihla is filled with descriptions of Islamic architecture in fourteenth-century Delhi.

These descriptions are more than the simply innocent and astonished observations of a newcomer. Instead, they serve a specific role in Battuta’s account of India. Through Battuta’s judgments of the structures and styles which comprise the spaces of society, architecture is turned into a highly visible example of the cultural superiority of Islam and the inferiority of Hinduism. This purpose becomes clear when Battuta’s derisive descriptions of Hindu architectural sites are contrasted with the rhetoric of awe and admiration he reserves for documenting any evidence of Muslim influences on the landscape. I suggest that Battuta seeks to legitimize Islam by claiming it had a role in civilizing pagan society; Battuta thusly frames his descriptions of architecture as objective, overwhelming public displays of superiority and inferiority. By contrasting the beauty of Islamic cultural artifacts with the aberrations of Hindu culture, Battuta constructs a narrative of Islamic progress and non-Islamic primitivism.

Battuta devotes careful attention to observing several feats of Indo-Islamic architecture. The first of these structures to impress him is “the wall which surrounds the city of Delhi,” which he describes as “unparalleled.” 15 Here, Battuta concedes that Indo-Muslims are capable of tasks that have seemingly remained inconceivable to historically Mulsim regions or Muslim experts. Battuta is doubly amazed by the Mosque of Delhi, whose “walls, roof, and paving are all… admirably squared and firmly cemented with lead,” and is further intrigued by the “awe-inspiring column” at the center of the mosque, which was said to be constructed from an unknown source of metal.16 This awe continues as Battuta describes the beauty of yet more monuments, including an Islamic burial site.17 Many of these descriptions are focused on detailing distinctly Islamic characteristics. Battuta’s notable fascination with each of these sites 14.

15.

16.

17.

Wagoner, 865.

Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, 3:621.

Ibid., 622.

Ibid.

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is significant because it demonstrates that Battuta acknowledges the possibility that Indo-Muslim architects have discovered something that Buttuta himself has not yet encountered, despite having extensively traveled the much of the Islamicate. For Battuta, this statement is significant in that it implies that Indo-Muslims may have potentially surpassed the rest of the Islamicate in certain areas, such as technical and architectural advancement. However, his amazement is at the civilizing power of Islamism and its innovative products; such achievements are celebrated as the result of Islamicization and the innovation it brought to Delhi.

Battuta’s depiction of Hindu architecture is far less glamorous. This bias in the Rihla becomes most apparent in Battuta’s retelling of an encounter with the ruins of an ancient Hindu town. He describes the location as a “curiosity… outside [of] town.”18 This suggests that evidence of Hindu culture would have already been foreign to urban centers, remote, and pushed to the outskirts of society. Relegated to the spatial and social periphery, any substantial unapologetic presence of Hindu culture within Muslim societal centers had become minimal at best and almost nonexistent in Battuta’s environment of the Dehli elite. Further, the existence of the abandoned Hindu ruins are themselves an indication of marginalization; it is not coincidental that the ruined city had existed in a predominantly Hindu state and was left empty during the transition to an Islamic country. In its prime, the now-ruined city would have been part of a predominantly Hindu state and one of India’s many Hindu cities. However, the imported Islamic society of Battuta’s era strived to remain distant from imprints of Hinduism upon the landscape, designating these spaces as marginal to the new society and erasing their histories by labeling such Hindu sites as “curiosities” or relics of a long-gone, primitive time.

In describing evidence of idolatry, the Rihla’s depiction of the ruins also serves to emphasize the primitivism of Hindus and the sophistication of Muslims. Battuta encounters “an innumerable quantity of stones resembling the shapes of men and animals. . . . Many of them were disfigured and their forms effaced.”19 Of these idols, Battuta pays special attention to the remains of what seemed to be a human figure, “except that its head was elongated and its mouth on one side of its face and its hands behind its back like a pinioned captive.”20 For Battuta, this association with idolatry is further evidence of the barbaric nature of Hinduism because the tradition embodies qualities that directly oppose a core tenet of Islamic belief, which strictly prohibits and 18. Ibid., 603.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

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strongly condemns idol worship. While idol worship in Islam is seen as a sin, it is seen thusly as both an evil and an error; this duality deeply plays into Battuta’s assessment of Hinduism in light of its worship practices.

The sole explanation that Battuta provides regarding the origins and intended purpose of these ruins only emphasizes the aberrant nature of the Hindus. He explains that the deformed human figure he found is in fact an idol made to represent the king of the former Hindu city, which decayed into ruins because its “inhabitants were so given to depravity that they were turned to stone.”21 Thus, Battuta’s acknowledgment of the preceding Hindu culture becomes a cautionary tale for Muslims, urging them to avoid the pagan traditions which led to the destruction faced by the “depraved” Hindus—the former inhabitants of a now desolate ruin. Here, Battuta ties together his evaluation of Hindu architecture with his judgment against Hindu belief. Beyond not looking like buildings identifiable as Muslim in style and function, the Hindu ruins are barbaric in both their appearance and their historical use—the practice of Hindu faith.

Battuta’s glorified presentation of Islamic architecture is a testament to his belief in the cultural superiority of Islam. Battuta becomes an active participant in the process of cultural Islamicization through his use of these descriptions to demonize Hinduism as it appears across many different features of contemporary Indian society. Apt here is Wagoner’s understanding of universalization, a process that replaces local cultural norms with the “functional analogues” of a more dominant and intrusive second culture.22 In this sense, both texts acknowledge that the introduction of Islamic culture changes what is considered the norm and what is aberrant. Here, the “functional analogues” being introduced into contemporary Indian society, generally and in contemporary Islamic architecture, do not just harmlessly replace the preexisting Hindu standards but supplant them, relying on condemnation. Further, Battuta’s judgment of Hindu religion as practiced in the ruins suggests that Islamic architecture derives merit by actually surpassing the status of analogue, totally redefining the functions of built spaces in contemporary Indian society.

Not only does Battuta contrast Islamic and Hindu architectures, he compares Indian architecture with the architecture in the rest of the Islamic world. When speaking of Delhi’s famous Qutb Minar, Battuta writes that it “has no parallel in the lands of Islam.”23 Whereas in comparing Muslim and Hindu art, Indianness was a mark of inferiority, in the comparison of Indo-Muslim art and art in the rest of the Islamic 21. Ibid.

22. Wagoner, 872.

23. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, 3:623.

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world, India emerges as superior. Thus, Indianness has a different value to Battuta, depending on whether it is Muslim or not. As purely Hindu, Indianness stands inferior to Islam. But, after its Islamification, it becomes able to compete with and, limitedly and circumstantially, surpass the rest of the Muslim world. For Battuta, what seems to make Indo-Muslim architecture unique is the fact that it reflects the transition from paganism to Islam. This transition is admirable; because the contrast between Hindu culture and Islam is so stark, any capacity to bridge this divide through Islamicization becomes a testament to the powers of contemporary Islam. The extraordinariness of Indo-Muslim architecture is noted by Battuta because of this non-Muslim background, but derives its merit from the effort required to become Muslim and its ability to reflect such a significant transition.

Relations with Muslims and non-Muslims While on the outside the Rihla appears to be a travelogue, it also implicitly serves as an apologetic for contemporary Islam. This is evident in the different ways Battuta depicts Muslims and non-Muslims in the Rihla. He largely ignores non-Muslims, even when they are the regional majority, and chooses to depict them as adherent to irrational pagan customs over rational Islamic practices. Further, The Rihlas descriptions of local Indian populations differ greatly. Once again, Battuta’s fondness for the people who surround him seems to be contingent on their similarities to Islamic norms. Thus, Battuta’s first description of local Indo-Muslims is respectful: The chamberlain stands beside the table-mat before the food is served and he does homage in the direction of wherever the Sultan may be and all those who are present do homage at the same time. This homage with them consists in bending the head rather like the ‘bowing’ of the prayers. . . . The chamberlain then says bismillah which is the signal for them to start eating. When they finish eating . . . the chamberlain says bismillah, whereupon they rise and do homage as they did before, and separate.24

In stark contrast, any reference made to the Hindus conveys Battuta’s deep repulsion for the existence of such people. This is evident in Battuta’s anecdote of a Hindu custom he observed: I rode out with my companions to see what exactly these women did in this [ceremony of] burning… we came to a dark place . . . there were four pavilions, each containing a stone idol. . . . The place looked like a spot in hell—God preserve us from it! On reaching these pavilions [the women] descended to the pool . . . oil of sesame [was] poured over them, so that the flames were increased… men threw on her the firewood they were carrying and the others put those heavy balks on top of her to prevent her moving, cries were raised and there was a loud clamour. When I saw this I had all but 24. Ibid., 3:608.

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fallen off my horse.25

The contrast between the language Battuta allocates in the above descriptions could not be more stark. While Muslims, and even those who only perform Muslim rituals, are depicted as civilized beings adherent to rational cultural practices, Hindus are barbaric, fully irrational individuals, whose cultural practices represent a shocking deviation from acceptable, reasonable behaviour. Here, Battuta describes secular Hindus as a foil for Islam by representing them as barbaric aberrations of the Islamic norm.

Amplifying this contrast is the disparity between the frequencies of Battuta’s descriptions of Islamic and Hindu practices. While Battuta devotes most of the Rihla to narrating the development of local Muslim culture, this courtesy of acknowledgment is rarely extended to local Hindu populations, despite the fact that they then remained the religious majority. Battuta rarely mentions them at all, and when he does, it is to present them as savages. Islam is thus associated with civilizedness, whereas Hindu culture appears as aberrant. In this way, Islam is presented both as superior and as a ubiquitous norm. As we saw above when comparing Battuta’s discussion of IndoMuslim architecture and Hindu temples, he believed that Islamic attributes were the main factor in the evolution of Indian architecture from grotesque to extraordinary.

The same principle is at play in his perception of Hindu people; Battuta likewise suggests that local non-Muslims have the potential to better themselves and become associated with the civilized norm if they adopted Islam. Thus, Battuta offers support for Wagoner’s suggestion that the shame of being associated with the abnormal is sufficient to provoke cultural change.26 However, Wagoner also presents the shame of being deviant as an instigator of voluntary cultural change. Alternatively, I suggest that the constant stigmatization of Hinduism imposed by cultural imperialism would have proved to be an adverse stimulus strong enough to coerce a widespread adoption of Islamic culture.

Conclusion In a reexamination of Wagoner’s understanding of Islamicization through the Rihla, it becomes clear that the concept of a forced conversion must be expanded. In the context of the Rihla, Islamicization serves also to normalize the dominant culture of Islam whilst reclassifying local Hindus, their practices, and their religion generally as aberrant.

25. Ibid., 3:615—616.

26. Wagoner, 859; 865.

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This cultural shift towards the new Islamic norm initiates subsequent Islamicization processes, which for Battuta, serve to legitimize Islam, establish its superiority, and demonstrate the ubiquity of Islam. These factors converge in the Rihla to function as an apology for Islam, expanding its original vocation as a travelogue. Through examining Battuta’s writings on court mannerisms, architecture, and cross-cultural relations, I believe Wagoner to be partially correct in claiming that Islamicization occurred through cultural change rather than an explicit or violent program of conversion and, like Wagoner, I present Islamicization as independent of an organized conversion objective. However, I challenge the extent to which cultural changes occurred voluntarily by acknowledging an alternative type of conversion: cultural imperialism. Thus, any process of Islamicization—and most cultural transitions between religions—should be assessed through a wider analysis of the many forces which constitute and change public culture.

taja de silva is a student of Religious Studies, World Islamic and Middle East Studies, and Geography. She is interested in the historical development of the Eastern religious landscape, and is particularly fascinated by the subjects of non-duality and religious pluralism seen in both India and Japan. Her interest in Indian religiosity inspired her study of Islam in fourteenth-century India, leading to a continued interest in the study of Hinduism, and later Buddhism. Publications of Taja’s work have previously appeared in the McGill Pre-Law Review and Le Délit. Taja also works as an illustrator and cartoonist for the McGill Tribune.

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Women in Confucianism victoria guglielmi

Confucianism, as a philosophical school, governed the system of social organization for most of China’s ancient dynasties from roughly 200 BCE to 1911.1 During the rule of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141-87 BCE), Confucian canonical texts, such as the Five Classics and the Analects, became the foundation of hierarchical gender conventions which were believed to be conducive to moral uprightness.2 Henceforth, a patriarchal ethos was propagated across subsequent dynasties and became more adamantly enforced through legislation by the time of the Tang dynasty.3 Gender inequalities rooted in the Confucian moral principles of the Han dynasty, namely the Three Obediences and Four Virtues, were implemented by government rule throughout ancient imperial China in ways that oppressed women in the marital, familial, and educational domains of their lives. This essay will discuss the emergence of the social conventions that confined women in ancient imperial China and their justifications as put forth by the Confucian school of thought. The patriarchal feature of Confucianism can be partially understood as a by-product of the interpretations of intellectuals and dominant discourses at the time of the Han dynasty rather than inherent to the tradition itself.

Women’s inferior position in ancient imperial China was consolidated by textual evidence, believed to have been compiled by Confucius’s close followers, which inspired subsequent dynastic books and state legislations. Confucian conceptions of women’s value materialized amid the Spring and Autumn Period and became the basis for the system of social standards and codes implemented by Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty.4 In the Confucian classics, women’s subordinate position to men is a recurring theme.5 For instance, The Book of Songs declares that baby boys are placed on a bed and 1. Xiongya Gao, “Women Existing for Men: Confucianism and Social Injustice against Women in China,” in Race, Gender & Class 10, no. 3 (2003): 114.

2. Hiroko Sekiguchi, “The Patriarchal Family Paradigm in Eighth-Century Japan,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 27.

3. Ibid.

4. Jiling Lin, “Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Women’s Value in Recent Times,” in Chinese Education and Society 33, no. 6 (2000): 16.

5. Ibid.

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given a toy, while baby girls are set on the floor and given a tile.6 The Analects (Lun-Yu) infantilizes women, describing them as individuals of low stature who are incapable of insight.7 Confucius’s adherents produced a collection of ceremonial rites that dictated the proper conduct for women entitled The Book of Rites.8 These rites were built upon the few written works left behind by Confucius after his passing.9 The Book of Rites attributes initiative-taking specifically to men; women only need to be faithful to their husbands, given that women do not hold any social standing on their own.10 Thus, the notion of a feminine ethics emerged during the Han Dynasty.

Sāncóng Sìdé, which comprises the Three Obediences and Four Virtues, is the most notable text on feminine ethics. It emphasizes a woman’s duty to be obedient and loyal to men throughout the stages of her life, starting with her father, then her husband, and ending with her son.11 The Confucian precepts of the Three Obediences and Four Virtues constituted the social guidelines of behavior necessary for women to attain self-perfection; failure to abide by them would be regarded as a moral transgression.12 The Book of Han, a historical account of the former Han dynasty, reaffirmed women’s inferiority and consequently denied them a place in ancient Chinese society.13 Furthermore, The Book of Han asserts that if women were to conduct government, it would undermine peace.14 The Han dynasty brought forth a system of rulership that enabled the privileged position of men in Chinese political and social life.15 The Confucian virtue of filial piety “legitimized the familial and the state hierarchy, and it gave precedence to males, whether rulers, fathers, or elder brothers.”16 Thereafter, Tang dynasty legislators compiled codes grounded in the gendered precepts found within the Confucian canonical texts such as The Great Learning, The Book of Rites, and The Classic of Filial Piety.17 For instance, Article 190 of the Tang penal code asserts that a wife must act in accordance with her husband and should not make decisions for herself.18 6. Gao, “Women Existing for Men,” 115.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Joan R. Piggott, “The Last Classical Female Sovereign,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 48.

11. Gao, “Women Existing for Men,” 116.

12. Lin, “Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Women’s Value,” 16.

13. Gao, “Women Existing for Men,” 116.

14. Piggott, “The Last Classical Female Sovereign,” 48.

15. Ibid., 47.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 48.

18. Ibid.

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Women’s inferior position in ancient imperial Chinese society was believed to have a cosmic justification. Confucianism as a moral and state ideology maintained that stability within the household preceded stability within the state.19 According to Jinhua Jia, “the harmonious husband–wife relation was placed at the center of the social, political, and cosmic order.”20 The belief that the institution of marriage served the betterment of society is connected to Rongdao Lai’s notion of gănyìng. The corelative cosmological principle of gănyìng stipulates that the microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm, as everything in the universe is interconnected.21 Accordingly, there is some evidence for hierarchical and gendered metaphors of yin-yang in the commentaries of the Chinese divination text entitled The Classic of Changes (Yìjīng) as well as in Han texts.22 Han cosmology associated yang with heaven and male energy, whereas yin corresponded to earth and female energy.23 Yang, or the male principle, was regarded as honorable and became favored over yin, the female principle, which was deemed lowly.24 Accordingly, Chinese Confucian philosopher Xunzi, from the Warring States period, interpreted the xián hexagram from The Classic of Changes as an indication that the gendered synergy precedes and underpins all human social relations.25 Thus, both husband and wife must undoubtedly fulfill their corresponding duties in this relation wherein men are always dominant and wives are subordinate.26 The strict regulation of women’s behavior under the Han dynasty reinforced the superior and inferior interactions between men and women respectively; the maintenance of this social dynamic was deemed essential to sustain harmony within the family which would, in turn, ensure the stability of the greater society and reify the concept of yin-yang.27 For this reason, the patriarchal structure presided at both the familial and societal level in ancient imperial China.28 However, we must differentiate The Classic of Changes from its commentaries given that only the latter is ascribed to Confucianism.29 The commentaries are understood to be Confucian interpretations of The Classic of Changes and, thus, the 19. Jinhua Jia, “Gender and Early Chinese Cosmology Revisited,” in Asian Philosophy 26, no. 4 (2016): 290.

20. Ibid.

21. Rongdao Lai, “Ancestors and Ghosts,” Religion 354: Chinese Religions (class lecture at McGill University, Montreal, QC, September 17, 2019).

22. Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, “Yin-Yang, Gender Attributes, and Complementarity,” in Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 55.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Jia, “Gender and Early Chinese Cosmology Revisited,” 288.

26. Ibid.

27. Lin, “Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Women’s Value,” 17.

28. Piggott, “The Last Classical Female Sovereign,” 48.

29. Rosenlee, “Yin-Yang, Gender Attributes, and Complementarity,” 56.

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values presented are open to debate. We must also recognize that the hierarchical and gendered relation between yin and yang in Han cosmology mirrored the content of instructional texts available to women at the time.30 An analysis of The Classic of Changes further reveals that the correlation between yin-yang and woman-man, as well as the actual words “yin” and “yang,” are not present in the main text; this widespread metaphor “only occurs in the later attached commentaries.”31 In fact, the terms yin and yang first appeared in the Confucian classic, The Book of Songs, and was correlated with sun and shade respectively, but this binary was depicted as complementary rather than oppositional and hierarchical.32 Thus, the subordinate position of women was given a cosmic justification by Confucian intellectuals who were inadvertently influenced by existing societal norms.

The Three Obediences and Four Virtues incited the bondage of the marital system and the principle of agnatic descent in ancient imperial China; such practices confined women, as they led to a preoccupation with women’s chastity and purity.

Women under the Han dynasty were restricted to the domestic arena and higherranking positions were reserved for men; thus, wives were reliant on their husbands and could only become distinguished through the deeds of their male relations.33 The Confucian principle of filial piety, xiào, which denotes devotion towards one’s parents, had granted mothers a certain degree of authority within the household.34 However, xiào allows for the reverence of mothers primarily based on their reproductive abilities with which they can bear sons; failure to bear a son was considered greatly immoral.35 By the time of the Ming dynasty, once a woman was married, her expressions of filial piety for her biological parents would be redirected towards her husband’s parents and she would move in with her spouse’s family.36 This tradition severed women from their biological family because they would have to fully integrate into their husband’s ancestral lineage.37 Zang states that “in such patriarchal families governed by agnatic descent, women were dependents of men, serving as instruments for furthering the male line.”38 Women were essentially bound to their husbands, especially given that 30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 51.

33. Lin, “Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Women’s Value,” 17.

34. Gao, “Women Existing for Men,” 117.

35. Ibid.

36. Fangqin Du and Susan Mann, “Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue in Late Imperial China,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 220.

37. Ibid.

38. Jian Zang, “Women and the Transmission of Confucian Culture in Song China,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott (Berkeley: University of

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only men had a legal right to polygamy and divorce.39 Prior to the 1920s, the word for divorce in Chinese, líhūn, did not exist; instead, the word xiu was used, which translates to “a man getting rid of his wife,” or “sending the wife back to her own home.”40 The marital injustices perpetuated by the Three Obediences and Four Virtues worsened in the Song dynasty as Confucian intellectuals criminalized the remarriage of widows.41 In fact, it became highly honorable for a woman to commit suicide when her husband died as the ultimate means to conserve her purity.42 The Biographies of Virtuous Women is a compilation of accounts of women who achieved prestige by way of suicide following the death of their husbands.43 In the Ming and Qing dynasties, “emperors presented certificates of merit, sums of silver, and personal commendations written in the emperor’s own hand to families who could document the fidelity of a chaste widow.”44 This demonstrates the degree to which a woman’s chastity was valued in ancient imperial China.

It is important to note that the Confucian idealization of female chastity, zhēn, was likely an outcome of China’s late imperial period and should not be treated as an overarching phenomenon.45 The complex interplay between Buddhism and Confucianism likely forged the widely understood Confucian notion of female chastity at present.46 Prior to the introduction of Buddhism in China, the ideal Confucian woman was primarily characterized by “the dutiful fulfillment of wifely obligations as stipulated by the Confucian marriage rites.”47 The Buddhist ideal of an uncontaminated body was adopted into Confucian thought and produced the newfound fixation on a woman’s physical purity over her ritual uprightness.48 Subsequently, in late imperial China, the government prohibited women’s participation in religious expeditions and temple visitations in order to guard against the impurities of the external world.49 The ideal Confucian woman was also required to uphold the purity of her abode and thus refused entrance to outsiders.50 Late imperial Confucianism restricted women to the California Press, 2003), 131.

39. Lin, “Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Women’s Value,” 17.

40. Gao, “Women Existing for Men,” 118.

41. Ibid., 117.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Du and Mann, “Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue,” 221.

45. Beata Grant, “Women, Gender and Religion in Premodern China: A Brief Introduction,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 10, no. 1 (2008): 3.

46. Ibid., 5.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 6.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

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extent that professional women who provided services were classified as sāngūliùpó, meaning “Three Aunties and Six Grannies.”51 Sāngūliùpó held negative connotations due to this group’s perceived likelihood of defiling the sacredness of one’s chambers; this Confucian stigma marginalized nuns, midwives, fortune tellers, and so on.52 The education and cultivation of women was of great concern in ancient imperial China and was subjected to state regulation. Confucius’s statement that women are virtuous by way of their absence of knowledge and talent had translated into the social convention of few women in ancient China attending school.53 Women belonging to elite families often acquired literacy, but their studies were confined to the Confucian classics; otherwise, women became cultivated in the arts mainly for men’s entertainment.54 For instance, the Records of the Grand Historian and other Han sources document the existence of palace ladies who entertained rulers.55 The founder of the Han dynasty, Emperor Gaozu, had a concubine named Lady Qi who was a musician and dancer.56 Emperor Wen had requested the performance of a zither player, by the name of Madame Shen, whilst he sang.57 Concubine Yu, who sang for military leader Xiang Yu, was particularly noted as well.58 The Analects differentiates between proper music and vernacular music, the former is valuable to effective governance and self-cultivation, while the latter serves as a diversion from such duties.59 In the Han dynasty, Confucian scholars denounced music made by women as intrinsically lewd due to its ability to lure men with both the feminine voice and presence.60 However, it is necessary to distinguish the interpretations of Confucian scholars against the views on music of Confucius himself. Confucius opposed all vernacular music, irrespective of gender, because it upset the social and political harmony of society.61 In fact, Confucius’s emphasis on gender segregation prescribed for women a specific role in music rites.62 This poses a contradiction to 51. Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, and Ping Yao, Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity, and Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 5.

52. Grant, “Women, Gender and Religion in Premodern China,” 6.

53. Gao, “Women Existing for Men,” 120.

54. Ibid., 121.

55. Joseph S. C. Lam, “The Presence and Absence of Female Musicians and Music in China,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 100.

56. Ibid., 101.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 100.

59. Ibid., 97.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 102.

62. Ibid., 103.

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Confucian scholars who regarded music made by women as inherently vernacular.63 Nonetheless, in accordance with Confucius’s urged ban on vernacular music, Confucian scholars in the Han dynasty sought to prohibit music made by females despite the conceptual ambiguities.64 Therefore, the absence of female musicians in early imperial China is an illusory narrative put forth by male Confucian scholars who regarded the participation of women in music as the source of the “intellectual and practical dilemma as well as a conflict in male desires.”65 “The Record of Music,” contained within The Book of Rites, is an example of a text that overlooks the active contribution of female musicians in imperial China.66 As exemplified by the musical performances of concubines previously mentioned, imperial China did permit female musicians— at least for the ruler’s entertainment. Although music made by women had not been banned, their participation was limited during the Han dynasty as scholars made extrapolations based on Confucius’s teachings that led to the emergence of patriarchal music conventions in imperial China.67 Lam argues that music “became gender-specific, and the conflict between proper and vernacular music intensified” as “The Record of Music” became the basis of the music rites that arose.68 A chapter in “The Record of Music” condemns the corruptive nature of various indecent sounds but cautions against female performers in particular as their sound supposedly undermines people’s state of awareness.69 Thus, proper music took place in Han court and the musicians who performed at state sanctioned rituals were exclusively male scholars; in other words, women were barred from performing official music.70 Confucian scholars did not have the authority to carry out a complete banishment of women from nonofficial music life as well, so instead, they enacted a textual erasure of women from the official records of musical life in the Han dynasty.71 Women were excluded from the arts in the sense that their talents seldom received official recognition, except for when it served the merriment of men.

Beginning in the Han dynasty, women were faced with oppressive social conventions and values that became cemented in legislation as time went on. The patriarchal state system was put forth in ancient imperial China as a Confucian ideal 63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 98.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 102.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., 99.

70. Ibid., 104.

71. Ibid., 106.

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grounded in canonical texts and cosmological justification, but, as I have argued, these doctrines were susceptible to the interpretations and extrapolations of individual Confucian adherents as well as existing dominant discourses. The Confucian tradition was infused with ambiguities that allowed it to be molded to the benefit of the existing patriarchy. Although we should caution against categorizing Confucianism as intrinsically patriarchal, we must also necessarily address the sexist notions that Confucian himself did profess. For instance, Confucius’ statement that women do not need to be knowledgeable or talented led to women’s exclusion from formal instruction. Thus, it is the complex interplay between Confucius’s ideas, the canonical texts produced by his followers, and the prevailing societal discourses of the time that instituted women’s place in ancient imperial China. Consequently, the Confucian rites that developed in the Han dynasty had real implications for the lived experiences of women throughout ancient imperial China. The Confucian principles of the Three Obediences and Four Virtues inspired the confining marital structure and agnatic kinship system that deprived women of their selfhood. Accordingly, the preoccupation with women’s unwavering obedience and loyalty to their husbands prompted the cult of widow chastity in the Song dynasty. Women in ancient imperial China received limited education and, although they were barred from official court music rites, their cultivation in music served as entertainment for emperors and warriors. Thus, the behavior of women from the Han dynasty onwards was the subject of strict state regulation and social confinement.

victoria guglielmi is a McGill undergraduate with a major in Psychology as well as a double minor in World Religions and Sociology. Although she does not have a strong religious background herself, she has taken a keen interest in the study of different religious theologies, particularly East Asian religions such as Mahayana Buddhism. Her appreciation for religious diversity can be partially attributed to her upbringing in the cultural mosaic that is Montreal. One of her favorite courses during her time at McGill was ‘Japanese Religions: History and Thought’ with Professor Mikael Bauer, where she was introduced to the concept of non-duality through the Vimalakirti Sutra. She hopes to travel in the near future and visit various religious sites.

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The Roots of Our Crisis Can Grow Our Solution claire grenier

Lynn White Jr.’s landmark 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” continues to shape how we view the relationship between Christians and the climate crisis. His observations on the intrinsically tied Christian and American views of the environment remain pertinent, as do his concerns of ecological deterioration. In 1967, White Jr. did not appear to believe that modern Christianity has the capacity to care for the individual soul and the collective earth at the same time; where do we stand fifty years later? Can Christianity include a theological obligation to protect the earth?

I believe so and have made this conviction a core tenet of my own faith. At 20, I am undergoing confirmation in the Catholic tradition. My parents are Catholic; growing up, we spent Christmas Day at a meal drive, cooking dinner for those who could not afford their own. We helped run the annual Earth Day celebrations in our small town located in the centre of the Ontario Greenbelt. My dad is a militant recycler; he also helped me bring the gospel of compost to my elementary school when I was eight years old. Coming into my own faith, I began to realize these instances were more than actions for the collective good: they were forms of worship. Religion is one of the most powerful tools for social justice.

For White, Christianity was the architect of the ecological crisis. The values of dominion, exploitation, individualism, and progress embedded in the Christian theology that shaped Western society are the “roots” of our ecological condition. However, White also believed that “since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny.”1 He called on Christians collectively to undertake a reimagining of their faith and its active practice in response to the dire circumstances of the climate. Even in 1967, White made it clear that climate change cannot be solved through individual acts—we need collective action.

However, for most Western branches of Protestantism, the individual is prioritized over the collective. These groups “by and large do not resonate with religion that is 1. Lynn White Jr, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (October 1967): 1207.

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based on community affiliation, social relationships, tradition, and ritual.”2 This was a central failure of White’s article; he called for a collective response in a context which overtly values the individual. Christian society not only gave us the axiom that “nature has no purpose but to serve man,” but also the infectious individualism that prevents large scale movements.3 As Pope Francis points out, we seem to be “unconcerned about caring for things for the sake of others; we fail to set limits on ourselves in order to avoid the suffering of others or the deterioration of our surroundings.”4 To form these collectives, we must turn to religious leaders, especially Christian leaders, because in our present circumstances, “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.”5 In 2015, Pope Francis released an encyclical letter, Laudato Si, calling not just on Catholics to care for the environment, but the whole world. Pope Francis explains: The ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion. It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians, with the excuse of realism and pragmatism, tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment. Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent. So what they all need is an “ecological conversion,” whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.6

Pope Francis has outlined the theological basis for pan-denominational movements by and for Christian communities by highlighting the importance of faithbased action to counter the climate crisis. This is just the start. This paper provides a survey of current Christian thought on climate change, and how these new movements are tackling apathy towards climate change among Christian communities along three lines: Christian views on nature, science, and climate policy.

Christians and Nature White believes that the Christian theory of humankind’s dominion over the earth is a major factor behind the current climate crisis. As the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen,” Western Christianity “made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”7 White Jr evinces the Christian axiom

2. Adam B. Cohen and Peter C. Hill, “Religion as Culture: Religious Individualism and Collectivism Among American Catholics, Jews, and Protestants,” Journal of Personality 75, no. 4 (2007): 711.

3. White, 1207.

4. Francis, Laudato Si’, (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2015), §208.

5. White, 1206.

6. Francis, Laudato Si’, §158; emphasis added.

7. White, 1205.

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that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”8 Because, humanity “is not simply part of nature: [they are] made in God’s image.”9 For White, we must reject this notion or “we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis.”10 Obviously, this notion prevailed, and arguably, it increased in its furor over the last fifty years. Positioning humanity as the “masters of nature” supplied a theological entitlement to technological advancement: “The present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science. . . . Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma.”11 White’s concerns are elaborated in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si. “A sober look at our world” reveals that human technological advancement, “often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly.”12 Rationalized through self-identification as masters of nature, “we seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.”13 Early studies based on White Jr’s thesis showed that belief in the mastery or dominion over nature theories are “indeed predictive of environmental apathy.”14 The majority of Christian climate movements have focused on challenging this belief among Christians. For an example, the activist organization Young Evangelicals for Climate Action provides congregations with environmentally focused Bible studies for this purpose. “Many throughout church history have taken words like ‘dominion’ and ‘rule’ in Genesis 1:26-28 as license to do whatever we want with creation; to usurp the authority of the true king,” they explain.15 The same line of thinking is also linked to humans being the only creature to be made in God’s image. However, in receiving this honour, humans have the duty “to mirror the image and nature of our loving, orderout-of-chaos God to the rest of creation . . . not to use our status as a license to abuse and exploit, but to remind the created world—and ourselves—who its true ruler is.”16 Further, Genesis 2:15 proclaims “The LORD God took the man and put him in the 8. Ibid., 1207.

9. Ibid., 1205.

10. Ibid., 1207.

11. Ibid.

12. Francis, Laudato Si’, §26.

13. Ibid.

14. Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle, Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think (Oxford University Press, 2018), 94.

15. YECA, “Bible Study,” (Young Evangelicals for Climate Action), https://yecaction.org/resources/bible-study.html.

16. Ibid.

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Garden to serve and to protect it;” for YECA, this is an order to “serve and to protect creation.”17 This is the proper shape of our relationship to the rest of creation, this is what it means to rule over the fish in the sea and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground: to be in a special relationship of service with the earth and all its creatures, and to actively and jealously protect it with the same tenacity that God protects his people.18

Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ also speaks to interpretations of Genesis: We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us. This allows us to respond to the charge that Judaeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man “dominion” over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature. This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church. . . . Nowadays we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures. The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic, recognizing that they tell us to “till and keep” the garden of the world (cf.

Gen 2:15). “Tilling” refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while “keeping” means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.19

This is a popular reimagining across Christian traditions. For one Episcopal Father in the US interviewed by Ecklund and Scheitle, God gave the garden to humankind. Adam is earth, a man of earth, man-made of clay, man of hummus, an Eve is mother of all living things. Some theologians think that the garden is the representation of the entire earth. God gave the earth to man to care for its part of the [covenant]. . . . God creates Adam out of the earth . . . you get living earth and we’re supposed to take care of the earth. What does that include? It includes animals, it includes air.20

These interpretations provide the groundwork for the stewardship model. The same Father explains, “We receive a great deal of inspiration from scripture on how to be good stewards. We want to be good stewards.”21 The stewardship model is often related to eschatological theology, not in a way which avoids the end of the world, but one which highlights the importance earth has in bringing the Christian reality to fruition. The YECA Bible study illustrates that stewardship is about confirming that this world matters, “that God’s final, culminating act of salvation will be to join 17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Francis, Laudato Si’, §49.

20. Ecklund and Scheitle, 93.

21. Ibid.

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heaven and earth—God’s space and our space—once and for all.”22 Through an analysis of Revelations 21, YECA extrapolates the message of stewardship. They point out an important exegetical issue as well: the word used for “new” in the original Greek is kainos, which means “renewed, taking that which is and bringing it to its full intended purpose and potential. . . . John is saying that God’s not starting over, God’s restoring

his masterpiece.”23 For this mission to be accomplished, there needs to be a viable earth.

“By working to stop pollution, to preserve biodiversity, to slow climate change,” they announce, “we join our voice with that emanating from the throne. We proclaim that this world matters, that God has a good future for it, and that even now, God is making everything new!”24 To be a steward means caring for the earth in the name of God. The stewardship theory exists in secular climate activism too, but it calls on people to protect the earth for future generations. A survey from Ecklund and Scheitle found that very few Christians view stewardship in the context of humanity.25 Those who “did mention future generations did so in the context of God’s wishes.”26 For them, secular stewardship is “almost like . . . worshiping the planet and not God.”27 Environmentalism in that vein then creates a tension for Christians, in that the movement is seen as neglecting “the important place of humans in the schema of creation, which violates a core tenet of their faith tradition.”28 An Evangelical youth minister interviewed by Howard-Ecklund and Scheitle explains: If we have the opportunity, yeah, we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey, or something like that. . . . Are we stewards? Yes. Right? It’s our responsibility. This is our place. Let’s take care of it. But at the same time, do I think we should be running around and trying to save every tree we can? . . . I’d rather be interested

in people. I think we’re given a pretty clear indication of the way everything’s going to end, and it’s not because of global warming [laughs]. And so it’s not on the top of my priorities. . . . Jesus’ last command before he left Earth was: Go baptize people.

Go tell people, not go save the trees.29

For Christians to take action on the climate, their core tenets must be addressed.

This means stressing the impacts climate change is already having on the most 22. YECA, “Bible Study.”

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Ecklund and Scheitle, 98.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 102.

28. Ibid., 98.

29. Ibid., 101.

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vulnerable populations. Christianity is a deeply anthropocentric religion; humans hold a higher status. If Christians can understand these disastrous effects, the chances of creating interest, or even a larger movement, grow exponentially.

In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis speaks to this dilemma of climate activism. “One cannot prescind from humanity,” he writes, “there can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself. There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology.”30 Fortunately, there are a handful of Christian climate movements which place the effects on humanity at the forefront of their reasoning. The organization Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM) espouses that, because they are Catholic, they are “prophets of justice, calling for urgent, nimble, and ambitious action.”31 Further, In responding to “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (LS, 49) we bring forth a prophetic voice for a just and urgent transition from fossil fuels. We make clear that the poor, the vulnerable, and future generations carry an unjust burden in the climate crisis. We are willing to challenge and call for change. This injustice is happening now.

Climate change already increases the risk of hunger, sickness, and forced migration for millions of people, and its effects are expected to multiply in coming decades. The science is clear: we must drastically reduce emissions now to keep temperature rise below 1.5°C. The climate crisis urgently needs to be solved, and we translate urgency into bold, and creative action.32

Christians and Science A great barrier to climate action is the long-standing battle of belief between religion and science. A secular modernity has imposed the dichotomy of religion as suggestive and science as authoritative. Climate activists have popularized the call of “Just listen to the science!” when it comes to addressing and acting on our ecological crisis. Greta Thunberg, in a 2019 address to the US Congress, asked that lawmakers and citizens alike “unite behind the science and . . . take real action.”33 The Congress which Thunberg called on to “unite behind the science” is 82% Christian.34 Science is not the only conduit for people to understand the world and its changes, and it is not the only way to unite people to take action on the climate crisis. “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation 30. Francis, Laudato Si’, §88.

31. Global Catholic Climate Movement [GCCM], “Values of the Global Catholic Climate Movement,” Global Catholic Climate Movement, August 13, 2019, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LjxBJhp0pyUn3qSpQTs8YTbFzasmMHEw/view 32. Ibid.

33. Oliver Milman and David Smith, “‘Listen to the Scientists’: Greta Thunberg Urges Congress to Take Action,” The Guardian, September 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/18/greta-thunberg-testimony-congressclimate-change-action.

34. Pew Research Forum, “Faith on the Hill: The Religious Composition of the 116th Congress,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, December 31, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/2019/01/03/faith-on-thehill-116/.

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to things around them.”35 Christians do believe in science, but science is not their main authority on the mysteries of the world, nor are science and technology the solutions to the world’s problems: “More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion or rethink our old one.”36 To take action against the climate crisis requires admitting that there is a problem: that the scientific consensus is right. However, trust between Christians and the world of science is low. This divide is enforced from the outside as well, as the religiously unaffiliated are most likely to see science and religion as conflicting, “and almost all of the religiously unaffiliated individuals who hold this conflict perspective say they side with science.”37 Moreover, Christians do not “rate themselves as actually less competent or trusting in science, even though they recognized that others stereotyped them as such.”38 This conflict is also an early modern historical development. Originally, nature was viewed as “essentially artistic rather than scientific.”39 In “Roots,” outlines this development: From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leibnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so expert an amateur theologian, he would have got into far less trouble: the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.40

Thus, while Christians may have an appreciation for science, they still “think they are fundamentally different from scientists—who are seen as holding an extreme naturalistic view of the world.”41 For these Christians, what is paramount is “maintaining an active role for God in the world,”42 In their view, this conviction can be contrary to the world of science, which can be synonymous with atheism. “Really I thought all scientists were atheists,” one Evangelical in Ecklund and Scheitle’s study admitted, “I thought you had to be an atheist in order to be in science.”43 Christians and scientists alike “tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.”44 For individuals who have 35. White, 1205.

36. Ibid., 1206 37. Ecklund and Scheitle, 41.

38. Ibid., 14.

39. White, 1206, 40. Ibid.

41. Ecklund and Scheitle, 102.

42. Ibid., 139.

43. Ibid., 45; emphasis added.

44. Joel Achenbach, “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” National Geographic, March 1, 2015, https:// www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/03/science-doubters-climate-change-vaccinations-gmos/.

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previously admitted that they side with science over religion, it’s possible that they “believe in scientific ideas not because [they] have truly evaluated all the evidence but because [they] feel an affinity for the scientific community.”45 Marcia McNutt, a former editor of Science, the original publisher of White’s Roots, explains that science is “not a body of facts. . . . Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”46 Still, our perception of science changes depending on which “laws of nature” we adhere to. When we argue about issues like climate change, “we’re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We’re thinking, people like us believe this. People like that do not believe this.”47 Advocating for an alternative belief then puts you at risk of being ostracized from your group.

“Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers.”48 Further, Christians have a tendency to see climate science as a threat to their faith. In 2015, Texas senator Ted Cruz proclaimed, “Climate change is not a science, it’s a religion.”49 In this line of thinking, ecologists and climate scientists are characterized as pagan land worshipers. “Scientists wax lyrical about the beauties, complexities, and mysteries of nature, it is not only plausible but clear that at least in some cases and to some extent, scientists are effectively promoting nature spirituality and environmental caregiving.”50 Trust in science over religion is an indicator of “a deep trust in nature itself [as] inherently sacred or spiritual.”51 This self-imposed sacredness is in part because “we have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.”52 As such, a “naturalistic, evolutionary-scientific worldview existentially [is not] compelling, ironically, because an environmental ethics based wholly on science is insufficiently religious to be rationally persuasive.”53 A central tenet of White’s thesis in “Roots” is that because “no new basic set of values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity,” we have landed ourselves in a climate crisis.54 Additionally, climate science cannot replace Christianity 45. Ibid 46. Ibid 47. Ibid 48. Ibid 49. Katharine Hayhoe, “I’m a Climate Scientist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out.” The New York Times, October 31, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/opinion/sunday/climate-change-evangelical-christian.html.

50. Bron Taylor, Gretel Van Wieren, and Bernard Zaleha, “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White Jr. to Pope Francis,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10, no. 3 (December 2016): 344.

51. Ibid 52. Achenbach, “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?”

53. Bron Taylor, “On Sacred or Secular Ground? Callicott and Environmental Ethics,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 1, no. 2 (1997): 103.

54. White, 1207.

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because “climate change is not a belief system,” framing it as such is detrimental to both scientific and religious communities.55 Katharine Hayhoe, an Evangelical and climate scientist, explains: This framing plays right into the narrative that scientists are a godless bunch who [want to] rule the world and overthrow religion, an agenda that any right-minded believer will oppose until his or her dying breath...if you are a Christian, you know what to do when a false prophet comes along preaching a religion that worships the created rather than the Creator: Reject it!56

You cannot believe in climate change, because it is a reality: “We know that the earth’s climate is changing thanks to observations, facts and data about God’s creation that we can see with our eyes and test with the sound minds that God has given us.”57 For Hayhoe, “if we truly believe that God created this amazing universe, bringing matter and energy to life out of a formless empty void of nothing, then how could studying his creation ever be in conflict with his written word?”58 A new form of environmental education is also being called for in Christian communities. This method will include “a critique of the ‘myths’ of a modernity grounded in a utilitarian mindset (individualism, unlimited progress, competition, consumerism, the unregulated market),” and “facilitate making the leap towards the transcendent which gives ecological ethics its deepest meaning. It needs educators capable of developing an ethics of ecology, and helping people, through effective pedagogy, to grow in solidarity, responsibility and compassionate care.”59 Additionally, it seeks to “restore the various levels of ecological equilibrium, establishing harmony within ourselves, with others, with nature and other living creatures, and with God.”60

Christians and Climate Policy For White, the governing system we now rely on to fight the climate crisis is one of its architects. “Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture,” he writes, “the issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.”61 These axioms are, of course, inherently Christian. In White’s history of the ecological crisis, he plants 55. Katharine Hayhoe, “I’m a Climate Scientist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out.” 56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Francis, Laudato Si’, §210.

60. Ibid, §210 61. White, 1204.

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Christianity as the driving ideology behind the West’s obsession with progress: Viewed historically, modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and, second, that modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful master over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology—hither to quite separate activities—joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.62

Our science, technology, and democracy have grown from “Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as postChristians.”63 White also believes that advocating for more progress along these lines will not stop the climate crisis, a view Pope Francis also expresses in Laudato Si’: “The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment.”64 Francis calls on people to reject the supposed neutrality of progress, for its results create the frameworks “which end up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.”65 While the last two decades have seen an increase in Christian climate movements which want to build a better society, there is a “dearth of evidence that religious greens are playing a leading role in promoting effective environmental protection movements, they do not appear to contribute significantly to the environmental movement in general.”66 The main reason that Christians have not taken action on enacting environmental policy is because most view the climate movement as a monolith drastically opposed to the Christian way of life. Popular evangelizing Catholic digital network the Church Militant believes that “this preoccupation with ecological matters and climate change alarmism” is an agenda being pushed by “Pope Francis, bishops’ conferences, and members of the hierarchy” onto the laypeople.67 For them, this agenda also includes racism. One of their news reports declares that “climate change hysteria” is a leftist tool “to reduce human population through contraception, abortion, and euthanasia and 62. Ibid., 1206.

63. Ibid., 1206.

64. Francis. Laudato Si’, §80 65. Ibid.

66. Bron Taylor, Gretel Van Wieren, and Bernard Zaleha, “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White, Jr, to Pope Francis,” 350.

67. William Mahoney, “Climate Change Alarmism in the Catholic Church,” Church Militant, October 15, 2019, https:// www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/climate-change-alarmism-in-the-catholic-church.

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concentrate those efforts in third world countries. The elites pushing this are mostly white and the targets of their ideology are mostly not.”68 Following Laudato Si’ in 2015, in the United States, Pope Francis’ general approval rating dropped 11%, and even lower with Catholics and political conservatives.69 While there is also widespread indication that Christians do believe the climate is at risk, most refuse to admit, or even entertain, the notion that humans are behind climate change.70 As such, it’s hard to spur these Christians into action. As mentioned earlier, there is also a popular assumption that a number of Christians believe “environmentalism promotes politically and spiritually dangerous pantheism or neopaganism.”71 Evangelicals in particular continue to “place a low priority on environmental issues. For them, ‘the economy’ and ‘abortion’ ranked high as priority issues (at 69% and 67% respectively) but only 16% considered ‘environmental issues’ to be a high priority.”72 Additionally, for some Evangelicals, climate activism runs counter to God’s plan.

A young Evangelical interviewed by Ecklund and Scheitle expressed his lack of concern about the climate by saying “our world is supposed to end in fire, so that could be the slow process of global warming.”73 Similarly, a self-described Evangelical homemaker in the same study expressed her frustration with environmentalists: “[They say] ‘If we don’t do this to save the planet, we’re all going to be destroyed in so many million years.’

And I’m thinking we’re not going to be here anyway.”74 Another Evangelical woman from the study explains that she is not worried about scientific reports outlining the seriousness of the climate crisis because she “automatically translate[s] that into what [she] know[s] the Lord has said, how that correlates with what is happening spiritually. . . . The Lord is very clear that He commands us not to live in fear of those things. And so, not to be alarmed, not to be surprised, and not to be afraid.”75 Oklahoma Senator and author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, James Inhofe, believes that because “God’s still up there,” it is “arrogant” and “outrageous” to think “that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is

68. Church Militant, “News Report — Racism Wrapped Up in Green.” Posted October 2, 2019. Youtube Video. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=29-PYOc8Kns&t=28s 69. Bron Taylor, Gretel Van Wieren, and Bernard Zaleha, “The Greening of Religion Hypothesis (Part Two): Assessing the Data from Lynn White, Jr, to Pope Francis,” 350.

70. Ibid., 351.

71. Ibid., 352.

72. Ibid., 327.

73. Ecklund and Scheitle, 106.

74. Ibid., 101.

75. Ibid., 106.

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doing in the climate.”76 For these people, personal salvation is more important than that of the collective world; as the bumper stickers for one Baptist church in Idaho says: “Forget ‘Save the Earth’; What about your Soul? The Earth is Going to Burn; What about You?”77 Hayhoe explains that in the United States, there are two brands of Evangelicals: political and theological, and that “for political Evangelicals . . . their statement of faith is written first by their political ideology and only a distant second by what the Bible says.”78 As long as “political ideology continues to drive the belief system of those who identify as Christian,” there is unlikely to be the large mobilization of Christians needed to combat the climate crisis.79 Climate politics are also widely distrusted and viewed as a gateway towards other liberal ideals; such Christians worry that “pro-environmental views [may lead] them to align with individuals or groups that they view as too extreme, too political, or simply too different from themselves.”80 So, while there are plenty of Christians who “enthusiastically believe their faith tradition provides a rationale or a responsibility to care for the earth,” these same people “[pull] back when asked if they do anything personally to care for the environment.”81 For one Evangelical in Ecklund and Scheitle’s study, climate change is a lie; he grounds this knowledge solely in his self-identification as someone who worships “the God who is the source of all truth, and as a steward of the environment.”82 “I’m going to tell you what is true, and I’m going to try to persuade you to get off of this path because it’s terribly destructive,” he pledges. This man’s view, which is not uncommon among more conservative Christians, is that the real goal of climate “alarmism” is “to shut down the oil business.” Because “God is in control of the climate,” the general consensus on climate change must be “driven by ulterior motives that are destructive for the economy and hence the quality of human life.”83 Ultimately, this conjecture feeds into the idea that climate change is both a “Trojan horse for a political and social agenda,” one which is “completely fabricated and a tool of the political left to gain power.”84 Their inaction is not because these Christians do not value the environment, the Evangelical just quoted refers to himself as a steward, but rather a desire for Christians to distance themselves from “tree 76. Ibid., 94.

77. Ibid.

78. Olivia Goldhill, “‘The Green New Deal Isn’t Socialist, It’s ‘Biblical,’ Argue Evangelical Environmentalists,” Quartz, September 18, 2019, https://qz.com/1709793/evangelical-leaders-are-making-climate-change-a-religious-issue/.

79. Ibid.

80. Ecklund and Scheitle, 95.

81. Ibid., 98.

82. Ibid., 103.

83. Ibid.

84. Ibid.

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huggers” and the “extreme” environmentalist movements of modern times.85 Opinions and attitudes towards the climate crisis are influenced more by political ideology than religion. This is especially true for Evangelicals, who are a very salient voting bloc in the United States; in their minds, environmentalism is tied to “political ideologies they want to distinguish themselves from.”86 YECA has made notable efforts in reframing the climate crisis through issues that conservative Christians are already passionate about. Noah Meyaard-Schaap, the director of YECA, details that although Evangelicals are practically “synonymous with resistance” to climate activists, there is a way to pique their interest: When talking to conservatives, YECA emphasizes the economic freedom that comes from not accessing energy through a regulated monopoly. Also a plus: the national security benefits of not being dependent on hostile foreign powers for oil. . . .YECA members also highlight how climate action is a pro-life issue, as burning fossil fuels contributes to low birth weight and preterm babies, and heavy metals emitted through the burning of coal cross the placenta and impede fetal development.87

Yet, still these framings of climate change produce “only the most basic environmental practices and fairly muted actions.”88

Conclusion White’s article, despite the little evidence he offered to substantiate his claims, pioneered the field of ecotheology. He also managed to transcend the lines of history and theology; for White, Christianity and intellectualism are not “separate roles but intimately linked to one another.”89 The lasting power of White’s Roots lies in this marriage, for “it was his voice as a preacher, rather than historian, that made this argument compelling to so many.”90 Ultimately, what cemented White’s work as one of the most important articles on religion and environment from the last 100 years was his ability “to connect Christianity not just to nature, but to the newly discovered environmental crisis and make the moral argument that dealing with this crisis depended on rethinking traditional ideas about the relationship between humans and the natural world.”91 I am writing in a very different time than White. He warned of the crisis 85. Ibid., 102.

86. Ibid., 108.

87. Goldhill, “The Green New Deal Isn’t Socialist, It’s ‘Biblical,” Argue Evangelical Environmentalists.”

88. Ecklund and Scheitle, 100, 89. Elspeth Whitney, “Lynn White Jr.’s ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ After 50 Years,” History Compass 13, no. 8 (2015): 399.

90. Ibid., 403.

91. Ibid., 402.

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worsening, whereas I was born in 1999. All I have known is a global climate shaped and destroyed by human actions. This is the world I grew up in—one which seems to refuse its own salvation. I am writing for different reasons than White as well. He was creating a historical document, whereas I am angry. I am depressed. I am anxious. I have no idea how many lives will be lost because we did not intervene when we had the chance; because enough people held the conviction that economic and technological process was not only more important than the future wellbeing of billions, but that as a Christian society, it was our right. And further, that because there is a world to come, it does not matter if we lose this one.

At the risk of heresy, I care very little about my personal salvation. I feel called to Catholicism, not to earn a divine life, but to utilize the teachings of Jesus Christ to create radical social change. At first, I was worried about being a good Catholic. I was rebuked for this; “there is no such thing as a good Catholic,” a priest reminded me. All you can do is keep your eyes on Christ and go through the world acting in a manner which honours Him. I turned to the saints, to writers of the church venerated and lay.

Ultimately, I was rebuked for my individualism. A journey of faith is one that is rarely taken alone. Becoming Catholic is not just a personal choice; it’s one which affects an entire community. The tradition, while long and robust, is not unmoving. Vatican II reimagined the Church for a new age, and efforts like Laudato Si’ cement updates as tradition. I realized that the Catholic tradition is one that calls us to be better, not as individuals, but as the very Greek word which “catholic” comes from, katholos: the whole. Climate change cannot be fought through individual acts alone—it needs the whole.

The climate crisis, if it is to be resisted, needs the personal conversion asked of us by Christian Climate movements. In Roots, White did not advocate for government lobbying or policy changes; he wanted a far more fundamental change, “a change in religious consciousness.”92 This shift is “essential if we truly wish to care for our brothers and sisters and for the natural environment.”93 We must reject “every form of self-centeredness and self-absorption,” because, “If we can overcome individualism, we will truly be able to develop a different lifestyle and bring about significant changes in society.”94 These surveys of Christian attitudes toward nature, science, and policy surrounding the climate crisis are part of a larger picture: a new image of Christianity 92. Ibid., 400.

93. Francis, Laudato Si’, §208.

94. Ibid.

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and its central mission of protecting this world and its inhabitants. Radical collective action is needed. Christianity, as one of the world’s major religions, the cultural basis for the globe’s most powerful countries, and, as per White, a central influence on our present ecology, can and should be a beacon for this change. Christian climate movements already exist. We need to uplift these voices and work together towards actionable ecotheology. If not, we will lose this earth.

claire grenier is a fourth year student pursuing a BA with a Joint Honours in Western Religions and Political Science. Her research interests surround the ways lived religious experiences and beliefs influence individual and collective political activity.

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The Ineffable Experience of God in the Self lucas coque

One aspect of the academic study of religion is the study of religious mystical experiences. The psychological approach of William James and the phenomenological approach of Rudolf Otto highlight how subjects of mystical experiences relate senses both of ineffability and of absolute meaningfulness. This is congruent with the theological accounts found in the Christian Augustinian tradition, which emphasize how the experience of God ultimately escapes words and must be felt. However, the claim of ultimate meaningfulness being ineffable seems contradictory, and this contradiction invites philosophical inquiry. The philosopher Silvia Jonas has provided an analytical investigation of the notion of ineffability, questioning whether, and how, real ineffability exists. In her investigation she engages philosophical discussions, but not theological or phenomenological accounts of religion. In this paper, I investigate claims about the religious experience of God by use of a phenomenological approach, juxtaposing philosophical and theological accounts centered on the notion of ineffability. I conclude by raising the hypothesis that knowledge of what one calls God is phenomenal knowledge of the Self as essentially a relational Self.

I begin with a consideration of the phenomenological standpoint in the study of religious mystical experiences as defined in the work of Anthony Steinbock. This phenomenological framework will serve as the lens through which the findings of James and Otto can be juxtaposed to both the theological account and the philosophical analysis of ineffability. The Augustinian account of the mystical experience of God intuitively relates it to the five senses and the mind, affirming a sense of absolute meaningfulness in the experience, while at the same time holding a claim of ineffability. The basic elements of this account are consistent throughout the tradition, from Augustine himself, to the medieval theologian Bonaventure, to the modern existential theologian Paul Tillich.

The analytical philosophical inquiry carried out by Silvia Jonas, however, concludes that extraordinarily insightful and meaningful ineffable experiences are actually experiences of phenomenal knowledge of the Self.1 I mediate between these claims 1. Silvia L. Y. N. Jonas, Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Houndmills,

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through phenomenological inquiry, drawing attention to the relationship between the Self and God. In the dynamic relationships formed by a phenomenological investigation of the Augustinian theological account of mysticism and Jonas’s philosophical account of ineffability, it becomes possible to realize the dialectical nature of philosophy of religion as a discipline that mediates dialogue between theology and philosophy.

Phenomenological Inquiry The work of Anthony Steinbock has utility in defining the phenomenological framework with which to begin. Quoting Edmund Husserl, Steinbock calls phenomenological reflection “hyper-normal”: it is an intentional attentiveness to experience as experienced, or, as he defines it, the givenness of things, beyond the dichotomy of object and subject.2 In our “normal” mode of experience we attempt to fit our experiences and posit their meaning within our conceptual frameworks (worldviews, beliefs, assumptions, etc.), in many ways limiting and shaping our experience as we inadvertently impose our frameworks onto what we experience. In this normal mode of experience and inquiry, we usually leave ourselves, as subjects, unacknowledged; we take what we think about our experience to be objective. The phenomenological reflection, instead, seeks to acknowledge the subject by acknowledging its object as object-as-experienced-by-asubject instead of object-in-itself. It recognizes that the concepts we form about an experienced object originate as much from ourselves as subjects as they do from the object itself.3 The goal of a phenomenological approach is to allow the experience to be apprehended and understood with as little reference possible to external conceptual frameworks and assumptions, by, at least, acknowledging such assumptions as integral parts of the experience.4 The advantage of a phenomenological approach to religious and mystical experiences is that it allows for inquiry into every aspect of said experiences without implicating questions of truth, value, comparison, or coherence.5 If one claims to have experienced God while at the same time claiming God cannot be experienced, or speaks of this experience while claiming it is ineffable, the phenomenologist will not linger on the logical contradictions of these accounts, nor will they make dogmatic assertions to judge or correct the account. Rather, they will seek to understand the Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 169–78.

2. Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 3.

3. Steinbock, 2–3.

4. Ibid., 3–4.

5. Ibid., 5–6.

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account as such: an account from a subject who experienced their experience of something. Accordingly, the object of my investigation is not God, but rather, a person’s experience of what-they-call-God as experienced by them.

Phenomenology Applied To Mystical Experiences Of God Friedrich Schleiermacher attempted to rescue religion from the domain of metaphysics and morality by defining religion as a “sense and taste for the Infinite.”6 This new theology affirmed religion is primarily an affection rather than something conceptual.

His contemporary, Søren Kierkegaard, distanced religion and faith even further from rationality by defining them as absurd and paradoxical. To him, faith is “that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself is grounded transparently in God,”7 or rather, when “the individual is able to stand in absolute relation to the absolute,”8 and this “by virtue of the absurd.”9 Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard mark a theological crisis—a despairing of the claim of rationality one would find, for example, in Thomas Aquinas, and a turning towards the experiential, even if irrational.

The phenomenological approach elucidates the tension between the rational and experiential aspects of religious experience. In 1917, Rudolf Otto published his book The Idea of the Holy, proposing to explore, in a rational manner, the non-rational aspects of religion.10 His approach is largely phenomenological and attempts to be broad enough to speak of religions in general, even if by the end of the book he reconciles his work to Christian theological dogma.11 He coins the term “numinous” to refer to that surplus meaning in the word “holy” which is more than simply good, and uses it to characterize the religious experience.12 The numinous is an ineffable sui generis state of mind or category of value that includes an overwhelming feeling of absolute dependence towards its object.13 Otto defines this object as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and it can be felt by the mind in ways that vary from tranquil moods of worship to demonic

6. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman, B.D. (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 33.

7. Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling: And, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 384.

8. Kierkegaard, 203.

9. Ibid., 213.

10. 1917 was the publication of the original German text, titled Das Heilige - Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. It was published in English under the title The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational in 1923.

11. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans John W. Harvey (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2010), 159-82.

12. Otto, 5–7.

13. Ibid., 8-11.

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horror or euphoric ecstasy.14 His focus is on what the subject feels, defining the object as object-as-experienced-by-the-subject. An encounter with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans is marked by awefulness,15 overpoweringness,16 urgency,17 and something between awe, wonder, and fascination.18 The defining characteristic of the mysterium is an absolute otherness,19 understood as “something of whose special character we can feel, without being able to give it clear conceptual expression.” 20 By making the object of the numinous experience primarily a mysterium, Otto places ineffability at the heart of religious experience.

The Idea of the Holy responds to and collaborates with the work of William James.

James’ psychological and philosophical analysis of religious experiences are still useful for phenomenological reflection. He gives two essential marks to identify mystical states of consciousness, plus another two which are common but not essential. First, ineffability, meaning the experience cannot be fully communicated through words; it is only understood through direct experience. Second, what he calls a noetic quality, which is a sense of knowledge or insight, of significance, of importance, and authority, bringing depth to truths and experiences. Third, the transiency of mystical states of consciousness, which James claims can last at the most for one or two hours. Lastly, a sense of passivity or reception: even mystics and monastics who actively seek the mystical experience, when they finally attain it, end up reporting a sense of abeyance of their will—of being grasped by a higher power.21 James elaborates on ineffability: “Incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else.”22 This mystical truth is closer to sensation than to conceptual thought, yet it has a peculiar relationship to sensual experience; while the five senses can play a part in mystical practices of meditation and contemplation, at the highest stages of the experience they tend to fall away altogether. 23

The Augustinian Mystical Experience Of God 14. Ibid., 12–13.

15. Ibid., 13–19.

16. Ibid., 20–23.

17. Ibid., 23–24.

18. Ibid., 31–41.

19. Ibid., 25–30.

20. Ibid., 30.

21. Michael L. Peterson, ed., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 4th ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43–44.

22. Peterson, 46.

23. Ibid.

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This resonates in a classic theological account of religious experience from the Augustinian tradition: Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong, I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being were they not in you. You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace. 24

These lines mark the climax of St. Augustine’s Confessions, his account of his own conversion to Christianity. St. Bonaventure gives a similar account in his mystical guide, The Soul’s Journey Into God.25 Robert Davis describes the apex of Bonaventure’s theology of union with God as an affectus above the intellectus, marked by darkness and a sensorial state analogous to death.26 Both Augustine and Bonaventure situate God, experienced in this supra-sensorial manner, within the mind: the Journey begins with a movement from the external sensorial world to the inner experience of the mind, while Augustine laments having taken so long to recognize and love God who was within himself all along his search in the external world. 27 Calling God “Truth,” Augustine understands it to be that by which he understands all else. Nonetheless, the moment of ecstasy is marked, as Bonaventure puts it, by darkness. Matthew Lootens qualifies Augustine’s language of sensual experience of God as an immediate experience of something ultimately ineffable.28 In his On Christian Doctrine, Augustine claims that religious language necessarily contradicts itself, and such contradiction is preferably “to be avoided by silence than to be explained away by speech.”29 In these accounts, we see an instantiation of James’ point about the mystical state of consciousness; it may begin and have a strong relation to the five senses, but at its climax the senses give away to darkness and silence.

Paul Tillich highlights the notion of God as Truth in his explanation of Augustinian theology. God as Truth, Good, and Being, as opposed to a truth, a good, or a being, is the necessary condition for any experience and inquiry whatsoever: “God is 24. Saint Augustine and Maria Boulding, The Confessions (New City Press, 1997), chaps. XXVII, Book X. 25. See Bonaventura, The Soul’s Journey into God, trans. Ewert H. Cousins, (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978), 89, 115–16. Hereto, Journey.

26. Robert Glenn Davis, The Weight of Love: Affect, Ecstasy, and Union in the Theology of Bonaventure (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 11, 57, 81, Project MUSE. 27. Bonaventura, The Soul’s Journey into God, chaps. 1–3.

28. Matthew R. Lootens, “Augustine,” in The Spiritual Senses, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 57.

29. Saint Augustine, “St. Augustine: On Christian Doctrine, in Four Books - Christian Classics Ethereal Library,” chaps. 6, Book I, https://ccel.org/ccel/augustine/doctrine/doctrine.i.html.

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the presupposition of the question of God.”30 Thus, he calls God the “Unconditioned.”31 Tillich curiously characterizes this mode of theology (he calls it philosophy of religion) as discovery of oneself, or a person’s discovery of something identical to themselves while transcending themselves infinitely.32 He argues against Schleiermacher’s affirmation that this is merely a feeling. He insists that religious experience is an engagement of feeling, indeed, but also, and necessarily so, of the will and the intellect. In other words, it is existential, with the individual’s participation “as a whole in the cognitive act.”33 This immediate awareness of the Unconditioned demands the existential engagement of faith as one lives in a conditioned world while being ultimately concerned with the Unconditioned. The ways the Unconditioned is conceived or “embodied” in many forms, such as sacrament or a theistic conception of “God,” are, to Tillich, “expressing the ineffable.”34

A Philosophical Account Of Ineffability To conceive of the mystical experience as an immediate experience of that which is absolutely meaningful—Truth itself—and to call this experience ineffable while expressing it seems contradictory at first. The philosopher Silvia Jonas engaged the question of the possibility of ineffability, and its metaphysics, in an impressive work of analytical philosophy. Here I cannot but adumbrate her discussions on the topic, limiting myself to only raise the points relevant to this paper. She first draws out a difference between trivial ineffability and significant or philosophically-interesting ineffability. She squarely places phenomenal experiences (in the phenomenological sense) in the category of trivial ineffability; while we can talk of redness or the color red, for example, these words as signifiers cannot possibly communicate what is meant by them if the interlocutor is born blind.35 Her special attention is reserved to experiences of ineffability in art, religion, and philosophy, seeking to identify the common object of ineffable experiences, if such an object exists.36 She structures her discussion around four possible contexts where the predicate “ineffable” is used: objects, propositions, contents, and knowledge.37 30. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 12–13.

31. Tillich, 24–25.

32. Ibid., 10.

33. Ibid., 23–24.

34. Ibid., 27–28.

35. Jonas, 7.

36. Ibid., 21.

37. Ibid., 22–23.

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Jonas discusses ineffable objects by tackling the concept of the Absolute, which is that which “grounds (or crowns) the entire metaphysical hierarchy of existents.”38 A claim of ineffability for the Absolute would be based on a property of the Absolute, absoluteness, which would be neither qualitative nor relational, yet uniquely able to identify the Absolute and account for its ineffability. Such a type of property, if it exists, is a haecceity.39 To Jonas, this argument makes the Absolute identical to any haecceity.40 Furthermore, she lists compelling arguments against the existence of haecceities, having, therefore, little reason to hold to a concept of the Absolute as an ineffable object. The same structure and arguments also hold against a claim of ineffable objects based on the concepts of bare particulars.41 Jonas also rejects the notion of ineffable propositions. Phenomenally, one feels that experiences of the ineffable are meaningful, and that one has learned something.

What is learned from these experiences can be called truths, and therefore, one is reasonably led to believe that in an ineffable experience one has learned ineffable truths. She demonstrates how possible conceptions of ineffable propositions are either incoherent or simply contingent on factors that make it trivial rather than philosophically interesting, being inapplicable to paradigmatic cases of ineffability in art, religion, or philosophy.42 Jonas then looks for ineffability in contents, the mental stuff or data contained in an individual’s mental state at a given time, which is then cognized into proper concepts. Ineffable contents are closely related to, or dependent on, the existence of nonconceptual contents.43 She identifies nonconceptual content in the fact that concepts refer to mental informational content rather than properly constitute or communicate said content, but to her this is trivial.44 This is also true of the contents of perception, like the previous example of redness being incommunicable.45 Turning to art, she proposes that what can be ineffable in art is due to the way we process sense perception, rather than its own content.46 This is perhaps coupled with the trivial ineffability of everyday sense perception that is necessarily implicated in aesthetic experience, but aesthetic 38. Ibid., 59.

39. A haecceity is “a non-qualitative property responsible for individuation and identity. . . . It is a ‘thisness’ (a haecceitas, from the Latin haec, meaning “this”) as opposed to a ‘whatness’ (a quidditas, from the Latin quid, meaning “what”).” Richard Cross, “Medieval Theories of Haecceity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2014 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2014).

40. Jonas, 59–60.

41. Ibid., 71.

42. Ibid., 74-76, 100.

43. Ibid., 101.

44. Ibid., 103–4.

45. Ibid., 106–7.

46. Ibid., 114–15.

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content does not constitute a qualitatively different content.47 Looking at religious experience, she analyzes claims of ineffability centered on the alleged metaphorical character of religious language. She argues, convincingly, that metaphors are always reducible to literal language in one way or another, and therefore religious language does not connote any real ineffable content.48 Jonas finds significant ineffability in her investigation of ineffable knowledge. She proposes “knowledge-how” as the first step in identifying significant ineffability.49 This ineffable knowledge is not the sort of “knowledge-that” involved in receiving inputs from the world and expressing concepts about them.50 The ineffable knowledge-how is part of understanding itself, for example, the knowledge of what it is that something is a certain color, the knowledge of how to use language, or the knowledge of how to think and use knowledge.51 She also identifies what she calls “indexical knowledge” as ineffable; the knowledge-how that I am “I”, that I am here, right now, is something I cannot communicate.52 Phenomenal knowledge is also ineffable, such as the kind of knowledge gained from perception.53 She then identifies the Self as the central reference point of indexical knowledge, and proposes that acquaintance with the Self produces phenomenal knowledge, and this experience is the paradigmatic ineffable she searched for. Moments of Self-acquaintance, she argues, are important, meaningful, and mysterious.54 The Self is ultimately important as the reference point to all of our experience, yet we always experience it in relation to objects, so our attention is centered on the objects. The Self is our ultimate concern yet ever hidden.55 She claims Selfacquaintance is usually not recognized as such because, firstly, we do not experience it often enough to develop the capacity to recognize it as such, which is something that comes with habit. Second, because Self-acquaintance is a specialist term in philosophy; like any phenomenon, it is immediately absorbed into our conceptual frameworks, which, if religious, will describe it in religious terms.56 She posits that perhaps aesthetic and religious contexts facilitate Self-acquaintance because they engage the individual in phenomenal ways beyond the ordinary. Philosophical and contemplative contexts 47. Ibid., 117–20.

48. Ibid., 128.

49. Ibid., 143.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 154.

52. Ibid., 157–60.

53. Ibid., 161–66.

54. Ibid., 166–72.

55. Ibid., 173–74.

56. Ibid., 175–77.

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(also present in art and religion) focus one’s attention into one’s own inner self, again facilitating Self-acquaintance. The paradigmatic case of ineffability, then, is a shift in perception wherein “the focal point of all our phenomenal experiences, that is, the Self, becomes itself the object of acquaintance.”57 In my introduction to this paper, I proposed an investigation of religious experiences of God centered on the notion of ineffability, through phenomenology, philosophy, and theology. I demonstrated how ineffability is evident in the phenomenological investigations of religious experience carried out by Otto and James.

I have also delineated how the Augustinian tradition speaks of the mystical experience of God being closely related to sensory experience but transcending it. God is located within and above the mind and is that by which everything else is understood. God is also somehow identical with the mystic subject, while at the same time being ineffable and Other. I then presented Jonas’s philosophical analysis of ineffability and her thesis that paradigmatic cases of ineffability are essentially moments of acquaintance with the Self wherein one gains ineffable phenomenal knowledge of the Self. Jonas’s argument is strong and well structured. Her description of acquaintance with the Self matches William James’s marks of mystical experience. It fits the Augustinian structure of suprasensorial experience from the external world to the ecstatic but silent experience of the inner self, as a movement from what Jonas calls trivial ineffability to the significant ineffability of Self-acquaintance. The Self is that by which everything is understood and experienced, and indeed it encompasses not only feeling but also will and intellect, constituting our ultimate concern as Tillich would understand it.

The Discovery Of God In The Ineffable Experience Of The Self The hypothesis that the Self and God are possibly identical is in many ways already commonplace in theological thinking.58 In that sense, understanding mystical experiences of something ineffable as acquaintance with phenomenal knowledge of the Self is not shocking. However, before settling with this philosophical hypothesis, the phenomenological standpoint requires closer attention to the theological account: The Augustinian mystic refers to the object of ineffable mystical experience as Truth, Good, and Being, but above all, as God. There is a surplus of meaning in the word “God” that is more than what Tillich calls “Unconditioned.” Jonas claims the ineffable experience is Self-acquaintance and that religious language is used wrongly when describing it otherwise. This implies the analytical philosopher is a better specialist than the 57. Ibid., 177–78.

58. For an example in Augustinian theology itself, see Lootens, “Augustine,” 59.

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mystic in describing their own experience. The ineffable experience may indeed be an acquaintance of phenomenal knowledge of the Self, and of ultimate reality as Good, Being, and Truth, inasmuch as these are, indeed, presuppositions necessary for our own subjective being-in-the-world and thus ultimate realities in our experiences of being a conscious subject. Yet, a phenomenologist cannot ignore the mystics’ account of a surplus meaning in the name of the object of their experience. It is Good, it is Being, it is Truth, it is identical with the Self, but it is also something-else, an Other, a strange and even eerie mysterium. Augustine does not only recognize himself, but recognizes also the “You” he refers to, the beauty old and new that was with him even as he was not with it. This surplus of meaning is referred to as God, and Jonas does not account for it. I propose this hypothesis: the word God is an attempt to convey the insight of the ineffable phenomenal knowledge of the Self as a fundamentally relational Self. In other words, where there is “I”, there is “You,” even as both exist within the Self. This is a paradoxical notion; my experience of “You” is located within myself, “I,” which I know is not “You.”59 Thus, God is found in the Self, and is identical to the Self, but the Self knows that God is not the Self, and this knowledge-how, the knowledge of the difference between “I” and “You” which emerges in the very phenomenal experience of the “I,” is ineffable.

This hypothesis suggests there is something intrinsic to the Self and Selfawareness that includes some notion or intuition of the Other, an external consciousness which one may relate to. Perhaps we are indeed created to be in relationship with the Abrahamic God, or, instead, we are innately aware of other humans. Perhaps this phenomenon is simply a function of how the brain is structured by language which necessarily assumes an interlocutor. The hypothesis challenges theological frameworks by demythologizing God, replacing the concept of an external objective absolute agent beyond time with a fundamentally phenomenal experience of our Self as essentially relational—an inescapably subjective experience without any guarantee of external objective existence. Once again, this phenomenological investigation has been unconcerned with the validation of truth-claims about the experience of God from Augustine, Bonaventure, Kierkegaard, or Tillich. Rather, it sought to understand their subjective experience as such. I juxtaposed their accounts with Jonas’s hypothesis about ineffability, highlighting the surplus of meaning in God which is more than the Unconditioned. In the end, we learn not so much about God—if there is one—but about 59. While my language here might be evocative of the work of Martin Buber, I am not engaging with his philosophy of dialogue, and it remains outside the scope of this paper. Nonetheless, exploring whether or how his concepts in I and Thou are compatible with the hypothesis raised here is certain to be productive. For reference, see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1970).

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ourselves. Knowledge of this God cannot be communicated. One can only relate to this God based on the kind of existential trust, or faith, that is moved, as Kierkegaard would put it, on the strength of the absurd: placing oneself as a particular above the universal, in an absolute relation to the absolute. Yet this God also challenges an individualist perspective, as in relating to this God, the individual finds oneself as an essentially relational individual. The hypothesis may lead into a productive phenomenological investigation of communal mystical experiences, including claims of ineffable significance in important but non-religious social experiences.

lucas coque is an independent student in his last year of the Bachelor of Theology program.

Informed by his own journey of faith, from Brazilian Pentecostalism to Agnosticism, he is fascinated by post-Christian spirituality and the evolving ideal of a pluralist secular society. Lucas is passionate about existentialist ethics, postmodernism, and theologies of resistance.

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Out of Darkness into Light Liberation and Illumination in Dante’s Paradise

hannah cheslock

Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, synthesizes a long tradition of medieval Christian theology and philosophy in the form of an epic poem. It has since provided centuries of readers with vivid imaginations of the afterlife. Dante divides his musings into three parts: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Inferno tracks Dante’s guided descent to the very depths of Hell. Here, Dante is allowed the opportunity to both recognize sin and reject it from his own life. The rejection and active repentance of sin then leads him to Mount Purgatory. Purgatory is a place of discipline and improvement, and as Dante ascends the mountain, he learns of the motives behind human sin, specifically the abuse or misuse of the pure love that flows from God into humanity. In Purgatory one of Dante’s major arguments is laid out: the wisdom and love of God is pure, all-knowing, and all-powerful, and the ultimate objective of humans both in mortal and immortal life should be to love God. Purgatory ends with Dante’s guide Virgil, who embodies reason and philosophy, handing Dante off to Beatrice, who embodies a mind elevated by grace, as an enactment of the turn from philosophy to theology. Dante’s Paradise is the final stage in Dante’s journey through the afterlife.

Beatrice, who was Dante’s earthly love and who died long before him, portrayed as a highly elusive and lusted after character up to this point in the poem, now accompanies Dante as he ascends through the spheres of Paradise.

In this paper, I will discuss the complexity of Beatrice’s role in Paradise and in Dante’s learning and ascension. I focus my analysis on Dante’s description of light in Paradise. Light is used as a poetic mechanism to describe the brilliance of Beatrice, which is not just a physical quality but also a reflection of God’s love and the enlightenment and wisdom it contains. Metaphors of light, indications that she has received Divine Wisdom, are irrevocable from Beatrice. I argue, however, that her purpose in the poem is not necessarily to give Dante knowledge but to guide him towards the true source of light and intellect: God. Throughout Paradise, discussions and images of light are repeatedly used. The

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realm of Paradise is one that grows increasingly brighter as Beatrice and Dante ascend through the spheres. The idea of nearing the source of the light as the poem progresses, however, is even present throughout The Divine Comedy. Starting in Hell, moving through Purgatory, and up into Paradise, the theme of traveling and transforming from darkness to light permeates the entirety of Dante’s poem. This is symbolic of Dante’s transformative journey from the mortal condition of selfishness and unawareness, represented by dark language and imagery, to the immortal condition of knowledge and understanding, represented through descriptions of light and spiritual illumination.

Irma Brandeis explores the concept of darkness to light in this poem by arguing that darkness may be “the condition of the intellect without aid of faith,” such that those who have not led an earthly life of faith have lived in darkness.1 Dante experiences the total darkness of Hell, the split of light and darkness through daytime and nighttime in Purgatory, and it is not until Dante reaches Paradise that he enters a constantly illuminated realm. That Beatrice only joins Dante once he has reached Paradise, replacing Virgil, is important to note; because Beatrice fully represents and embodies light, she could thusly not exist in either Hell or Purgatory. While she descended to Limbo, she never fully entered into realms where darkness existed. In this detail, Beatrice as a vessel for God’s light and love can begin to be understood.

In Paradise, Dante repeatedly uses language of light and illumination to describe Beatrice. Dante spends a good portion of The Divine Comedy dreaming of Beatrice and being reunited with her, and once the two finally come together, the light Beatrice emanates is striking to Dante. Beatrice’s eyes are so beautiful and full of light that looking into them immediately comforts Dante. The feelings that Beatrice’s eyes elicit in Dante are those of immense warmth and happiness, however, Dante is self-aware in his struggles to describe completely these sentiments. The following passage from Canto XVIII encapsulates Dante’s attraction to Beatrice’s eyes and his inability to fully explain their power: The Lady who was leading me to God / Said: “Change thy thoughts; bethink thee, I am near / To Him who lightens every sinful load.” / So at my Comfort’s voice I turned – that dear, / Dear sound – and O, what love I then descried / In her blest eyes I dare not speak of here; / Not only language plays me false; beside, There’s memory, which is powerless to retrace / Its course so far, save One should be my guide. This much I may report upon the case: / My heart from every other longing went / Completely free while I perused her face, / For the Eternal Joy, its radiance bent / Direct on Beatrice and from her eyes / Reflected, held me in entire content. / She, with a smile that left my faculties / Quite vanquished, said to me: “Turn and give heed; / Not in my eyes alone is Paradise.2 1. Irma Brandeis, “Metaphor in ‘The Divine Comedy.’” The Hudson Review, vol. 8, no. 4 (1956): 574.

2. Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Penguin Books, 2004), xviii.

3-21.

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This passage is one of many examples in Paradise where Dante turns to Beatrice and is so overwhelmed by her beauty, he chooses to not even attempt to explain her affect. In this passage, the power of her smile is also mentioned. While Beatrice’s eyes are a great source of light and love, her smile also provides Dante with a sort of spiritual elevation.

Beatrice’s beauty is so exquisite that it both literally and figuratively elevates Dante closer to Paradise. Dante is ultimately guided through the spheres of Paradise towards the source of light and understanding by the love he feels for Beatrice and her physical beauty. The struggle to articulate her description is, then, much more understandable in the context of the larger significance of her beauty—as an expression of closeness to God. Anne Paolucci and Frank D. Grande elaborate more on Beatrice’s beauty and the issue of language: In the Paradiso, Beatrice’s gaze grows brighter and brighter, strengthening Dante’s sight for the progressively increasing intensity of divine revelation. . . . This everincreasing illumination produces, in turn, the ever-increasing difficulty of describing the phenomenon in adequate poetic terms. Again and again, Dante reminds his readers that the radiance of Beatrice’s eyes not only blinds him momentarily, but also leaves him, as a poet, speechless—keenly aware of his incapacity to express adequately the reality of his experience.3

In Canto XXVII of Purgatory, Dante’s allegory of Leah and Rachel facilitate some understanding of the light that Beatrice radiates. In Dante’s interpretation of the story, Leah is emblematic of the active life and earthly pleasure, as she is a woman who is more grounded and uses her hands to accomplish tasks. Rachel, however, is described as a woman with beautiful eyes, and functions as an emblem of contemplative life and heavenly pleasure: I in a vision saw a lady, young / And beautiful, through level meadows go, / Gathering flowers, by whom these words were sung: / “Whoso would ask my name, I’d have him know / That I am Leah, who for my array / Twine garlands, weaving white hands to and fro. / To please me at the glass I deck me gay; / The while my sister Rachel never stirs, / But sits before her mirror all the day, / For on her own bright eyes she still prefers / To gaze, as I to deck me with my hands; / Action is my delight, reflection hers.”4 3. Anne Paolucci and Frank D Grande, “Dress and Physical Features,” in The Women in Dante’s Divine Comedy and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Griffon House Publications, 2005), 42.

4. Dante, The Divine Comedy II: Purgatory, xvxvii.97-108.

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Furthermore, Dante aligns Mathilda with Leah and Beatrice with Rachel. Beatrice was, for Dante, the ideal of contemplative life, a life of quiet, faithful servitude. Now that Beatrice and Dante have been reunited in Paradise, the effects of the earthly life of contemplation she led become more visible to Dante. Through the interplay of the physical and spiritual in discussing Beatrice’s light, Dante constructs a causal relationship between faith and the light she emanates unto him. The light of intellect and of God’s power pour out of her and engage Dante’s physical and spiritual senses.

This is exemplified in the final line of the second previous quoted passage: “Not in my eyes alone is Paradise.”5 Here, Dante reminds readers that the light in Beatrice’s eyes expresses not just the Paradise she can guide him to, but the beauty and light of the Paradise waiting for him once he fully ascends.

The function of Beatrice in Paradise is complex, and although it appears as if Beatrice is Dante’s reward for making it through Hell and Purgatory, I argue instead that Beatrice can be better understood as Dante’s teacher and guide as they ascend towards the a higher goal and gift. Paradise, with its unfamiliar new nature, is so elevated from the human condition that it can only be understood through metaphors and analogies, as Brandeis explains: “Paradise is beyond space and time; its sights and events are merely educational concessions to the pilgrim’s mortal condition, helping him to grasp by analogy what he cannot grasp directly: the nature of pure being, free from all becoming, from all contingency.”6 Beatrice’s function in Paradise just as a gift upon arrival in Paradise, but to guide Dante through it and to help him make sense of the allegories he encounters there. Barbara Reynolds reflects on this notion: Beatrice does not exclusively or specifically “stand for” theology, the Christian revelation, heavenly beatitude, the light of glory or any of the abstractions which, in the course of centuries, have been put forward by critics and scholars. She is the image by which Dante perceives such things and her function in the poem is to bring him to that state in which he is able to perceive them directly.7

The following passage from Canto XIV demonstrates Dante observing a reality presented in the spheres and relying on Beatrice for the very aid described above by Reynolds: I now began to glimpse existences / Newlyarrived, and forming a fresh wreath / Beyond the other two circumferences. / O sparks that from the Holy Breath outbreathe / Living and 5. Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, xviii.21.

6. Brandeis, 569.

7. Barbara Reynolds, “Introduction,” in The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barabara Reynolds (Penguin Books, 2004), 49.

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true, how swift, how sudden growing, / The light mine eyes bore not, but sank beneath! / But Beatrice appeared all smiles, and glowing / With beauty such that I must leave it there / With things outgone by memory in its going. / This gave me strength to lift mine eyes up where / I stood, and find me raised to loftier bliss / Beside my Lady, and alone with her. / That I’d been lifted up by this: / The warm smile of the star, whose burning ball / Seemed ruddier to me than his custom is.8

Charles Tomlinson further expounds on Beatrice’s role: Beatrice, then, represents Divine Wisdom; Virgil, Dante’s master and guide, represents human wisdom, unenlightened by the Divine; and as a knowledge of Divine truths is vouchsafed only to those who give themselves to the meditation and contemplation of them, so Beatrice’s place in Heaven is next to that of Rachel, the symbol among the Hebrews of the contemplative life.9

Tomlinson importantly notes there hat the handing off of Dante from Virgil to Beatrice is an essential moment, as Beatrice, a resident of Paradise, has wisdom infused in her that is a result of her contemplation and faith to God during her mortal life. The light Beatrice emanates that so enchants Dante is actually Divine Wisdom and the knowledge of absolute truths, all of which come from God. Beatrice functions then, not as a reward for Dante making it to Paradise, but as a guide and interpreter of the theology and philosophy embedded within the metaphors of the spheres, and as she who will lead him to the source of the Divine Wisdom—light.

With the acknowledgment of Beatrice’s purpose in Paradise, the true objective of Dante throughout The Divine Comedy is revealed to the reader. While Dante may have started with the goal to eventually be reunited with Beatrice in Paradise, the language of light and illumination explain that the mortal, courtly love Dante felt for Beatrice allowed for him to elevate himself to Paradise, closer towards understanding the beauty and love that emanate from Beatrice. The love shared between Dante and Beatrice is genuine, but as Dante ascends through the spheres, Beatrice becomes less of an object of desire and more so a vessel or image of the knowledge and love of God. Paolucci and Grande summarize this idea concisely: “As her [Beatrice] virtue grows, her body becomes less and less material until it is wholly transparent . . . and, finally, appears as an emanation of light.”10 As Dante approaches the source of light and knowledge, 8. Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, xiv. 73-87.

9. Charles Thomlinson, “Beatrice,” in Dante, Beatrice, and the Divine Comedy (Williams and Norgate, 1894), 59.

10. Anne Paolucci and Frank D Grande, “Dress and Physical Features,” 33.

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Bearice’s light overwhelms his senses until all he sees is the light of Divine Wisdom pouring out of her. Beatrice’s responsibility as Dante’s guide becomes even clearer once Dante reaches the final stage of his journey, through which Beatrice can no longer accompany him: One thing I meant, another is my story: / Not Beatrice, an elder there I saw, / Clad in the raiment of the saints in glory. / A joyfulness benign his features wore; / Such gentle kindliness his air implied / As ever tenderhearted father bore. / “And she, where is she?” instantly I cried. “’Tis Beatrice who sends me unto thee / For they desire’s fulfillment,” he replied. / “Lift up thine eyes, yonder thy Lady see / In the third circle from the highest place, / Enthroned where merit destined her to be.” / Without a word I lifted up my gaze, / And there I saw her in her glory crowned, / Reflecting from herself the eternal rays.11

Beatrice, here leaving Dante, resumes her rightful place in the spheres. This passage, together with Paolucci and Grande, raise another vital aspect of the role of Beatrice not as an end but as a means, a naturally limited function. Shown here and elsewhere throughout the poem, Beatrice is described to be gazing upwards or turning her eyes towards the heavens. Moreover, while Beatrice is looking towards the light, Dante looks at her, not where she is looking. An example of this is in Canto I: “Beatrice stood, her eyes still riveted / On the eternal wheels; and, constantly, / Turning mine thence, I gazed on her instead; / ‘Twas even thus a change came over me.”12 The direction of Dante’s gaze, not looking upwards towards the main source of light but instead at Beatrice, is a romantic allegory of the poem that signifies that both her role and his; at the beginning of Paradise, courtly love is still Dante’s primary motivator, and he is only shown that which he can truly reach by Beatrice. It is not until Dante reaches the point where he must journey alone that he understands Beatrice was just a guide to a higher realm and wisdom, not the final reward or step in his ascension through Hell and Purgatory.

This realization of the true nature and function of Beatrice in his adventure is the final lesson he learns, or, more accurately, is taught. Romantic love is the closest form of divine love humans can achieve on earth, but Paradise reveals that an even greater love and wisdom can be achieved. Once Dante ultimately arrives at the source of light, he tries to describe the blissfulness and meaning of what he has experienced, but once 11. Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, xxxi, 57-72.

12. Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, i.64-67.

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again, mortal language fails: That light doth so transform a man’s whole bent / That never to another sight or thought / Would he surrender, with his own consent; […].

Now. Even what I recall will be exprest / More feebly than if I could wield no more / Than a babe’s tongue, yet milky from the breast; / Not that the living light I looked on wore / More semblances than one, which cannot be, / For it is always what it was before; / But as my sight by seeing learned to see, / The transformation which in me took place / Transformed the single changeless form for me.13

Having reached the apex of Paradise, Dante is transformed and now knows Divine Wisdom and Love. With this knowledge, Dante has succeeded in overcoming the human condition. Beatrice, while she does not lead him all the way to the truth, played an essential part in Dante’s journey; not just in guiding him, but through revealing to him his true destination.

Paradise is a poem that chronicles Dante’s ascension from the darkness of the human condition to the light of Divine Wisdom by the guidance of his romantic love, Beatrice. Dante’s reform came from wanting to please Beatrice, and had Beatrice not navigated him along the way, he would not have been able to reach the source of light.

Beatrice’s embodiment of God’s love and light enchanted Dante, and she symbolically functioned as the guiding light towards Divine Wisdom. The importance of Beatrice in Dante’s development throughout the poem is unparalleled by any other characters, as she enabled Dante’s liberation and enlightenment.

hannah cheslockis a U4 student completing a Joint Honours in Western Religions and English: Drama and Theatre with a minor in Russian Culture. She is interested in the ways religious imagery and ideology influence pieces of dramatic literature, especially in relation to gender, sexuality, and issues of social and political justice.

13. Dante, The Divine Comedy III: Paradise, xxxiii. 100-102, 106-114.

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Identity, Ritual, and the Eucharist Communion Among “Lapsed” Catholics in a Montreal Parish thesis excerpt

isabella daniele

We come to Your table.

Life You give for us to share, We come to Your table.

We come, we come We come to Your table.

This is a verse from the children’s favourite song, which one can hear from outside the classroom doors as they practice singing for their First Communion celebration.

The lyrics of the song refer to receiving the body of Christ, Jesus, in the form of a host (wafer), which the children will take for the first time at their sacrament of First Communion.1 The song and the ritual of Communion are both part of connecting to the Christian belief that Jesus sacrificed himself through his crucifixion for humanity’s sins. Catholics can only receive the body of Christ at Mass in the sacrament of the Eucharist, where the priest consecrates the bread and wine, which become the body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation), at the altar (table) for the community to receive. This thesis project explores the function of the sacrament of First Communion in building a Catholic identity amongst practicing and non-practicing Catholics at St. Benedict’s Parish in Montreal, Quebec. 2 I thought that by the end of my fieldwork, I would have a definite answer as to why parents want their children to do their First Communion, only after which Catholics are permitted to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, so that their children are allowed to eat from His table (receive the body of 1. First Communion itself is not a sacrament per se, but a celebration of the first time someone partakes in the sacrament of the Eucharist. It is here addressed as a sacrament because it is commonly treated as such in Catholic churches, as a distinct coming-of-age ritual that is itself the performance of a sacrament. While the sacrament of the Eucharist can be accepted whenever wanted following one’s First Communion, the first occurrence, at the First Communion, has a deep importance in Catholic life milestones. First Communion typically happens after the sacrament of Baptism but before that of Confirmation, though there is discretion across dioceses (the designated area under the jurisdiction of a local bishop). First Communion in the Montreal Diocese is usually received in 2nd or 3ird grade (8-9 years of age) and Confirmation in 5th or 6th grade (11-12 years of age); however, the ages and methods of preparing for these sacraments are at the discretion of the local dioceses.

2. This honours thesis was completed as part of my Bachelor of Arts degree in Honours Anthropology under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Norget, who gave me the opportunity to explore this topic ethnographically. The honours thesis would not have been possible without the support and generosity of St. Benedict’s Parish: the priest, the catechist coordinator, the catechists, and all the children and parents who allowed me to participate in the First Communion preparation courses and took time to speak with me. Please note that all the names used throughout the essay are pseudonyms, including that of the parish, in order to respect the confidentiality of the participants.

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Christ), while seeming to discount the importance of attending Sunday Mass, which essentially signifies not bringing their children to His table (church). It was a question I had often asked myself: what was the point of ensuring your child could receive the body of Christ knowing that they would rarely receive it again? Apparently, I was not alone in this line of thought, since Sandro, a well-spoken father, told me: Why do they feel like they have to do the First Communion and then not continue?

‘Cause for myself, it’s either you do it, you commit to it, or you just don’t, or you wait for a time in your life when maybe you want to commit to doing it. But that’s how we are, we get into something, or we don’t, if we don’t subscribe to it, we avoid it. We don’t do anything halfway.3

Many parents shared Sandro’s opinion, along with the priest and catechists at St. Benedict’s, while other parents agreed with him in theory but were unable to practice in such a way. I find intriguing how a sacrament can be done “halfway” or “not for the right reasons,” which were expressions I heard often in my interviews and will explore throughout this paper. 4 I soon came to realize through my interviews and readings that this pattern of receiving the sacrament yet subsequently not regularly or even intermittently attending Mass was not new—it had actually been the experience of many of the children’s parents and grandparents. The priest and catechists at St. Benedict’s knew that the church pews fill during the months leading up to the First Communion sacrament and empty once the sacrament was received, and thus the parish faced the challenge of encouraging the families to continue attending Mass even after receiving their children received their sacrament of First Communion.

The inconsistency or absence of attendance at Mass is not exclusive to St. Benedict’s Parish; it is part of Quebec’s religious history and continues to effect churches across Montreal. In the 1960s, 88% of Catholics in Quebec attended weekly Mass, while less than 15% currently do (the lowest in North America)—yet French Canadians continue to self-identify as Catholics and report high levels of belief.5 The significant decrease in weekly Mass attendance is a consequence of the 1960s Quiet Revolution modernization reforms, implemented by Jean Lesage’s Liberal government, which diminished the Catholic Church’s influence in civil society in order to create a “secular, modern” state.

3. Sandro and his wife Clarissa (June 2019) were a couple who started attending St. Benedict’s a few months before they had registered their daughter to prepare for the sacrament of First Communion. I interviewed them in the tiny lackluster room reserved for group projects at the local neighbourhood library where I conducted most of my parent interviews.

4. Catechists are volunteers who teach the children the Catholic faith, usually in the form of catechism classes. I was a catechist at St. Benedict’s Parish, and the idea for my honours thesis project stemmed from my experiences teaching the children and interacting with the parents and the priest.

5. Hillary Kaell, introduction to Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec, ed. Hillary Kaell (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2017), 13.

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The Catholic Church had an influential role in Quebec from the province’s foundation in 1608 as a French colony (New France). Catholicism was a crucial part of a French-Canadian identity, along with the French language, which differentiated the province from the rest of English-speaking, Protestant Canada.6 The Catholic Church controlled schools and hospitals and conspicuously participated in Quebec provincial politics until the 1960s. In the 1960s, Quebecers elected Jean Lesage’s Liberal Party in hopes of modernizing the province, which many felt had fallen behind compared to the rest of Canada and other Western nations, through secularization.7 The government thus took control of Church-run public institutions, specifically education and healthcare, which altered the Catholic Church’s status in the public sphere. FrenchCanadian identity was rebranded to exclude Catholicism, only emphasizing French language and Quebec citizenship as the fundamental attributes of a separate and unique nation within Canada.8 However, only in the late 1990s did the school boards become fully “secularized,” no longer divided by religious denomination (Catholic and Protestant schools) but by language (English and French schools). The secularization of the school boards effected the preparation of the children’s sacraments (First Communion and Confirmation); once part of the Catholic schools’ curricula, the sacraments became the responsibility of parents and local parishes. The secularization of the schools and the decrease in weekly Mass attendance changed the nature of the First Communion rite of passage in Quebec; once a communal neighbourhood event, it became an individualistic event, dependent on the discretion of the child’s parents.

When the children received their sacrament as a part of the Catholic school curriculum, they usually attended the parish church affiliated with their neighbourhood school. They received the sacrament along with classmates who were often also their neighbours, defining it as a communal, shared experience. In contrast, for many of the current parishioners, St. Benedict’s is not their neighbourhood parish. The parents at St. Benedict’s expressed “shopping around” for a church in Montreal, which is a relatively new phenomenon. The recency of this change was clear in my interviews with many of the parents, who had attended their local neighbourhood church while growing up in Montreal. However, now parents are willing to travel to a church outside of their neighbourhood if it suits their needs, whether that be a welcoming community, a dynamic priest, or a short preparation course. One mother shared with 6. Ibid., 10.

7. Ibid., 11.

8. Ibid., 12.

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me a conversation she would have with friends: And I found a church where you only have to go once a month. Then it was another parent saying, well, I found a church that it’s a one-week intensive in June, and another parent was like, I found a church, that you don’t even have to go. They give you the books, and you do it at home.9

This thesis will also explore not only why the parents chose to have their child take their First Communion, but why they felt St. Benedict’s Parish was the “right” place to do so. How did St. Benedict’s Parish’s catechism program differ from other churches? Why was this difference significant to parents? How were children prepared for receiving the sacrament of First Communion?

There is more to the sacrament of First Communion then just being able to receive the body of Christ at Mass, which needs to be acknowledged and further explored. When I asked one child what the gift was that he would be receiving at his First Communion— expecting him to answer Jesus or the body of Christ—he instead responded with “an X-Box” and “probably some money from [his] nonna [grandma].” Although not all of the children answered me this way, his spontaneous response revealed the materialistic and consumerist aspects associated with the sacrament, which the Church tries to minimize but many parents continue to emphasize. The sacrament of First Communion hence illustrates Robert Orsi’s notion of “religious messiness,” which he describes as “attention to . . . multiplicities, to seeing religious spaces as always, inevitably, and profoundly intersected by things brought into them from outside, things that bear their own histories, complexities, meaning different from those offered within the religious space.”10 The First Communion also gathers families for a meal and sees them engaging in a form of gift economy, which reaffirms bonds and heritage as a way of continuing the chain of memory— a theme I refer to later. 11 In the following pages, I explore how religious identity, though it has become disassociated from personal levels of religious practice, remains relevant for Catholics within the secular narrative of Quebec.12 The Roman Catholic sacrament of First Communion at St. Benedict’s acts as a case study to understand the cyclical nature embedded in Catholic tradition, which brings people back to the Church to practice 9. Clarissa, parent, June 2019.

10. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 167.

11. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), 124-125.

12. Religious scholar Courtney Bender defines the dual meaning of religious practice, which traditionally is understood as “the things that religious people do” (e.g., praying, going to mass, singing hymns) (2012, 273). However, it is also a framework that studies religion as an “embodiment, a habit and a daily activity” which diverges from the traditional approach that emphasizes belief, religious scripture and theology (Asad 1993 as cited in Bender 2012, 273).

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through the coincidence of the sacraments and life’s milestones (e.g., birth, transitioning into adulthood, marriage, and death). The well-known line from Francis Coppola’s The Godfather: Part 3 (1990) sums up this cycle of inconsistent Mass attendance well: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” This line speaks to the dynamic of Catholics drifting away from the Church and being pulled back into the fold—even if only temporarily—by significant events, usually sacraments or holidays such as Christmas and Easter. After conducting interviews, I came to realize that many Catholics were never really “lapsed,” for although they had stopped attending Mass, they claimed they never stopped believing in God, praying, or living by Christian values.

This thesis is divided into four sections. My first section contextualizes this project within Mayblin’s work on religious leniency. I explore how flexibility and tradition are reoccurring themes expressed by the parents at St. Benedict’s regarding the First Communion process.13 The second section introduces the reader to St. Benedict’s Parish, an anglophone parish in a Montreal francophone east-end neighbourhood, and contextualizes their First Communion preparation course within Quebec’s religious history. This section also explores what differentiates this parish and their catechetical program from other Montreal churches. The third section examines the perspectives of the children preparing for their sacrament and those of their parents, as well as how they understand and live their Catholic faith. In this section I provide my own experiences, having observed and interacted with the children during their preparation classes, interviewed the different parishioners, attended the actual First Communion celebration, and even taught a children’s catechism class. Finally, the fourth section focuses on the symbolic nature of the gift and the materialistic and consumeristic aspects of the First Communion ritual.

A Tradition of Lenience: The Motives Behind Receiving the First Communion

“It’s just something as a Catholic that you do, sometimes you don’t think about it, you just do it.”

-Amanda, parent, May 2019

“Religion is not tradition; it is a way of life.”

-Cathy, parent, May 2019

13. Maya Mayblin, “The Lapsed and the Laity: Discipline and Lenience in the Study of Religion,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (2017): 503-522.

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When I asked parents why they wanted their children to receive the sacrament of First Communion, many answered that it was just part of their culture and its traditions, implying that it needs to be done because it has always been done. Some parents acknowledged the cultural expectation placed on them by their family and friends but emphasized the primary religious aspect: they want their children to form a relationship with their faith. However, as I reflected on my conversations it became apparent that religion for the parents was never only “tradition” or “faith,” but a constant negotiation of the two. The majority of the St. Benedict’s parents I interviewed were of Italian origins, themselves children of parents who had immigrated from Italy and brought their Catholic faith with them, the continuity of which became a vital part of their families’ Italian Canadian identity. For many, it was hard to distinguish what was strictly a Catholic tradition from what was an Italian one, exemplifying the tendency for Catholic faith to permeate the identity of a community or individual.14 Enzo, a middleaged father, shared with me that as a child he thought all Italians were Catholics, and that he did not even know of any other religions until he attended a Protestant high school.15 There he encountered students of different faiths and realized that some Italians were Protestants, and sometimes even Jehovah’s Witnesses.16 In these ways, many parents at St. Benedict’s understood their Catholic faith as part of their heritage and cultural identity. They wanted to pass it on to their children, the next generation, like they were doing with their other values, mother language, and family recipes. Most parents shared that their motives for passing on the faith had changed from that of their parents, in that they were not motivated by the belief that their children might not be able to enter heaven without receiving their sacraments.

Instead, the parents I spoke to expressed that the Catholic faith was a way to provide their child with a tradition, a moral compass, God (a higher being to believe in), and a foundation to explore religion more deeply. For the parents, the sacraments are an important and effective medium for instilling their Catholic faith in their children.

French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s book Religion as a Chain of Memory discusses the challenges that occur when religion is associated with tradition. HervieuLéger relies on the model French society, which had been primarily Catholic until the early-twentieth-century modernization and secularization reforms.17 Hervieu-Léger 14. Maya Mayblin, introduction to The Anthropology of Catholicism, ed. Norget, Napolitano & Mayblin (Oakland, Ca: University of California Press, 2017), 4.

15. As discussed in the introduction, Quebec school boards were originally divided into Catholic and Protestant schools. Protestant schools, unlike Catholic schools, catered to students of all different faiths. In the following section the Quebec school systems and religious education will be further discussed.

16. Enzo, parent, June 2019.

17. It is worth noting that the Lesage government was inspired by French secularism and used it as the model for the Quebec reforms, as did other proponents of the so-called “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec.

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argues that “by placing tradition, that is to say, a reference to a chain of belief, at the center of the question of religion, the future of religion is immediately associated with the problem of collective memory.”18 Collective memory is rooted in a shared geographical place and community. Hervieu-Léger argues that the typical French countryside village parish (pre-industrialization) was an exemplary site of collective memory; every Sunday, families living in the village would gather in the village church and partake in a communal experience, which facilitated the extension of the “chain of memory” (tradition) to the next generation. “Modern society,” specifically urban living, challenges this method. By prioritizing the individual’s experience and anonymity and by negating the community aspect of living in close proximity, city life impedes the processes of sharing collective memory and reproducing what is inherited.

A challenge of passing down the faith in the form of tradition (memory), particularly in urban contexts, is that it discounts the active aspect of religion: the requirement of ritual practice (such as Mass attendance, saying prayers, or reading the Bible) for the development of an individual’s faith. It is too reductive to equate a break in the chain of memory with an end of a tradition; instead, individuals are continually adapting traditions to their changing lifestyles. The Catholic Church as an institution is no exception, continuously adapting its traditions and increasing its flexibility to remain relevant to its followers.

The relative flexibility this engenders within the Catholic Church is often perceived as hypocritical by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. However, the flexibility is a part of Schmitt’s idea of the Catholic complexio oppositorum: the Church’s ability to embrace all different and often incommensurable interests and lifestyles, which allows for a flexibility that makes the Catholic Church into a “ both/and” rather than an “either/ or” type of religion.19 The Catholic complexio oppositorum, meaning in translation “the complex of opposites,” is the rather miraculous way in which the Church can bring ideas and institutions that are usually mutually exclusive together without neutralizing the tension between them.20 Catholicism’s elasticity and ambiguity allow all dualities such as “democracy and authoritarianism; rationalism and irrationality; romanticism and science; masculinity and femininity” to exist in the oppositional tension, nurturing and encouraging these differences instead of reconciling it.21 The Catholic Church’s 18. Hervieu-Léger, 123.

19. Tracy, 1981 as cited in Mayblin, introduction to The Anthropology of Catholicism, ed. Norget, Napolitano & Mayblin (Oakland, Ca: University of California Press, 2017), 17.

20. Michael Marder, “Living Forms: Culture, Multiculturalism, and Complexio Oppositorum” in Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (London: Continuum, 2010), 152.

21. Schmitt 1923 and Marder 2008 as cited in Andrea Muehlebach, “Complexio Oppositorium: Notes on the Left

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ability to be opulent (owning real estate worldwide and displaying symbols of wealth and status to demonstrate God’s power) while preaching modesty (censuring worldly riches and amplifying Jesus’s teachings of charity) exemplifies this complexio oppositorum.

The complexio oppositorum is Catholicism’s ability to contain opposition within 22 itself. However, it is worth noting that the elastic nature of Catholicism to house opposition can only stretch so far before breaking—reaching a point where there is not enough resemblance to the traditional and familiar Catholic Church—and thus the Church is continually mediating this tension, choosing when to extend or withdraw flexibility through policies of lenience and discipline. The complexio oppositorum allows for both the spiritual (connection with God) and material (celebration and gift-giving) motives behind First Communion to coexist openly and commonly, which is discussed in section four. It is also the mechanism that allows for those who are non-practicing (“lapsed”) and the very devout to be equally called Catholics by the Church.

The flexibility within Catholicism allows Catholicism to be a marker of identity that is not always contingent on “belief” or ritual practice.23 It is rare to hear of a “lapsed Calvinist” or a “cultural Evangelist” because of the nature of Protestant denominations, which generally have different requirements and expectations around piety, consistency, and the individual/community dynamic. However, there is an array of labels used to describe a Catholic person and their affiliation to the Catholic Church, such as a “nominal Catholic,” “non-practicing Catholic,” “lapsed Catholic,” “cradle Catholic,” “cultural Catholic,” “raised Catholic,” “buffet Catholic,24” and “C&E Catholics.”25 As anthropologist Maya Mayblin asks, “Why do non-believing, religiously indifferent, and ritually disengaged Catholics retain a [Catholic identity], becoming lapsed Catholics, whereas upon ceasing to engage in rituals nonbelieving and religiously indifferent Protestants tend simply to cease being Christian altogether?”26 Diverging from the trend in Religious Anthropology of studying the very devout or pious, my project tries to answer Mayblin’s call of studying the “many Catholics who populate these lapsed peripheries, particularly in regions [like Quebec] where ‘cultural’ or ‘non-practicing Catholics’ make up the vast majority of Catholics.”27 The parents who self-identified or are labeled by others as “lapsed Catholics” or “C&E Catholics” Neoliberal Italy,” Public Culture 21, no.3 (2009): 498-499.

22. Muehlebach, 499.

23. Mayblin et al., The Anthropology of Catholicism, 18.

24. The term “buffet Catholic” refers to someone who picks and chooses which aspects of the Catholic faith they will adhere to and which they will disregard.

25. “C & E Catholic” is the term for a Catholic who only attends Christmas and Easter Mass.

26. Maya Mayblin, “The Lapsed and the Laity: Discipline and Lenience in the Study of Religion,” 505.

27. Mayblin et al., The Anthropology of Catholicism, 19.

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yet chose to have their child follow the First Communion preparation classes were always the most intriguing to me. It was in these parents’ insistence that their child receives the sacrament of First Communion that I came to realize that there was more to the sacrament then being able to receive the body of Christ.

Mayblin defines “lapsedness” as a relational word that is only understood when compared to its opposite, piousness, neither of which is objectively measurable or quantifiable. Lapsedness, like other relational terms, is culturally and communally relative, and therefore the standard of a lapsed Catholic to one individual or group can be the standard of pious Catholic for another individual or group, and vice versa.28 Originally my intention in this project was to speak to “lapsed” families who had resumed attending Mass specifically for the sacrament preparation but who did not plan to continue attending Mass regularly afterwards, since that spoke to my preconception of being “lapsed.” However, I ended up speaking to a variety of families who fell along a continuum of practicing their faith, challenging my notion of lapsedness and its characteristics. All the individuals that I interviewed identified as Catholics and believed in God, despite the fact some had not routinely attended Sunday weekly Mass in six or seven years. Only one parent described his practice as being “lapsed,” and his explanation illustrated Mayblin’s relativity argument. Although others may have characterized his occasional Mass attendance as the “secularized” norm, he understood himself to be “lapsed” vis-à-vis his siblings and their families who attended Mass weekly and were involved in their churches.29 Thus, “lapsedness” is not solely measured according to what the clergy, the Pope, or the Bible states, but also in relation to the religious habits of one’s family, friends, and communities.

One of the mechanisms within Catholicism that allows for lapsedness is the principle of the “division of spiritual labour,” where the clergy has the principal role and does the “hard work” while the “followers (congregation) follow.”30 This essentially creates a “community of deferral,” in which the different church members divide the “spiritual labour” and allow for some people to take more active roles while others take more passive ones.31 The priests (who, through their ordination, have devoted themselves entirely to God) assume the responsibility of mediating the laity’s access to the divine by spending their time in prayer, performing rituals for the congregation, and sharing their theological knowledge. The laity (the non-clergy members of the faith), 28.

29.

30.

31.

Mayblin, “The Lapsed and the Laity: Discipline and Lenience in the Study of Religion,” 505.

GM, parent, September 2019.

Lehmann 2013, as cited in Mayblin et al., The Anthropology of Catholicism, 19.

Mayblin et al., The Anthropology of Catholicism, 19.

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on the other hand, are believed to be chosen by God to fulfill the biblical directives of marriage and reproduction. Thus, some lay Catholics feel like they are permitted to defer their “spiritual” active practices (like praying or attending Mass) to the priest whose job it is and who is better qualified, or that they may delay it to a later time (temporal deferral) when it is more convenient (for example, after retirement)—and can do so without jeopardizing their standing as a Catholic.

There is also difference between genders within the division of “spiritual” labour, especially among the laity, in which women often assume or are expected to assume more of it. One of Mayblin’s interview subjects, an elderly Brazilian man, captured this sentiment: “The wife, she takes care of all that stuff.” 32 This response was echoed by many of the fathers I interviewed from St. Benedict’s Parish regarding the spiritual upbringing of their child’s faith. Father Peter, St. Benedict’s caring and fair parish priest with a tough disposition in his late sixties, is aware of the role gender plays in a family’s process of their child’s First Communion. He addresses it at the initial parents meeting, stressing the importance of both parents, especially the father, being present for their child’s faith journey, equally sharing the responsibilities of going to Mass, praying with their children, and helping them prepare. Father Peter is adamant that both parents should be sending a united message through their actions; if one parent is sitting on the couch watching football and telling their children to go to Church but not attending, it sends a contradictory message.33 Among the parents I interviewed, the majority were mothers; however, I did speak with four couples and two fathers. In general, the mothers were responsible for getting the family to attend Mass, praying, and completing the catechism homework with their children, whereas the father took on supportive roles, such as attending Mass wit the family and picking up/dropping off their children at catechism classes.

Sara, an elementary school teacher, shared that her two boys would always go to her with religious questions even though she encouraged them to ask their dad.34 Amanda, a stay-at-home mom, shared that her husband had made it clear that if their child were to have a First Communion, it would be her responsibility to manage the catechism classes and obligations. However, when choosing the particular church, her husband insisted that the program be in English so his son could more thoroughly understand what he was learning, thus displaying a level of involvement.35 Cathy, a full-time working mother of two, shared the responsibilities with her husband, who valued weekly Mass 32. Mayblin, “The Lapsed and the Laity: Discipline and Lenience in the Study of Religion,” 509.

33. Fieldnotes, September 2018.

34. Sara, parent, February 2019.

35. Amanda, parent, May 2019.

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and thus brought the children while she occasionally joined them; however, she was in charge of bringing the children to their weekly courses.36 One father shared that his wife was not religious nor of the Catholic faith, so it was his responsibility entirely, since he wanted their daughter to receive her communion.37 Although Father Peter had good intentions with wanting both parents to participate in their child’s faith journey, some wives whose husbands were not interested in coming to Mass felt it added stress to their relationship and often led to a confrontation. One mother shared that her husband was an atheist, but he still supported her and did not stop her from passing on her faith to their children.38 She felt that with many more religiously mixed families, Father Peter has to accept that both parents will not always be able to be present.

Delegating “spiritual work” to a priest or a wife/mother is an example of Catholic leniency allowing for a “lapsed” Catholic identity to form.39 Another example of leniency within the Catholic Church was the medieval penitential option of indulgences, which gave the lay population, who did not always have the time or means to perform penance, an alternative way to be forgiven, their sanctity restored, and their status as “good Catholics” preserved through monetary payment.40 Practicing the Catholic faith (or any religion) requires time to engage in rituals, self-reflection and soul-searching, but many Catholics today struggle to find the time to do so.41 The parents at St. Benedict’s voiced how busy they were, working full-time jobs, driving their children around for activities, and running a household, and that it prevented them from practicing their faith. Father Peter, on the other hand, was adamant, insisting to the parents that it is not a question of time or business but of prioritizing one’s faith, which many parents agreed with but struggle to implement.

Mayblin argues that lenience coexists with discipline, which is always goaloriented and never purposeless; in the Catholic context, the goal is the cultivation of the soul.42 To receive their First Communion, the children and their parents need to be disciplined, as the children have to attend the weekly preparation courses, complete the weekly homework activities, and participate in weekly Mass. The discipline for some families at St. Benedict’s stems from wanting to achieve the immediate goal of receiving the sacrament, but for others, the sacrament is just part of the larger project 36. Cathy, parent, May 2019.

37. Luigi, parent, September 2019.

38. Vicky, parent, June 2019.

39. Mayblin, “The Lapsed and the Laity: Discipline and Lenience in the Study of Religion,” 518.

40. Ibid, 515.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 506.

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of “cultivating the soul.” As Mayblin and Malara argue, “Lenience provides religious systems with a vital flexibility that is necessary to their reproduction and adaptation to the world.”43 Although the Catholic Church has a reputation of being dogmatic, its mastery of flexibility is shown by its continued relevancy over such a long amount of time. The different catechetical programs that have emerged to cater to the diverse lifestyles of families is exemplary of the flexibility within the church. Lenience often has a negative connotation of “lacking;” this is the rhetoric which often surrounds these short catechetical programs, which are referred to as “fast track” or “fast food” because they do not require the weekly Mass attendance which many Catholics believe is crucial for the child’s faith formation. Mayblin and Malara argue against the implication of lenience as a “lacking,” rather understanding it to be “tolerance, mercy, clemency, grace, kindness, and compassion.”44 Catholics have come to understand God as a lover and as an understanding and forgiving father figure, rather than a harsh, stern judge, and this perception allows and justifies their “lapsedness” and lenient behaviour.45 This recalls a situation when Father Peter asked a father who was sitting in church with his Montreal Canadians cap on his head to remove it as a sign of respect. The father, in an antagonizing tone, told Father Peter that God would not love him anymore or any less if he kept his hat on in the church, and that he would still be able to go to heaven, what did it matter?46 Although this is a trivial example, the parents often use this rhetoric of God’s fatherly love (without the antagonizing tone) to justify or complain about aspects of the program they find tedious, inconvenient, or too strict.

Returning to the question of discipline, Mayblin and Malara state that discipline requires a lot of emotional, physical and cognitive effort, especially when instilling a habit. However, once a habit is rooted and is part of a person’s routine, it no longer feels taxing.47 The voluntary weekly Mass attendance is the most significant point of contention between the parents and the parish. Mass, for many parents and also for their children, is a cognitively, emotionally, and physically taxing task that drains their energy, making it a hard habit to root. Many parents stress to find time for it in their weekend schedule; between groceries, helping their children with homework, driving them to birthday parties, and activities, going to Mass becomes another chore on the 43. Maya Mayblin, and Diego Malara, “Introduction: Lenience in Systems of Religious Meaning and Practice,” Social Analysis 62, no.3 (2018): 1.

44. Mayblin and Malara, “Introduction: Lenience in Systems of Religious Meaning and Practice,” 2.

45. Andrew Greely, The Catholic Revolution, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 73.

46. Fieldnotes, June 2019.

47. Mayblin, and Malara, “Introduction: Lenience in Systems of Religious Meaning and Practice,” 9.

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“to-do list.” One mother shared that, though at times it is a struggle to get her children to church, once they are there, they never complain and seem to enjoy it, which reassures her she is doing the right thing.48 Many parents, like their children, complained about going to Mass, but once they were at Mass, they appreciated the hour of peace, the message they received from the sermon, and the feeling of recharging themselves for the upcoming week.

The program at St. Benedict’s requires families to attend weekly Mass in hopes of it becoming a habit, the repetition of which will allow them to reconnect, form a relationship with God, and feel the benefits of nourishing their soul. Mass, according to Catholic teachings, is a celebration and should not be a painful experience, a chore, or feel like an obligation; however, for many families, it feels that way. The program coordinator, Nora, a woman in her late sixties with a Master of Theology degree, clarified that while many accuse St. Benedict’s of “forcing the people to go to Mass,” she believes that no one can force anyone to do anything—it is up to the parents once they know what is required of them to choose if they want to continue at St. Benedict’s or find another parish that fits their objectives and lifestyle.49 Although many parents claim that the program can be strict, Father Peter and Nora prioritize the children, working to ensure that they enjoy the preparation courses and learn how to live their faith. There is still leniency built into the program; since Nora is aware of the challenges parents face, she tries to accommodate them as best she can. For instance, the children catechism program is offered at all three weekend Masses, which allows the parents to attend the Mass that works best in their schedule.

If a child is unable to attend a catechism course, they can always arrange a make-up session. Thus, there is a delicate balance that needs to take place between discipline and lenience—too much of either is ineffective.

Father Peter often jokes with the parishioners that just as you cannot get your mom’s lasagna at any other place but your mom’s kitchen, Catholics cannot receive Christ (as in the Eucharist) anywhere else but at Mass. Father Peter explains that while Catholics are called to have a relationship with Jesus outside of Mass, that intimate connection (literally ingesting Jesus) is only experienced at the Eucharist and it is from that connection that Catholics are strengthened to have relationship to God outside of Mass. Father Peter finds that people today will go to Mass but not have that relationship with Jesus outside of Mass, or they won’t go to Mass and unsuccessfully try to have that relationship outside of Mass, but it is clear to him that both are needed for Catholics 48. Vicky, parent, June 2019.

49. Nora, program coordinator, March 2019.

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to truly grow in their faith.50 I found a tension between the parents’ ability to confidently identify as Catholics and their ability to explain the significance of Catholic rituals and practice. One mother was relieved that I was not going to test her knowledge on the Catholic faith, admitting that she had Googled “what is First Communion?” in the car before our interview.51 Clarissa, a soft-spoken and articulate mother, had grown up in a non-practicing Catholic household but received her sacraments so that her parents would not feel judged by their neighbours. However, her preparation course was insufficient, and as an adult, she felt uncomfortable in the Church; she felt out of place for not knowing the prayer responses, when to sit or stand, and when to cross herself during Mass, which everyone else seemed to know. However, she was grateful that, at St. Benedict’s, she could ask, “What does that mean? Why do we do that?” without feeling judged by Father Peter, Nora, or the other parishioners.52 Clarissa’s experience exemplifies how faith is a taught practice, requiring repetition and discipline, that goes beyond receiving First Communion and its preparation course.

The degree of “religious messiness” and the imperfection that exists in all Catholic rituals is exemplified in the First Communion preparation and sacrament at St. Benedict’s Parish, enfolding the parishioners’ experiences of identity, heritage, consumerism, secularism, and “modernity.”53 The parents of the children are conflicted between familial pressure to uphold tradition, the desire for their child to have a relationship with God, and the neoliberal, cosmopolitan lifestyle which deprioritizes religious practice. The Catholic sacraments create a continuous cycle of coming and going among its congregations, allowing religious practice and identity to exist on a continuum that fluctuates throughout a person’s life—in this way, the sacraments are testaments to Catholic leniency.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Fr. Peter, priest, March 2019.

Vicky, parent, June 2019, Clarissa, parent, June 2019.

Orsi, 167.

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Sacred Ski Resorts Ignorance Toward Indigenous Spiritualities Propagates Human Rights Violations

cassiel moroney

In November of 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the Ktunaxa people in the case Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia. The point of contention in this case was the development of a ski resort by Glacier Resorts Ltd. in an area called Qat’muk. This area is home to Klawla Tuklulak?is, the Grizzly Bear Spirit, a supreme member of Ktunaxa cosmology and, most concerningly according to the Ktunaxa Nation, a spirit that will leave Qat’muk and permanently become inaccessible to them should any development take place there.1 Despite this absolute threat to their religion, the court ruled that Section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not protect this aspect of the Ktunaxa people’s religion; development will proceed as planned. This ruling shows negligence to the religious rights of all indigenous groups in Canada. Specifically, it demonstrates a narrow and incomplete understanding of religion, favouring Christian conceptions of spirituality and overlooking Indigenous ones. This ruling will make it harder to reverse an already-existing precedent against non-Christian religious traditions and denies them acceptance and space under religious freedom law. On a human level, it will also permanently destroy one people’s connection to their deity.

Glacier Resort spent twenty years negotiating with various interest groups in the Qat’muk area, including the government, stakeholders, and multiple Indigenous groups.2 The other parties were eventually satisfied with their accommodations, but the Ktunaxa Nation revealed in 2009 that any permanent human habitation would irrevocably cut them off from the Grizzly Bear Spirit and as such, irreparably nullify a major part of their religion.3 They sought judicial review to assert that it is their right, through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to practice their religion, transmit it to future generations, and prohibit their sacred space from being desecrated.4 The primary reasons cited by Chief Justice McLachlin for the ruling against 1.

2.

3.

4.

Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations), 2014 BCSC 568, ¶106-111.

Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2014), §IV. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2014), §IV.D.4.

Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2014), §V.A.(ii); §VI; see also §VII on discussion of the Charter.

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the Ktunaxa was that the development of the ski resort did not impede the Ktunaxa Nation’s right specifically to believe and manifest their religious beliefs, as protected under the Charter, Section 2(a). Preservation of the “object of beliefs,” she stated, is not protected.5 Additionally, she declared that the Crown’s only obligation in matters such as these is to consult and accommodate, and that both had been sufficiently provided.

The Ktunaxa were never guaranteed, nor had the right to, a specific accommodation.6 In order to demonstrate a violation of Section 2(a) of the Charter, claimants must prove two things: firstly, that the belief is sincere and secondly that the government’s actions substantially interfere with their ability to manifest that belief.7 The court’s investigations found the Ktunaxa’s belief in the Great Grizzly Spirit and the importance of Qat’muk to be sincere, but it did not meet the second condition. The justices claim that permission for the resort would not impede upon the Ktunaxa’s right to belief nor to manifestation of that belief. “This is a novel claim that would extend S.2(a) beyond its scope,” they argue, “and would put deeply held personal beliefs under scrutiny.”8 This is a troublingly limited and biased understanding of religion, specifically nonChristian religions: sacred space is absolutely a part of “manifesting” religion, perhaps not in Christianity, but it has always been a fundamental principle in most Indigenous spiritualities.9 To describe it as “novel” is a gross mischaracterization—it is only “novel” because it has long been belittled instead of addressed by the Western judicial system. Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority, Badoni v. Higginson, and others have all sought to have their colonial North American governments recognize land as a vital part of their religious practice, and been denied.10 In a mirror ruling, Wilson v. Block in the United States also decided a ski resort was more important than Indigenous religion.

To many Indigenous peoples, not just the Ktunaxa, “the earth is a living, breathing entity, a nurturer, a life giver, and beloved family member to be treated with unconditional respect.”11 It is not restricted to land that is used for rituals: all land has an intractable sacred quality to it and holds spiritual power.12 The earth is a major 5. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations), 2017 SCC 54, [2017] 2 S.C.R. 386., at 388.

6. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017).

7. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017).

8. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017), at 388.

9. Rebecca Robinson. Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018), 33.

10. Brian Edward Brown, Religion, Law, and the Land: Native Americans and the Judicial Interpretation of Sacred Land (Wesport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 3.

11. Robinson, 33.

12. Ibid., 34.

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part of many Indigenous cultures, traditions, identities, and religions. This contrasts deeply with the Wise Use Movement, started in 1988 and with a very visible legacy in the Americas, which sees the land solely as something to be used and exploited by humans.13 Despite the fundamental belief in sacred space, no framework exists in Canada to legitimize this aspect of Indigenous spiritualities. Indigenous territorial issues, certainly, have had their time in the limelight. In the “breakthrough era” from 1972 to 1992, numerous Indigenous claimants fought for the recognition of Aboriginal title.14 Unfortunately, the legal result of these victories addressed the “ownership” quality of territory and not the spiritual. Andrew Gray writes that instead of thinking of Indigenous space as one concept, it is helpful to break it down into components: that of direct ownership (“territory”), that of access and usage of its resources such as for food and shelter (“land”), its spiritual significance (“earth”), and its historical and semantic meaning (“landscape”).15 Due to the Wise Use mentality of the West, nonIndigenous people have difficulty realizing that Indigenous “land rights” extend beyond a desire for ownership or for resources—their spiritual and cultural significance must also be recognized and protected as any other spiritual and cultural group would be.

Kent Greenawalt puts it succinctly if Christians believed that Christ had been crucified somewhere in South Dakota, they would be dismayed if the government tried to build a casino on top of that location.16 Likewise, the Ktunaxa deserve to have their spiritual lands preserved.

Christian practices, particularly Protestant ones, focus on “belief” as the primary part of the religious experience.17 This can be seen from the definition of religion in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which uses the words interchangeably. “It presupposes and produces subjects for whom believing is taken as the defining characteristic of what it means to be religious,” writes Elizabeth Hurd.18 Belief, however, is not the only aspect of religion or even necessarily the most important one. (The Ktunaxa’s declaration to the court does not use the word “belief” at all.) 19 Religious traditions that do not fit this mold can find it near impossible to be 13. Brown, 1.

14. Dr. P. G. McHugh, “Profile of a Modern Jurisprudence—An Idea whose Time had Come, ” in Aboriginal Title: The Modern Jurisprudence of Tribal Land Rights, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.

15. Andrew Gray, “Indigenous Peoples and their Territories,” in Decolonising Indigenous Rights, ed. Adolfo de Oliviera (New York, London: Routledge, 2009), 26-27.

16. Kent Greenwalt, Religion and the Constitution, Volume 1: Free Exercise and Fairness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 193.

17. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “International Religious Freedom,” in Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 3.

18. Ibid.

19. Nicholas Shrubsole, “The impossibility of Indigenous religion freedom,” Policy Options, November 2017.

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recognized as religions, particularly in the legal context. Hurd uses the example of the Kich’e people in Guatemala, who similarly are seeking preservation of their traditional lands for spiritual reasons but cannot pursue it as an issue of religious freedom because their relationship with the land is not recognized as religious.20 Likewise, the Ktunaxa pursued the issue of Qat’muk as an issue of religious freedom but were denied because the court could not conceive of how central the land was to their religious experience.

The court clearly mischaracterized the Qat’muk as an “object of belief” and claimed they had no obligation to protect “objects.” This alone demonstrates that the justices were uneducated regarding the nature of the land. The law, Ronald Niezen writes, has a propensity “to objectify and concretize” that which it is focused on, resulting in “a disjuncture between Indigenous statements of the significance of their spirituality.”21 An “object” though Qat’muk might be, its spiritual significance is not.

To return to Gray’s classifications, to neglect the “earth” of Qat’muk is to neglect Ktunaxa spirituality. Perhaps “territory” (ownership) and even “land” (resources) are not protected by the Charter, but “earth,” falling closest to Christian conceptions of “religion,” should absolutely be protected under Section 2(a). Ideally, the Charter could be rewritten to recognize this difference in religious practice; just as Christians have their beliefs protected by the Charter, Indigenous peoples should have their sacred lands and their protection. Failing that, however, it can still be recognized through legal precedent that the Indigenous relationship to the land, “object” as it is, is equal to a Christian manifestation of belief. I won’t argue through semantic loopholes to say that the land is somehow a “manifestation” of belief as-is, but it is a parallel concept.

The land is a major part of Indigenous beliefs regardless of whether it fits the court’s limited definition of religion. Thus, it is still protected by the overall literal “freedom of conscience and religion” of Section 2(a).

Regardless of whether a Canadian court could accept sacred space on equal footing with Christian manifestations of belief, there is also the issue of balance in court decisions. The Supreme Court of Canada has a precedent of balancing competing values when absolute religious freedom is not possible.22 Where both parties have a strong and honest claim, it is critical to evaluate the importance of each side. Here, a ski resort was prioritized over the desecration of sacred ground. Judge Goepel ruled that no one’s freedom of religion, Ktunaxa included, could be extended to be an imposition 20. Ibid.

21. Ronald Niezen, “Indigenous Religion and Human Rights,” in Religion and Human Rights; An Introduction, ed. John Witte and M. Christian Green (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 120.

22. Lillianne Cadeux-Shaw, “Ktunaxa Nation v. BC: Bringing Aboriginal Spirituality into Section 2(a) of the Charter,” The Court, 11 December 2017.

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on other groups, as per the Loyola High School v. Quebec case.23 While independently it is a reasonable assessment, it fails to account for the imbalanced absolutism of this particular claim. The Ktunaxa religion only sought restrictions on a single area of land and does not discriminate as to who it is that cannot develop on that land, whereas Glacier Resorts Ltd. could have developed their ski resort in any other location.

Allowing the Ktunaxa to preserve the religious integrity of their land would not have violated Glacier Resort’s right to develop at all or even in the geographic region, but simply in one area of it. Similar, non-religious restrictions are virtually always at play in developed areas; for example, one cannot build a factory in a residential area.24 The Ktunaxa claim to freedom of religion does impose on Glacier Resort, but the imposition is slight in comparison to the irreparable alienation from a deity. A Ktunaxa victory in this case would not have opened the doors for any religion to stop any development, just for individual, specific pockets of land to be preserved for religious use. Returning to the pithy comment from Greenawalt—replace Qat’muk with Jerusalem and it is easy to see that the legal system did wrong in protecting religious freedom. Allowing protections for sacred space would not necessarily put all “deeply held personal beliefs under scrutiny,” as the court feared.25 It could instead simply acknowledge a new right, within existing conceptions of freedom of conscience and belief, that has been long neglected.

The official case document describes the Ktunaxa as “adopt[ing] an uncompromising position” in regard to the accommodation of their religious rights, implying that the Ktunaxa Nation were electing to be unreasonable during the accommodation process.26 They did not willfully choose to complicate the case—the historic facts of the situation were by their nature impossible to compromise on.

The Ktunaxa were the party labeled as uncompromising for their historic belief in one sacred space, whereas Glacier Resorts was not labeled as such for insisting on developing in that area and no other. The court ruled that the various environmental and economic accommodations offered to the Ktunaxa were sufficient and that they had no right to any one, specific accommodation. It is true that no one is entitled to their preferred outcome in a judicial case, but it is shocking that the absolute, religious, and sincere claim of the Ktunaxa was disregarded in favor of Glacier Resort’s, who had no equivalent restrictions. It is of course always difficult for a court to compare the “importance” of different parties, but in this circumstance, it is almost laughable to say 23.

24.

25.

26.

Ibid.

Greenawalt, 234.

Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017).

Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017), at 397, 406, and 409.

moroney • 117

that a ski resort and an ancient religious tradition have similar importance. This is not sufficient accommodation.

A final but positive detail about the case: the Ktunaxa religion obliges certain details to be revealed to members only. Some aspects are so secret that they are known by only a select few members.27 For this reason, the Ktunaxa Nation did not reveal to the court that their religion would be irreversibly damaged by development on Qat’muk until 2009.28 Negotiations started in 1991. Understandably, the late date could have cast suspicion on the veracity of the claim. The respondent Minister in the previous ruling of this case did recognize that the reason for delay was due to the inherent secrecy of the beliefs. Although in all other ways the judges failed to respect the unfamiliar aspects of Ktunaxa religion, it is notable that they recognized this characteristic of their religion as legitimate and did not use it to disregard the sincerity of their beliefs.

Religion can provide community, culture, and stability when all else has been lost or left behind. Indigenous peoples in Canada have lost enormous parts of their culture and land due to generations of forced assimilation and stolen territory. Today, they cannot even enjoy freedom of spiritual beliefs, as the existing cultural conception of religion in Canada does not protect their fundamental connection between sacred space and religion. The supreme justices ruled that the Charter protects freedom to hold belief and manifest that belief but does not protect the “objects” of belief, a distinction that is misinformed by a limited perspective of what religion is that specifically, even if unintentionally, targets and limits Indigenous spiritualities that are intrinsically tied to land.29 Furthermore, their judgment of “adequate” accommodation of the Ktunaxa’s religion did a distressing disservice to the importance and severity of the damaging effects of a rejected claim. It did not appropriately balance the interests at play.

No rights would have been violated by ruling in the Ktunaxa’s favor in this case; but in denying them, rights were violated, permanently. The Grizzly Bear Spirit has been lost to the Ktunaxa people and another ski resort will be built on sacred land. If Canada wants to have true “freedom of religion,” it must acknowledge sincere religious practices that do not fit a Christian, belief-centric model. Until then the existing laws will continue to accept egregious violations of the religious freedom of Indigenous peoples. This ruling is a step further away from inclusive, genuine religious freedom in Canada.

27. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2014), ¶241.

28. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2014), §IV.4.(ii).

29. Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (2017).

• 118

cassiel moroney is a U4 student studying World Religions and Computer Science. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she is fascinated by the negotiation of authority, scriptural and otherwise, and with innovative narrative design in digital media. She is a former BLUE Fellow at McGill’s Building 21 and a freelance game writer.

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