god's body at work ramanuja and pan en theism

DOI 10.1007/s11407-010-9086-z

International Journal of Hindu Studies 14, 1–3: 1–30 © 2010 Springer

God’s Body at Work: Råmånuja and Panentheism Ankur Barua In recent decades philosophers of religion espousing traditional Christian viewpoints of divine action as well as those who have offered substantial revisions of these doctrinal positions have grappled with the question of whether, and in what sense, God can be said to be “embodied” in the world. Thinkers with or without specific Christian commitments from different standpoints, such conceptualized as the grand monarch time-lessly exercising unilateral power over creation, but that a more imma-nental understanding of divine action can be developed by viewing the world as in fact the body of a temporal God. Setting themselves against the “perfect being” theology of Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm, with its specific formulations of maximal power, aseity, simplicity, necessity and timelessness, they have instead developed various patterns of “panen-theism” which they argue can highlight the real communication and interrelationships between God and the world. Along with emphasizing God’s intimate presence in all finite entities, they believe that this notion of the embodied divine can help to dissolve various paradoxes and perplexities that have beset Christian orthodoxy, such as the compati-bility or otherwise of human free will with divine omniscience, petition-ary prayer with divine eternity, the Biblical account of Jesus’ suffering with divine impassibility, and so on. Mainstream Christian thinkers, who are otherwise sensitive to the charge that God’s relation to the world has sometimes been viewed in extrinsic terms as the distant deity or the cosmic clockmaker, have nevertheless rejected this notion of God’s embodiment in the world, their primary charge often being that it dilutes

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the divine sovereignty and transcendence. Therefore, the proper concep-tualization of God’s transcendence, which in turn is ultimately rooted in an attempt to answer the question, “What makes God God?,” remains one of the focal points of contention between philosophers and theolo-gians who would place themselves at varying distances from main- line orthodoxy such as Merold Westphal (1996), Paul Helm (1994), Keith Ward (2001), Arthur Peacocke (1979), Philip Clayton (1997), and others. Many of these discussions revolve around the question of God’s embodiment in the world, as can be seen from a survey of the ongoing exchanges between defenders of traditional positions such as William Alston (who maintains the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and omnis-cience with respect to future contingents) and Charles Hartshorne (who is associated with a neoclassical dipolar theism according to which the world is the body of God) or between feminist theologians such as Sallie McFague and Grace M. Janzten (who offer non-hierarchical conceptions of the world as the inspirited body which God indwells without becoming exhausted by it) and opponents of these conceptualiza-tions of divine embodiment such as John Polkinghorne (who argue that the panentheistic God would be subject to cosmological transformations and not maintain causal independence from the world) (Alston 1984; McFague 1993; Jantzen 1984; Polkinghorne 1989). Theism and Panentheism on the “Body”

One of the reasons why the Christian tradition has historically been averse to the notion that the world itself is the body of God is that the crucial term in this context—namely “body”—has usually been under-stood, almost analytically, in terms of spatial extension. A physical body is contingent, moveable, and has a specific spatio-temporal location, but since God is conceived of (at least in classical theism) as impassible, atemporal, and outside the spatio-temporal matrix God cannot have or be a body. This understanding of a body emerges early in St Augustine who understands by the term “body” (corpus) any entity that is characterized by spatial extendedness, measurability, and divisibility and who, during his Manichaean phase, thought of God as something corporeal that was either infused into the world or diffused beyond it through infinite space (Augustine, Confessions 7.1.1, 3.7.12, 5.10.19; Holscher 1986).

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Significantly, he even refers, in his mature City of God, to the notion that God is the soul of the world (mundi animus Deus est) and that the world is the body (corpus) of that soul, so that the whole is one living being consisting of body and soul (Augustine, De Civitate Dei 4.12). This, St Augustine claims, leads to the impious consequences that when we trample on anything we trample on a part (pars) of God and that when we kill an animal we slaughter a part of God. Such a corporeal under-standing of the divine nature, with the constituents of the world as physical segments broken off from it, would seem to be one version of “pantheism” in which all finite realities are ultimately in all respects inseparable from, and self-expressions of, an all-inclusive totality or unity. While it is difficult to reduce to a shorthand formula the different types of thought that have been regarded as “pantheistic” down the ages, what is common to “pantheists” such as Plotinus, Lao Tsu, Benedict de Spinoza, F.W.J. Schelling, G.W.F. Hegel, and others is their denial of a personal God who is ontologically distinct from the world, influences the course of its history, and produces but remains independent of it in all respects (Quiles 1975; Levine 1994). This rejection sets pantheists not only against classical theists but also panentheists who hold that finite individuals, who are autonomous agents with libertarian freedom of choice, are “included” in God who empowers these individuals without any externality or mediation. That is, God, who is usually conceived as temporal, is not ultimately reducible to the world or exhausted by it, as in pantheism, but surpasses it by remaining independent of it in some respects and not being as utterly distinct from it as the timeless, impas-sible creator of the classical theists (Nikkel 1995: 1–5). Panentheism, therefore, affirms that the relationships between God and the world are characterized by inclusion and distinction, such that, in the words of J.A.T. Robinson, there is a “co-inherence between God and the universe which overcomes the duality without denying the diversity” (1967: 84).

Some of the concerns that have been raised in current discussions over whether the God who is connected to the world as the divine body is too mired in empirical finitude to be able to exercise directive agential power over it have resonances in the Vedåntic context of Råmånuja for whom the phenomenal world literally is the body of Brahman. As we shall note in greater detail, contemporary philosophers who have formulated con-ceptions of the embodied God have often built on an analogy between

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human and divine action, and, by utilizing the specific resources of his own Upani‚adic commentarial tradition, Råmånuja developed a some-what parallel homology between the relation of the finite self to its physical body and the relation of Brahman to the self-body complex. Råmånuja was able, in part through his distinctive use of the term “body” (çar ra), to elaborate a theology according to which Brahman is inti-mately present in the world not by being spatially extended through it but by sustaining every finite object over which Brahman retains a causal asymmetry and independence in certain crucial respects. In the process of investigating these parallels, we shall also discuss certain criticisms of panentheism as a conception of God’s relation to the world that is distinct from both classical theism and pantheism and seek to respond to these from within the contours of Råmånuja’s understanding of Brahman as the immanent sustainer of the world. More specifically, our discussion of Råmånuja’s theology of divine embodiment will revolve around his distinctive understanding of the world as the “body” of Brahman and his simultaneous affirmation that Brahman remains untouched by the empirical negativities of the finite world and that Brahman sustains at every moment of its existence the substantivally real world as the divine “body.” As we shall note, Råmånuja develops a distinctive type of panentheism in which the world depends for its existence on Brahman and, in a manner we shall investigate, is a “part” of Brahman, but it is nevertheless ontologically distinct from Brahman who remains sovereign over it. Contemporary Forms of Panentheism

Before we sketch the outlines of Råmånuja’s conception of the Lord who is intimately related to the world in some respects and yet retains His essential sovereignty over it at all times, let us examine some recent formulations of the notion that the world is the divine “body.” In this section, we shall discuss certain panentheistic conceptions of the deity which have been elaborated by feminist theologians who have charged that Christian orthodoxy has generally failed to take bodily experiences seriously and philosophers who have developed an understanding of divine agency in the world through the analogy of human agency. We shall then review some of the criticisms that have been leveled against


the conception of the supreme reality as embodied in the world and investigate what sort of responses are available to them from Råmånuja’s theological standpoint.

An important theme that recurs in feminist thinking about the world as God’s body is the need to overcome the various sorts of dualism that are allegedly associated with Platonist motifs and instead to emphasize the emergence of embodied beings through a series of complex dynamic processes into a multileveled reality whose dimensions are closely inter-related and interdependent. Sallie McFague believes that though the model of the world as the inspirited body of God is pantheistic, when it is combined with an agential model, which depicts God as realizing the divine purposes in human history in somewhat the same way that the human self seeks to fulfill its purposes and intentions through bodily actions, it results in a panentheistic view of God’s relation to the world. This joint model highlights both the asymmetry and the interrelationships between God and the world, the body of God: all embodied beings are dependent on God, the indwelling spirit, for their very existence, but God is not drawn into such a relation of dependency (McFague 1993: 149). The whole of reality is seen through the perspective of the body, first the human body, which is not a dispensable appendage to a spiritual essence, but which not only gives us our distinctive individualities but is also “erotic in the most profound sense, for it is what attracts or repels” (16). Second, extending this primary sense to all matter in the universe, God herself will be conceptualized not as standing over and against it as a King or a Lord, nor through the negative abstractions of the via negativa, but as indwelling it in a most intimate manner. Therefore, the entire world is God’s body, the divine milieu in whom we live and move and have our being, the place where God is available to us without however becoming exhausted by it (156).

Grace M. Jantzen proposes a similar theological model of divine embodi-ment in which God “transcends” the universe not as an incorporeal substance that hovers above it but by producing it as God’s self-expres-sion and maintaining it at every moment in its continued existence. She writes that one of the reasons for the aversion within (most) Christian traditions to the notion that God could be embodied is the predominance of various Christianized forms of Platonism based on the ontological hierarchy of the immaterial and unchanging Forms, corruptible physical

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bodies as formed matter, and matter itself as unformed and unintelligible (Jantzen 1984: 33–34). However, a proper understanding of the non-dualistic relationship between human personhood and embodiment may help us to grasp the conception of the world as the body which God indwells without being exhausted into it. Human persons can be said to “transcend” their bodies in that all their experiences and emotions, though embodied, cannot be completely described in reductionist terms merely as an aggregate or epiphenomenon of physiological structures or biochemical processes. In a similar manner, while God does not stand over the universe as a great Monarch but is intimately related to it in the processes of knowing and controlling it, God does transcend the world in the sense that the ultimate reality of God cannot be encapsulated in any mechanistic terms (122–30). At the same time, while seeking to establish that transcendence and embodiment are not incompatible, Jantzen high-lights the perfections of divine embodiment in the world. Whereas the control that human being can exercise over the physical aspects of their embodied existence is limited (they may lose a pound in weight but cannot grow an extra hand), God is more perfectly embodied in that God can choose the manner in which God wishes to be embodied in the precise configurations of the universe. The structural patterns of the universe are maintained by the operation of the laws of nature which in turn are sustained by God’s will, and though God is not restricted by these uniformities God freely chooses to (ordinarily) uphold them. Second, because the whole world is God’s body, all divine activity is properly understood in terms of “basic actions,” that is, direct and imme-diate actions that God performs without having to take recourse to any intervening mechanisms or media (88).

Jantzen’s argument that neither human nor divine personhood can be exhaustibly reduced to physical terms rejects theories of the mind-body relationship which hold that conscious states are properties of an incorporeal substance or that they are ultimately identical with brain processes. A similar attempt to steer a middle course between Cartesian dualist and reductive materialist accounts of human personhood has been made by Philip Clayton in trying to develop an understanding of divine agency in the world on the analogy of human agency. Clayton first rejects dualist theories of personhood according to which mental and physical substances belong to two distinct realms, and in favor of


theories which emphasize the close interpenetration of our mental and physical activities, he points out that exegetical researches have shown that the Old and the New Testaments too view the human person in holistic terms. Second, he refers to the highly contentious issue of whether consciousness can be exhaustively described in the language of neurophysiology and affirms that Christian theologians must here part company with the “eliminative materialists” who claim that mental predicates can be reduced by explanation to the material substratum of the brain. He accepts the theory of “emergentist supervenience” according to which higher-order mental properties, which arise out of the physiological structures of the brain and possess genuine causal powers on the latter, cannot be fully described in terms of neurological events on which they supervene. However, this understanding of mental phenomena as emerging from its neurobiological base points in fact to an important disanalogy between human and divine agency, for the divine life is not merely a set of properties that have emerged out of the world. Clayton writes that the crucial issue in this context is whether God essentially depends on the universe or whether God is relatively inde-pendent of it, and this is a theological question that cannot be conclu-sively settled on the basis of scientific results alone which underdeter-mine one’s metaphysical view. Theologians will here supplement these empirical debates by postulating that God exists as an agent ontologically prior to the created world and that the divine attributes such as eternality and moral perfection cannot be inferred from physical reality. In short, then, we have a panentheistic account of divine agency in the world on the analogy of human agency: just as minds and mental properties can exercise causal influence over physical reality, so too the transcendent God is causally related to the entire world, the divine body (Clayton 1997: 258–60). Criticisms of Panentheism

These recent developments of the conception of God as related to, and intimately present in, the world as the divine body have been sharply criticized on a number of grounds as not adequately emphasizing the divine transcendence. Given Råmånuja’s doctrine of the world as the Body that the Lord gives being to and sustains at every moment of its

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existence, which we shall explore shortly, the criticisms that have been raised against contemporary forms of panentheism would seem applica-ble to Råmånuja’s theology as well. Therefore, examining them will help us to highlight better in subsequent sections how Råmånuja’s conception of divine embodiment can be a pointer to an understanding of divine agential power over the world that is inspirited by the divine reality.

(a) Regarding the view that God has some particular body, we may start with the objections that the experience of human embodiment is associated with manifold epistemic and moral defects and that to be embodied is to be subject to the ravages of death, decay, and disease. However, as William J. Wainwright (1987: 72–87) points out, such earthly ills are not necessarily connected with embodiment: some late Platonists believed in celestial or astral bodies, and as for Augustine himself, the tribulations of our mortal life are a consequence of the Fall.

(b) Second, on the Augustinian-Cartesian understanding of “body” as a spatially extended entity, the claim that the world is the body of God would imply that the universe as a whole is some sort of a physical object (Wainwright 1987: 81). In response to the criticism by philoso-phers such as Kai Nielsen (1971) and Antony Flew (1966) that the notion of incorporeal agency is not intelligible, for if God does not have a physical body God cannot be said to act in the world, it has sometimes been proposed that the collection of spatio-temporally identifiable events be regarded as the divine body (Hudson 1974: 166–76). However, the aggregate of physical realities such as planets, solar systems, and galaxies is not usually regarded as constituting one body, and it would therefore seem that the analogy between the human mind or will govern-ing the parts of its (physiological) body and the divine Mind controlling the constituents of the universe as its “body” breaks down because the universe is not one and does not exist as a totality (Farrer 1967: 148). Also, Marcel Sarot writes that in the strict biological sense according to which the term “organism” applies to human beings and other types of living things the world cannot be called an organism for it is not a massive animal or plant. Nevertheless, one can take it in an abstract sense to mean an entity that appears to be a unified whole while being internally complex, and he believes that the question of whether the universe is an organism in this sense remains an open one (Sarot 1992: 235–37).


(c) Third, another point at which the analogy between human and divine personhood is alleged to break down concerns the issue of whether or not the human self is to be conceived in substantialist terms such that it can transcend the body ontologically in the way that God transcends the world (Peacocke 1995). As we noted in our discussion of Clayton, the God-world relationship is only somewhat analogous to the self-body relationship because while consciousness is an emergent product contingent on evolutionary processes, God is not a contingent entity in this sense. Philosophers of mind such as Jaegwon Kim (1993) who have developed the notion of “supervenience,” according to which emergent mental processes cannot be “reduced” to brain states, do not nevertheless believe that these processes are properties of a substantial “soul”; more specifically, rejecting the notion that the mind is an onto-logically distinct entity that exercises top-down causal powers over the body, they often hold that the “mind” is a set of higher level macro-processes which are grounded in basic physio-chemical processes. Further, several Christian theologians themselves have claimed that not only a host of Biblical passages but also the crucial doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection emphasize a holistic view of the embodied person and militate against Cartesian-dualist conceptions of a substantial soul. For instance, Warren S. Brown (1998) argues that the term “soul” stands not for an ontological entity distinct from the body but for our emergent cognitive properties, such as language, memory and future orientation, which make possible personal relatedness with other human beings and with God. Nevertheless, sophisticated defenses have been advanced in recent times for substance dualism, and J.P. Moreland (2002) outlines five broad patterns of such arguments, including ones based on introspection, indexicality of thought, and libertarian freedom. For our purposes, what is especially interesting is Richard Swinburne’s conception of the soul as the substantival carrier of personal identity which needs a body, though not necessarily this mortal body, and which God may sustain in being through a special divine act. Swinburne argues that the soul, which constitutes the core of the person, is metaphysically distinct from its body, but he rejects two senses of the term “substance dualism,” namely, that the soul is intrinsically immortal and that the body is an entirely adventitious entity which is not necessary for full personhood (Swinburne’s response to Adrian Thatcher, see 1987: 180–

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96; for Swinburne’s reply, see pages 191–92). (d) Fourth, it has been argued that in pantheistic conceptions God is too

closely tied to the world because God would be fundamentally dependent on the world in the way human beings are on their physiological bodies and God will therefore be overwhelmed by the modifications and fluc-tuations in the divine body. John Polkinghorne (1989: 19–22) writes that the attempt to develop models of God-world interaction on the analogy of human embodiment will ultimately fail because just as the human person can undergo various disorders and disruptions brought about by physiological changes, the cosmological transformations in the universe (starting from the singularity of a big bang to a possible big crunch) will have significant impact on the embodied God.

(e) Contemporary proponents of panentheism such as Jantzen (1984: 144) and Charles Hartshorne (1941: 230–32) have rejected the classical doctrine of creation ex nihilo and therefore have to deal with the charge that they have not highlighted the divine supremacy over the world. The rejection of this doctrine has, in fact, been associated with pantheists, who have usually accepted some form of “emanationism” which holds that the world “flows forth” from the unity which is its ontological base; consequently, given this close connection between the effect and its origin, John Macquarrie notes that “emanationism does not necessarily lead to pantheism, but it does imply that in some sense God [the ‘origin’] is in the world and the world is in God” (1984: 34–35). It is such a type of emanationism which has been developed by Macquarrie who holds, in opposition to pantheism, that the world is “outside” of God in the sense that it has a limited independence and, to distinguish his position from deism, that God and the world participate in one another (35–37). In opposition to the production model which views God as the Maker or the Architect creating the world out of nothing, McFague proposes a similar model where God is viewed as the Mother who “encloses reality in her womb, bodying it forth, generating all life from her being” (1993: 152). Though the world is formed from God as its physical matrix so that God sustains whatever is in God, McFague seeks to distinguish her position from pantheism by affirming that the agential God is distinct from the universe which God enlivens and empowers. This metaphor of the mater-nal divine also appears in Arthur Peacocke (1979: 142) who writes that a biological model that will highlight the panentheistic emphasis on the


immanence of God whose reality is not subsumed by the world is that of a (mammalian) mother who nurtures the growing embryo within her womb.

(f) A final criticism of panentheistic conceptions of the deity, particu-larly ones framed from within process perspectives, that we shall discuss here is that the embodied God is too finite to be able to overcome the evils of the world, exercise providential guidance over the shape of human history, and decisively bring about the “triumph of good over evil.” Unlike in classical theism where God non-successively and all at once (tota simul) knows the course of the world, the God of process thinkers takes in every successive phase of the cosmos into the divine life and presents subjective aims for the next phase, and the notion that God can guarantee or uniquely determine its specific shape of actualization is therefore rejected as incoherent (Hartshorne 1967a). In the “naturalistic theism” of David Ray Griffin, which is opposed to the premise of super-naturalistic theism that the omnipotent God can interrupt the causal principles of the world from without, God is not an enduring substance nor an impassible subject but is integrally connected with the world through a series of relationships that belong to the very nature of things. Consequently, God does not exercise “interventionist” coercive power over the world but acts in it through persuasion: “God is more the soul of the universe. What exists necessarily is not God alone, but God-and-a-world” (Griffin 1989: 48–49; Hasker 1989). Given this close connection between God and the world, it can be argued that the various evils, ills, and imperfections that are all too manifest in the world show that it cannot be the body of a God who is perfect. However, the “problem of evil” is at least as acute for the classical theist as it is for the proponent of the notion of the universe as the divine body, for the former has to grapple with the objection that, given God’s perfection, the world created ex nihilo cannot harbor any imperfections as God’s handiwork (Wainwright 1987). Further, both groups can make use of similar conceptual tools in grappling with the reality of evil such as the uniform operation of the laws of nature, the emergence of order through evolutionary processes, and the notion of human free-will as a divine gift (Jantzen 1984: 91). Råmånuja’s Understanding of Divine Embodiment

Having discussed some influential contemporary presentations of “panen-

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theism” as well as the criticisms leveled against them, we now move on to discuss Råmånuja’s doctrine that the world is the Body of the divine and how these criticisms do not quite apply to his conception of divine embodiment. Råmånuja (traditional dates: 1017 CE–1137 CE) was both a critic of his theological adversaries belonging to schools such as the Advaita of Ça kara, the Bhedåbheda of Bhåskara, P¨rva M må så, Så khya, and Nyåya-Vaiçe‚ika and an innovator forming his own synthesis out of earlier texts and commentaries in the tradition of the Çr Vai‚~ava religious community based at Srirangam in South India (for a brief introduction to some of the viewpoints of these schools, see Brockington 1981: 92–112). One of the central questions in Vedåntic exegesis and philosophical reflection was that of whether or not Brahman, the ultimate reality, has a “bodily” form and what the ontological reality of this form is (Eck 1981). As a member of the theistic Çr Vai‚~ava community (sampradåya), Råmånuja vigorously argued against the non-dualism of Advaita which states that Brahman (the supreme infinite illimitable Being) is pure consciousness. Rather, Brahman is Vi‚~u-Nåråya~a, the Supreme Person (puru‚ottama) who has a body of matchless perfections. One of the early texts where we come across the symbolism of the body in the Vedic corpus is the famous hymn to the cosmic Man (puru‚a) in the ¸g Veda (10.90). It describes how the world was formed from the body of this primordial Man, a body so extensive that it covers the earth, the sky, and the four directions. The Upani‚ads carry forward speculations about the ultimate principle pervading and underlying the world and the structure of the human body, and key terms such as Brahman, puru‚a, and åtman (“the principle of consciousness”) are often used interchangeably. In the B®hadåra~yaka Upani‚ad (3.3–23), Yåjñavalkya teaches that the Self (åtman), the inner controller, is that which has as its Body (çar ra) the earth, the water, the fire, the sky, the air, the sun, the moon, the breath, and all beings. A similar alternation between these terms is also found in the Bhagavad G tå (ca. 500 BCE) where K®‚~a is called the Supreme Person (puru‚ottama, 10.15), the Great Self (mahåtman, 11.12), and the Great Lord (maheçvara, 9.11). Moreover, the human body is called the “field” (k‚etra) and he who knows it the “knower of the field” (k‚etrajña), and it is K®‚~a who has the true knowledge of both (18.1–4). These are central themes which appear in Råmånuja’s theology of human and divine embodiment. During the


period of pre-Råmånujite Hindu thought, the nature of personhood and the configuration of the human psycho-physical organism too were actively discussed. The classical Så khya school viewed the human person as composed of two distinct principles, puru‚a (“pure spirit” or “consciousness”) and prak®ti (“mutable primordial matter”), and it is the interplay of these two principles that has led to the evolution of the manifest universe, including the human body.

In developing his theology of embodiment, Råmånuja had to counter two main opposing groups: first the Advaitins and second, certain propo-nents of the doctrine of bhedåbheda, according to which the relation between Brahman and the phenomenal world is that of difference and non-difference, such as Bhåskara and Yådava Prakåça. His basic theo-logical positions on divine/human embodiment are worked out quite consistently in the Vedårthasa graha (“the summary of the meaning of the Vedas”), the Çr Bhå‚ya (his commentary on the Brahma S¨tras), and the Bhagavad G tå Bhå‚ya (his commentary on the Bhagavad G tå). In the beginning sections of the Vedårthasa graha (para. 10–53), he outlines his main criticisms of Advaitavåda as contrary to the evidence of scripture and reason and affirms that the true meaning of the statement tat tvam asi is that Brahman, the abode of illimitable auspicious qualities, is the self of which the world is the body. Further, he criticizes the views that Brahman is qualified by adjuncts in the way that space is divided into space-units of containers such as jugs and that Brahman is essen-tially identical with phenomenal entities: both these views, Råmånuja argues, fail to preserve the transcendence of Brahman over the world of empirical defects (Vedårthasa graha para. 54–57, 58–64). Underlying his discussions on both human embodiment and Brahman’s embodiment in the world is a hierarchical or quasi-spatial symbolism of reality as consisting of the three “levels” of Brahman who is the supreme Lord Vi‚~u Nåråya~a, the conscious self (cit) and the mutable objects consti-tuted of pråk®tic matter (acit), the latter two together constituting the world of finite beings (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.3.18). The latter two are differenti-ated from each other by the fact that whereas pråk®tic objects—such as the human body—are subject to mutability and decay, the finite selves are imperishable and have always existed since beginningless times (anådi). The Lord Himself is ontologically distinct from both non-conscious and conscious beings since He is free from all sa såric

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afflictions and has attributes such as omniscience which finite beings do not possess (tasyaitasya parabrahma~aª sarvavastuvijåt yatayå sarva-svabhåvatva sarvaçaktiyogaç ca; Vedårthasa graha para. 82). The human body, therefore, occupies the “lowest” level in this “ladder of being,” the transcendent Lord the “highest” rank, and the finite self is at an “intermediate” position between its body and the Lord. Now consider-ing, first, the case of human embodiment, the superiority of the finite self (j våtman) to its body lies in this: the body is subject to intrinsic transfor-mations while the self’s essential nature, that of knowledge and bliss (ånanda), does not undergo any essential change. In Råmånuja’s hierar-chical symbolism of human embodiment, the finite self is “above” its body not in the physical sense of being located over it but in the symbolic sense that by enlivening and supporting it, the finite self draws it upward into its own conscious life (G tå Bhå‚ya 7.5–7.6). However, in its embodied state, the finite self too suffers from contraction or expansion of its knowledge (jñåna) through its ignorance in the form of its karma, that is, the accumulated “residue” of its meritorious or non-meritorious actions. It is the Lord alone who is utterly beyond transmutations of any kind, and He is “above” the world, which is His Body (çar ra), in the sense that all finite beings are dependent on Him for their proper nature (svar¨pa), subsistence (sthiti), and activity (prav®tti) (G tå Bhå‚ya 7.19). Consequently, on the basis of this hierarchical symbolism of the Lord’s embodiment in the world, Råmånuja affirms that the transcendentally perfect Lord, the abode of illimitable qualities (aparimitagu~åçraya), is at the same time the immanent Ruler (antaryåm ) of every conscious and non-conscious reality (Vedårthasa graha para. 87; Lott 1980: 26). The Lord, therefore, is the paramåtman or the Highest Self in the evaluational sense that the He is the very source of the existence of the j våtman and material entities which are subservient to Him (çe‚a) and He remains superior (paratara) to them (G tå Bhå‚ya 7.7).

At the basis of this quasi-spatial symbolism of human and divine embodi-ment in Råmånuja’s texts is therefore the notion, common to other metaphysical traditions such as Platonism, that what is less subject to mutability occupies a higher “rank” in the hierarchy of being. However, Råmånuja’s view that the entire world, including the spiritual non-extended selves, is the Body (çar ra) of the Lord, would sound somewhat jarring to a figure such as St Augustine or Descartes who understand the


body (corpus) as an entity which has various shapes and sizes and is a composition of divisible parts. In his commentary on the Brahma S¨tras, the Çr Bhå‚ya, Råmånuja considers several definitions of the term çar ra, and after rejecting definitions given by various doctrinal opponents finally comes to his own definition of “body”: any substance which a conscious being is capable of completely controlling and supporting for its own purposes (sarvåtmanå svårthe niyantu dhårayitu ca çakyam) and whose essential form (svar¨pa) is to be the accessory of that being is its “body” (çar ra) (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.1.9).1 In other words, for Råmånuja, the term “body” (çar ra) refers not simply to the material structure of a human being (or an animal or an insentient object) but more extensively to any substantial entity, whether it is physical (such as the human body) or spiritual (such as the finite self), that is subject to a conscious being (such as the transcendent Lord). Consequently, the relationships that hold at the microcosmic level between the finite j våtman and its pråk®tic body are homologous (with some significant asymmetries that we shall shortly discuss) to the ones that hold at the macrocosmic level between the supreme Self, the Lord, and His Body, the world of conscious and non-conscious beings.2

Two of these relationships are, first, the relationship that exists between a thing that is supported and its supporter (ådhårådheyabhåva); and second, the relationship between a thing that is controlled and its control-ler (niyant®niyåmyabhåva) (Vedårthasa graha para. 76). Råmånuja says that the human body is ontologically dependent on its j våtman for its very existence and temporal continuity since it cannot be “realised apart from it” (p®thak-siddhyånarha) in a way similar to that in which a mode (prakåra) cannot exist independently of its mode-possessor (prakårin) (Vedårthasa graha para. 62). Moreover, to develop the analogy between human and divine embodiment, not only the human body which cannot perdure without being supported by the j våtman but the world itself can be regarded as the mode of its mode-possessor, the Lord; for in the same manner that the substantially real human body cannot be realized apart from its finite self (p®thak-siddhyånarha), the world itself is ontologically dependent on the Lord and also derives its intelligibility from it (Lipner 1986: 126). Therefore, what the prakåra-prakårin relationship empha-sizes is that one entity which has an ontological reality of its own remains in a state of continuing existential dependence on another, and this is

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precisely the nature of the relationship—at the microcosmic level—between the pråk®tic body and its j våtman and—at the macrocosmic level—between the world and the Lord.

Focusing specifically on the latter, we note that the causal dependence of the substantially real world on the Lord is highlighted by Råmånuja in his understanding of the Lord’s activity of producing the world as His Body and sustaining it as its immanent ruler. Råmånuja writes that the Lord remains forever free from all insufficiencies and remains the non-transmutable abode of glorious qualities throughout the production and cessation of various world-orders (Vedårthasa graha para. 20). The Lord, moreover, is at once the substantial cause (upådåna kåra~a) and the efficient cause (nimitta kåra~a) of the world, and in the production of the world the Lord, Brahman who is qualified by distinctions, is non-dual with it (viçi‚†ådvaita). For Råmånuja, the crucial scriptural text in this context is, “In the beginning, my dear, this was Being [sat] alone, one only without a second [ekam evådv tiyam]” (Chåndogya Upani‚ad 6.2.1–3; Radhakrishnan’s translation [1953: 447–49]). He points out that the first statement which states that Brahman is the substrate out of which the world is produced might seem to imply that it is some other cause which produced the effect, that is, the world. This is why the second statement is added so as to emphasize that it is Brahman who is also the efficient cause in the production of the world (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.1.1). Though the Lord always has conscious (cit) and non-conscious (acit) beings as modes which constitute His Body, these beings do not always exist in specific forms that are designatable by names. In the state of a great dissolution, these beings exist in an extremely subtle condition such that they cannot be designated as different from the Lord Himself, and in this state He is said to be in the causal condition (tat kåra~åvastha brahma). At the end of this dissolution, the Lord with the intention, “May I be many!” (bahu syåm), produces various beings which have definite name and form and which constitute His Body, and this state is called the Lord’s effected condition (tac ca kåryåvastham) (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.3.18).

In other words, as the world unfolds in time, we find genuine changes taking place in it, and it is the immutable Lord alone, untouched in any way by karma, who possesses this capacity of producing new things in the temporal world while retaining His pre-eminent Lordship (aiçvarya) over the world in both its subtle and manifest forms (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.2.2).3


Now the notion that the Lord is the world’s substantial cause (upådåna kåra~a) would seem to mire Him in its finitude and all the imperfections that beings within it suffer from. Such a possibility is however clearly rejected through the use of an important relationship which underlies Råmånuja’s symbolism of human and divine embodiment, that between a “part,” which is ontologically dependent on its “part-possessor” (aøça-aøçin) (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.3.45). The world is not a part of the Lord in the physical sense of being a spatially extended piece (kha~da) of His substance (which cannot be divided into segments unlike an object constituted of pråk®tic stuff) for this would not only absorb its reality into the Lord but would also entangle the Lord in the defects of the world. Rather, the whole world is a part of the Lord who is its part-possessor (aøçin) in the sense that the world, the aøça, cannot exist without being a part of Him.5 In short, Råmånuja too would reject, in his own theological context, the view that St Augustine does in his own, which is that the world is a material fragment broken off as a constituent piece of the divine substance. Råmånuja’s commentary on some verses of the ninth chapter of the Bhagavad G tå further rejects any “pantheistic” identification of the transcendent Lord with the world which He rules over as the inner Self. He says that the Lord supports finite beings not in the way in which a jug supports the water that it contains but entirely through His will (sa kalpena) which sustains all the modes (prakåra) which constitute His body (G tå Bhå‚ya 9.4). Therefore, although the relationships between the immutably perfect Lord and the phenomenal world that He is embodied in are analogous to the ones that hold at the level of every human person between the finite self and its pråk®tic body, this parallelism must not obscure the fact of crucial importance that the control that the Lord, the Principal (çe‚ ), wields over the world, His accessory (çe‚a), is of a different order from the self’s control over its own body. The j våtman does not have the causal power to originate its physical body, and, moreover, its association with its pråk®tic body often leads it to experience suffering because of the unexpended karma that it has accumulated over past aeons. Especially, its control over its body is obstructed in those cases when the body suffers from injury, paralysis, and such debilities (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.1.9). On the other hand, since the Lord is not subject to any karma His connection with the entities of which He is the Support (ådhåra) is consequently a source of delight to Him and

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He has direct control over all of them (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.1.14). Råmånuja’s Response to Criticisms of Panentheism

We are now in a better position to see how Råmånuja would respond to the six types of criticisms leveled against panentheism that we discussed in section “Criticisms of Panentheism” above.

(a) In response to the first view that embodiment is always associated with defects, Råmånuja would reply that the reason why human embodi-ment is often a miserable experience is not because the association of the j våtman with any body whatsoever results in its affliction but because its present state of embodiment is an imperfect one. Enveloped by its ignorance (avidyå) in the form of its previous karma, the j våtman fails to subordinate its pråk®tic body completely to itself; consequently, the j våtman’s relationship to its body is one both of unity and opposition, and this produces an uneasy tension at the heart of the human person. That is, the embodied self’s misery arises primarily not from the (pråk®tic) “materiality” of its body, which is not an independent evil reality, but because it has not turned to the Lord with unalloyed devotion and hence undergoes successive births into this world and experiences all the tribulations that are associated with such finite existence (Çr Bhå‚ya 3.2.11–12). Therefore, the “material” world to which the human body belongs must not be regarded as a self-determining hostile domain with the causal power to inflict suffering on the finite self for such suffering is the result of the self’s previous karma piled up over countless numbers of past aeons.5 Now turning to the case of divine embodiment, Råmånuja says that in “ordinary life” too we see that human beings undergo pleasure or pain depending on whether they have followed or transgressed the laws of their rulers, but their rulers, though they too have pråk®tic bodies, do not themselves undergo the same experiences. This is even more so in the case of the Lord who, because He is not connected with karma, is not associated with any evil of any kind though He has the whole world for His Body (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.1.14). Therefore, just as a prince, though living in a place infested with mosquitoes, remains untouched by all its discom-forts, his body continuously refreshed by a fan, so too the Lord of the world is not touched by its evils (do‚a) but rules over it while enjoying all possible delights.


(b) Regarding the objection that the world is not usually viewed as an “object,” Råmånuja’s understanding of the term “body” in terms of an entity governed by a conscious reality is not associated with the notion that it is some sort of a system, closed or open, constituted by interlock-ing parts. Therefore, the “world” is simply a shorthand term for the finite conscious and non-conscious entities, and Råmånuja can refer to both these entities as well to the “world” as the body of Brahman (Lipner 1986: 123). Further, there are parallels in Råmånuja’s theology of divine action to the view that God’s activity in the world can be regarded as basic, unmediated action, so that we may meaningfully speak of God’s intentions, purposes, and love in terms of God’s movements through the world (Hudson 1991). A basic action, in the terminology introduced by A. Danto (1965), is one that an agent performs directly and not through some other action, and Råmånuja often refers to the immediate way in which the Lord acts in the world, His Body. Giving the example of milk which can turn sour on itself, Råmånuja says that in a similar manner the Lord, who possesses powers that cannot be fathomed by human thought, does not stand in need of instruments external to Himself when He produces the world (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.1.24, 2.1.34). Unlike embodied selves who are able to form new things only through their connection with pråk®tic objects, the Lord produces the entire universe simply through His wish and sends it forth while remaining essentially disjoint from all pråk®tic materiality (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.1.19).

(c) In connection with the objection that if the “soul” is not a substan-tially real entity, the body-soul analogy breaks down when it is applied to the God-world relationship, we can see that Swinburne’s version of “substance dualism” resonates somewhat with Råmånuja’s understanding of the substantial self (j våtman) which is ontologically distinct from its pråk®tic body, and, which though everlasting, possesses its essential nature not though some form of “natural immortality” but only because it is dependent (åyatta) on the Lord who is beyond any change (Çr Bhå‚ya 4.4.20). For Råmånuja, as we have seen, the embodied self is a conscious subject categorically distinct from its non-conscious pråk®tic body and as an enduring reality it “holds together” its mutable pråk®tic body and prevents it from disintegration. Briefly, three arguments that Råmånuja offers for the substantial reality of the finite self are as follows: first, the self has characteristics such as those of inwardness (pratyaktvam) and

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subjectiveness which pråk®tic objects do not possess (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.1.1); second, the permanence of the self underlying all its conscious acts is established by the fact that a certain object could not have been re-cognized as the same object over a stretch of time unless the subject of knowledge had continued to exist for that duration (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.1.1); and, third, an object of knowledge (such as a jar) must be different from the knowing self, and the body is indeed shown to be such an “object” in the experience of a person who declares, “I know this body of mine” (G tå Bhå‚ya 13.1). Therefore, given the clearly marked ontological distinctions between the finite self, the human body and the Lord, Råmånuja’s analogy between human and divine embodiment is based on the transcendence of the j våtman to its body and the Lord to the world.

(d) We can see how Råmånuja would respond to the charge that panen-theistic conceptions tie the deity too closely to the world of imperfections. His hierarchical “self”-“body” symbolism clearly brings out the Lord’s utter distinction from all finite reality which is completely dependent on Him. Råmånuja says that just as the spatio-temporal attributes of the pråk®tic body such as “infancy” and “youth” do not touch the finite self in its essential nature, the imperfect attributes of the embodied self do not touch the supreme Self, the Lord, whose Body it is (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.1.13). Appealing for support to scriptural texts such as, “He who dwells in the earth…whom the earth does not know” (B®hadåra~yaka Upani‚ad 3.7.3), Råmånuja writes that whereas the very existence of finite entities is dependent on Him the Lord is not dependent on or subject to them in any manner (sarve‚å bh¨tånå bhartå aha na ca taiª kaçcid api mama upakåraª) (G tå Bhå‚ya 9.5; Carman 1974: 135). As if to dispel any lingering doubts that his view that the Lord is the world’s inner Controller might imply that the Lord is in thrall to it in some way, Råmånuja says that though in the case of human beings, the embodied self derives certain benefits from its association with its pråk®tic body, there is no assistance of any kind that the Lord obtains (or seeks to obtain) from the world by having it as His Body (G tå Bhå‚ya 7.12).

(e) Recent attempts to formulate emanationist models of divine crea-tivity without pantheistic associations have a clear parallel in the case of Råmånuja’s theology in which there can be no ontological “gap” between the Lord and the world, because the latter, as the “effect” of the former who is its “substantial cause,” depends on the Lord for its very


existence and rests on an ontological continuum with Him. This under-standing of the Lord’s “originative causality” is based on the Såøkhya theory of satkåryavåda according to which the effect (kårya) lies latent in a potential form in its cause (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.4.23). In other words, in Råmånuja’s theology, the world is not created out of nothing but is always existent as the Lord’s Body, but at the same time, Råmånuja emphasizes the Lord’s transcendence over it by insisting that He does not have to depend on it when He produces it in the manifest form (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.1.19). The Lord alone is without any beginning (anådi) because He exists without being born and as the supreme cause who is absolutely unoriginated in every manner (G tå Bhå‚ya 10.3; Çr Bhå‚ya 2.3.10, 1.1.12). Though the world has always (nitya-) existed along with the Lord who is everlasting, this is possible not because it is a self-sufficient entity confronting Him but only because it derives its existence from Him who has always sustained it as His Body from beginningless times (Vedårthasa graha para. 81).

Even within Christian theological circles, the view has often been articu-lated that the central concept associated with the doctrine of creation is not so much that it is produced out of utter nothingness at a definite point in time in the past but that it is a caused reality which needs the divine sustenance at every moment of its dependent existence (Taylor 1974: 107; May 1994). For instance, in explicating the conception of creation that we find in Aquinas, F.C. Coppleston says: “Every finite thing depends existentially on God at every moment of its existence, and if the divine conserving activity were withdrawn, it would at once cease to exist” (1955: 142). A similar emphasis on the notion of divine preserva-tion as the core of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo has been placed by Keith Ward: “It is irrelevant to a doctrine of creation ex nihilo whether the universe began or not: that the universe began was usually accepted because of a particular reading of Genesis 1….God is not nearer to the beginning of time than to any other time” (1993: 248–49). Further, it has been pointed out that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo was affirmed by Fathers such as Irenaeus and Augustine in opposition to the notion that God was the Demiurge working on pre-existent matter and fashioning it, which seemed to threaten the sovereignty of God by limiting God’s power and creativity to the recalcitrance of the material God had to work with. However, we can circumvent such apprehensions by emphasizing

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that the world emerges from the Lord’s productive will and is ontologi-cally dependent on the Lord at every moment of its existence. Råmånuja would therefore reject the emanationist-pantheist view that the Lord is substantially reduced in producing the world, as well as the deistic notion that the world is an autonomous entity in itself to which its supervising monarch is only externally related.

In this context, one may note certain parallels between Råmånuja’s conception of divine creativity, based on a quasi-spatial symbolism of divine embodiment, and the panentheism of Hartshorne who distin-guishes between God’s “abstract essence” consisting of God’s essential characteristics such as existence, independence, and omniscience and God’s “concrete states” in which the temporal, relative, and passible God processually accumulates value from the world through interactions with it (Hartshorne 1948; Hartshorne and Reese 1953: 15–25). He regards God as the soul of the world to indicate that God has immediate knowl-edge and control over the actual things encompassed by the divine body that is “internal” to God, but God is more than and distinguishable from all of them (Hartshorne 1941: 174–87). In response to the charge that his God, who is not actus purus but has unrealized potentialities, is too contingent and dependent to be transcendent to the world, Hartshorne holds that God is in fact doubly transcendent with regard to two kinds of perfections: God is absolutely perfect in some respects (for instance, God can know everything knowable) and relatively perfect in some other respects (God cannot foreknow future contingents and God’s knowledge of the world continues to grow). Now Råmånuja’s theology revolves around the ontological distinctions between the Lord, the finite self and material reality conceived of in substantialist terms, and he would be opposed to process thought’s prioritization of interrelated events over perduring substances with classificatory fixities, in which “becoming is reality itself” and human beings are co-creators, with God, of Godself (Hartshorne 1967b: 113; Rescher 1996). However, there are some analogues to these Hartshornean distinctions between the divine essence and the divine actuality in Råmånuja’s theology, for though in one sense the Lord does not undergo any “essential” change, when he produces the world He may be said to have changed “contingently” in that He now has a Body qualified by finite beings (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.3.18; Gupta 1967: 67). Therefore, while the Lord is eternally perfect as the unchanging ground


of empirical phenomena that He knows, governs and includes as the inner Ruler, the Lord is also temporal to the extent that He increases in value in every successive world-order as the embodied selves move towards liberation (Çr Bhå‚ya 1.4.27). Further, while the Lord remains completely untouched by all defects associated with human embodiment such as ignorance and moral imperfection, the Lord is processual and possesses a temporal strand to the extent that He manifests the subse-quent world-orders in response to the karma of the individual selves which He does not predetermine or timelessly foreknow. Now in trying to explain how an eternal God with no temporal extension can relate to a world characterized by change, proponents of classical theism such as St Augustine and St Anselm hold that God “has” eternally willed whatever happens in the world so that when a certain event takes place in time, this is the temporal effect of a timeless will (Pike 1970). Consequently, the divine activity of sustaining the world must be understood as the succes-sive unfolding of the will of God quoad nos, not in se, a conception of divine action which fits the stasis view of time according to which all events exist tenselessly at their particular locations and are sustained by the durationless God to whom they are co-present (Helm 1988). While the notion of a timeless God is sometimes written off as incoherent or as a Greek “intrusion” into the Hebraic gospel, whether or not God conceived as eternal can be personal, related to a temporal world and contingent in some ways are intensely disputed matters. Without trying to settle these debates, we can note that Råmånuja would seem to be closer to process theologians in their acceptance of the process theory of time according to which future episodes are not yet real or determinate, so that while, on the one hand, the Lord is not subject to the vicissitudes of “our time,” the Lord is, on the other hand, not absolutely timeless in the activity of producing and sustaining the world (Zeis 1984; Craig 1998; Padgett 1990). That is, the Lord is eternal not in the sense of being atemporal but that of being everlasting, and the various puzzles that surround the conception of the timeless deity such as the compatibility of divine knowledge and human choices do not appear in Råmånuja.

(f) Regarding the final objection that the panentheistic deity is too finite to deal with the reality of evil, while Råmånuja does not quite develop a “free-will” defense of theism, his theology too seeks to affirm both that it is the Lord who is the ultimate cause behind every action and that never-

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theless the finite self remains an autonomous moral agent capable of receiving either praise or blame for its actions. He argues that the Lord has equipped human beings with the instruments necessary for perform-ing action and remains within them as their Support and inner Controller while with the help of these capacities they either perform or desist from action (Çr Bhå‚ya 2.3.41). When the finite self chooses to perform a certain act, the Lord aids it by consenting to its fulfillment, and without such permission (anumati) no action is possible. Therefore, though the distinction between divine causality and natural causality does not quite appear in Råmånuja, he affirms a parallel distinction between divine power and human activity, with the former not competing with the latter but sustaining it (Drees 1996: 105). That is, though the world is “external” to the Lord in the sense that He does not predetermine the conscious choices made by the finite selves, it is at the same time fully encompassed by Him for He empowers their actions. Consequently, the empirical inequalities that exist between embodied selves are a conse-quence of the fruition of their respective past karma in the present world-cycle, and the Lord is not the producer of suffering, and more generally of any evil.

Conclusion

In short, Råmånuja’s understanding of the world as the divine body and of the supreme reality as “transcendentally immanent” in it contains resources to respond to some of the common charges that are leveled against panentheism. Råmånuja’s formulation of panentheism can be further highlighted by referring to a notion that has been central in much of Christian theologizing about the God-world relationship, namely, divine transcendence. Råmånuja’s emphasis on the immanence of the supreme reality in the finite world is reflected in the Christian traditions which have had to tackle the question of how a transcendent God can take an earthly human nature akin to ours in every way except sin. We note that when transcendence is understood in terms of a direct opposi-tion with the non-divine world, the deity is reduced to a (finite) object by this very opposition; hence an emphasis on God’s transcendence must go simultaneously with a parallel accent on the divine involvement with the world and immanent presence in it. Kathryn Tanner therefore argues that


“If Christians presume that God is somehow beyond this world and is therefore not be identified with it in part or in whole, the theologian in the interest of Christian coherence adds that this non-identity must not amount to a simple contrast” (1988: 47). Thus a Christian thinker such as St Augustine says that God is both more interior to him than his most inward part and also higher than the highest (tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo), and in this claim we can hear echoes of Råmånuja’s view that the supreme personal reality which includes and encompasses all finite entities is yet “above” the world (Augustine, Confessions 3.6.11).

Therefore, even Christian theologians of a more orthodox inclination who do not specifically propose panentheistic notions of the divine but seek to develop theologies in which human persons, God, and the world are linked together in various types of interrelationships can fruitfully engage in a dialogue with Råmånuja. For instance, Charles Taliaferro (1994: 233) writes that an increasing number of Christian theologians have charged that anthropological “dualism” leads to the denigration of the physical reality of the body which becomes an external shell where the spiritual essence is encased as a solitary monad. He argues that though many forms of dualism associated with Gnosticism and Manicheanism have indeed been associated with depreciating attitudes towards the body, environmental degradation and patriarchal hierarchalisms that have equated masculinity with cognitive processes and feminity with bodily experiences, one needs to carefully distinguish between various types of dualism and not lump all of them together. His “integrative dualism,” which holds that the human person and the body constitute an embodied unity, seeks to affirm that our manifold experiences in aesthetic, emo-tional, ethical, and social contexts are firmly rooted in our corporeal substratum which is therefore not a mere appendage. Taliaferro’s point that there is no necessary connection between the acceptance of some form of anthropological dualism and an attitude of hatred or loathing towards the physical body finds further support from our discussion of Råmånuja’s conception of the human person as an embodied unity in which the “health” of the spiritual principle and that of the physical body are closely interrelated.

In short, Råmånuja’s views on human and divine embodiment are not simply of specialized Indological interest and can speak to a variety of

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contemporary concerns about the conceptions of human embodiment and the nature of divine and human interaction. In this way, retrievals of the views of other theologians from the Vedåntic tradition, by carefully contextualizing them in the current conversations, can help to illuminate ongoing debates in philosophical theology. Through the hierarchical symbolism of human embodiment and that of the Lord’s embodiment in the world, Råmånuja is able to affirm that the “body,” whether the body of the finite self or the Body of the Lord, is not be defined exhaustively in terms of material constitution, nor is it an entity that can exist without the support of its self, whether the j våtman or the Lord Vi‚~u–Nåråya~a. The j våtman and its pråk®tic body are indeed metaphysically distinct, but they together form one embodied unit which comes to know the world, engage in (moral) activity in it, and through such knowledge and activity also enter into a loving communion with its self-existent Lord who is both “timeless” (in that He is not limited in space-time and His bliss and other perfections are never tinged with empirical negativity) and “temporal” (in the limited sense that He responds to specificities of the changing worlds to which He is co-present) in different respects (Carman 1974: 130). Notes

1. Lipner (1984) has pointed out that for Råmånuja this is the literal

meaning of the term “body”; consequently, the world is the “body” of the Lord in this sense.

2. Overzee has noted that “the body-self doctrine provides a theological structure to hold together a vision in which the divine and the world are fully integrated, one with the other. It also provides a model for spiritual practice leading to knowledge of Brahman (brahmajñåna) through coming to know the true nature of one’s self and the world” (1992: 83).

3. Bhatt says that in Råmånuja’s theology “the reality of the world is recognised, the supremacy of Brahman is taught, and yet both are brought together into a unity” (1975: 86).

4. In connection with Råmånuja’s understanding of the ontological status of the world, Vidyarthi says that “it is not self-sufficient but is, in all its stages, under the constant care, control and guidance of the Supreme Person” (1978a: 130).


5. Vidyarthi writes that when discussing the Lord’s embodiment in the physical world “as its very self Råmånuja urges in quite unequivocal and emphatic terms that not even matter is essentially or intrinsically bad” (1978b: 158–59). References Cited

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ANKUR BARUA is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St Stephens College, University of Delhi. <[email protected]>

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