Self and text: towards a comparative theology of the self.

Thinking about ourselves has always been one of the main preoccupations of human beings since the development of reflexive awareness and different cultural histories have come up with quite a wide variety of views about human identity although often parallel developments can be seen in those histories. In this paper I wish firstly to make some remarks about problems in comparison in religion and theology, secondly to offer a description of two very different understandings of the self from Christian and Hindu traditions, and thirdly to reflect on what we learn from such comparison. Here I shall argue that comparison cannot be neutral in an old sense assumed by comparative religion, and that furthermore comparison necessitates the generation of theory. I shall conclude with the beginnings of a comparative theory of the religious self or, more specifically, subjectivity.

Reflections on Comparison

In the last thirty years there has been a move away from general theories of the self in cultures towards area specific studies which pay attention to the particularity of history and place. This is to be welcomed because universalizing theories of the self, such as psychoanalytic theories, sociological theories, and genetic theories, have been linked to a politics of representation that has often distorted the self-representations of others; one thinks of Freudian psychoanalysis or Marxist analyses of self in Anthropology. Often universalizing tendencies in comparative studies have been for the best of motives, perceiving themselves to be a liberating discourse or claiming to present others in an equal light, but often the comparative enterprise can be linked to colonialism and imperial power, as David Chidester has shown with regard to comparative religion in South Africa, or as Said and Inden have argued with regard to Orientalism. Part of the critique of universalism has also been the critique of essence which has been replaced by the play of symbolic forces, to use Deleuzian language, pure simulacra without original. This critique of universalism has lead to a reversion to purely area-specific study and specialization in the study of religions which has lead to an increased appreciation of culture, language and history in the formation of views of the self and, indeed, in the formation of particular theologies (and one thinks especially of George Lindbeck in this connection).

One extreme position in reaction to what it perceives to be colonial forms of knowledge is the claim that only indigenous views of the self have validity and only a culture's self-representation has credence. This is to disclaim that the outsider can know something more about a culture than the culture itself, which is surely a mistaken view that is as equally erroneous as the reduction of plurality into a single, overarching scheme. Furthermore, the reversion to area specific study has often meant that scholars have not shared any common language and have not recognized common concerns. This seems to have been true in theology as well as in the study of religions where theology has meant until recently only Christian theology. But there is an increased recognition once again for scholars of religion to speak across the boundaries of their particular area concerns, for theologians to engage with other theologians, especially and vitally Islamic ones, and for theologians to engage with critical social science and even with neuroscience.

In comparing and describing different view of the self across cultures I am therefore engaged in an enterprise that could easily fall under the sign of comparative religion or comparative theology. Comparative religion has come under severe attack in recent years for the reasons I have just articulated and comparative theology has likewise tended towards universalizing claims and seeking for consensus rather than demarcating lines of battle. The traditional distinction--and this is somewhat of a caricature--between comparative religion and comparative theology has been that the former has claimed the objectivity and critical distance of the scientist operating from the view from nowhere, whereas the comparative theologian has been engaged and intellectually committed to a particular theology or has been engaged in creating a new theology from different traditions. There has to be a reason for comparison and that has often been that a surface similarity has prompted reflection that two or more things share a common structure or essence in which case the theory within the comparison has remained implicit. But comparison has to be for a goal beyond the general aim of greater understanding and arguably the purpose of comparison needs to be linked to the generation of theory. I shall leave my consideration about whether this paper is comparative theology or comparative religion until the end, I suspect the boundaries between them are blurred because of the linguistic turn, but I do intend to generate theory from comparison. Clearly comparative religionists need to take seriously the internal concerns of religions and clearly comparative theologians need to take seriously the concerns of social science and other human sciences such as linguistics, a point made well by Gavin d'Costa. (1) Indeed I have great sympathy for Gavin d'Costa's view and his critique of a universal view of holiness, but whereas Gavin d'Costa concentrates on the saintly self and thereby on virtue, I shall focus on abstract conceptions of self and on ontology rather than ethics. Having made these preliminary observations on the idea of comparison I wish to turn to the substance of what I wish to say, the conception of self in thinkers who are pivotal in their own traditions, namely Abhinavagupta and Augustine.

Whether the category of the self is universal or not is open to question and is not my main concern here, but that the category of the self functions in the history of both western and Indian religions is surely of significance and deeply interesting at a number of levels. The theme of the self has been examined in a comparative context by a number of scholars, particularly in response to Mauss' essay on the category of the person (2) that needs to be seen in conjunction with his equally influential essay on techniques of the body and the introduction of the concept of habitus. (3) Mauss presented a comparative analysis of the self across the history of civilizations. For him the self needs to be located not only in psychology but in the social life of the group which cannot be separated from its material substratum. The self that exists in all societies can be analyzed into the sense of self, the conscious person, and the idea or social category of the self. This social category changes through history and, for Mauss, evolves from a socio-centric conception linked to membership of the group or clan, through a process in which the self (moi) distinguishes itself from the group through a specific role (personnage) taken in ritual and drama, to the fully developed understanding of the self as person (personne), the autonomous agent in Christianity that culminates in Kant and especially Fichte's understandings of the self (moi) as 'the condition of consciousness and of science, of Pure Reason.' (4) Within Mauss' scheme India has a privileged place in being the most ancient civilization to be aware of the individual yet, having invented it, allowed it 'to fade away almost irrevocably.' (5) While Mauss's essay is impressive in its breadth it is, nevertheless, limited in its evolutionist views, especially with regard to India. As Sanderson in a volume of essays responding to Mauss observes, India contained more ideas of the self than the renunciationist views expounded by Mauss; Mauss takes only metaphysical categories of the self and does not examine 'the dimensions of social personhood which are, as it were, the raw material out of which these metaphysical systems were cooked.' (6) Philosophical and theological understandings of an abstract self to be fully understood must be seen in the historical and social conditions of their occurrence. It follows from this that any comparison of understandings of the self must entail a comparison of the contexts of their production. Nevertheless, it is possible to offer descriptions of theological and philosophical notions of the self, as I shall do here, while deferring an account of the broader conditions of their arising. Indeed, it is to one of the traditions described by Sanderson as a counter example to Mauss' evolutionism that firstly I wish to give an account of.

This is the tradition of the worship of the deity Shiva that developed in the early medieval period and whose most articulate exponent was the philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1050) who lived in Kashmir. (7) Abhinavagupta could be said to represent the culmination of a long tradition of philosophical speculation about the self and engagement with other, rival schools, especially the Buddhists, whom, as we shall see, he sets up in his work to knock down. It might be tempting in comparative work to take a Christian contemporary of Abhinavagupta to place his work in dialogue with, such as the ascetic theologian Peter Damian. Such a strategy has the advantage of placing together chronologically overlapping thinkers, but this in some ways would be unfair because Abhinavagupta is a significant figure in the tradition who introduces an innovative understanding of the self as dynamic consciousness and who reads the revelation of his tradition through this lens. A better dialogue partner would be one who stands at the beginning of Latin Christianity and who is, like Abhinavagupta, concerned with the fundamental categories of his system and who reads revelation in the light of his theological understanding. That person is, of course, Augustine.

Even though Augustine stands at the beginning of Mauss' historical trajectory that leads to the individual and Abhinavagupta stands at the end of innovative thinking about the self, at least from a Maussean perspective, there is a potentially rich conversation between them. But there are considerable difficulties in the enterprise of comparison, in the very selection of dialogue partners and themes to begin with. Another problem is that the tradition of Shiva, erroneously referred to as Kashmir shaivism, is centrally concerned with the category of the self; the self is its main focus and area of debate. By contrast Christian theology through to the high middle ages is less concerned with the ontology of the self than is the Indic tradition and more concerned with the nature of God, universals, and other epistemological problems. Indeed, Christianity has not been particularly interested in consciousness and Etienne Balibar has recently argued that the modern notion of consciousness only developed with Locke. (8) So, the focus of energy is quite different in the Christian and shaiva traditions. This being said, there is nevertheless a rich encounter to be had albeit not in history.

Abhinavagupta on the Self

Abhinavagupta was a prolific writer, composing treatises on aesthetics, philosophy, and ritual and meditative procedures. There is no space here to locate him in the history of Indian religions (for which I refer the audience to the work of Alexis Sanderson). Suffice it to say that he is a shaiva Brahman whose deity is Shiva, who operates within an intellectual environment of rigorous debate between rival schools, within a political environment of royal patronage, and within a cultic environment of worshipping Shiva in ways derived from an alternative revelation to the orthodox Veda, namely the Tantras. His work takes the form of commentaries on revealed texts of his tradition (called the Trika ['Threefold']), especially the root text that he regarded as the highest revelation, the The Supreme Victory of the Goddess who is Garlanded with the Alphabet, and in some independent treatises such as his Light on the Tantras which is in effect a ritual manual (paddhati). His views on the self are expounded in all of his texts because his vision of the self as impersonal consciousness is at the heart of his philosophy and his particular understanding is innovative in the Indian tradition. The text that I will be using here is his commentary on his great-grandteacher's exposition. Verses on the Recognition of the Lord by Utpaladeva. I shall take two chapters as the basis for expounding Abhinavagupta's view of the self, chapter 7 of the section on cognition and the first chapter of the section on action.

In summary, Abhinavagupta's philosophy is a kind of idealism, but I hesitate to use that term because he is at pains to refute Buddhist idealists and other traditions that denied the reality of the world. The world is real, for Abhinavagupta, but nevertheless an appearance of consciousness or comprising consciousness. Of course, he means something specific by his use of that term. Abhinavagupta's broad metaphysics claims that truth revealed in the sacred scriptures is that subjects and objects of language and experience are both appearances of an absolute or pure consciousness (samvit, cit, caityana). Recognition (pratyabhijna) of this truth is a liberating cognition which is the spontaneous expansion of consciousness beyond limitation, hence the school of philosophy he articulates is called the Pratyabhijna, the 'recognition' school. In his commentary Abhinavagupta brings out the meaning of his teacher's, teacher's thesis that subjects and objects are in fact both identical to an unchanging, eternal power called the light of consciousness which is also sometimes spoken about in theistic language as the omnipresent Lord. Perhaps the best way to understand the position is to look at the opening verse of Utpaladeva's chapter 7 which reads:

    As for this [awareness] colored by a sequence of objects [which
    appear] within it, it is [nothing but] the Great Lord who is the
    subject of experience whose nature is non-sequential, endless
    consciousness. (9)

Abhinavagupta explains the verse to mean that the flow of objects of cognition and perception are appearances of the light of consciousness. This light in itself is without succession and without variety. While this awareness appears to be 'colored' by the sequence of space and time in truth it is non-sequential because characterized by an absence of plurality. This, Abhinavagupta tells us in his commentary, is the knower which consists of pure subjectivity or 'I-ness' (ahanta). More precisely, the divine autonomy (svatantra) of what he calls the mass of cognition which is this pure awareness appears in both external and internal modalities. Thus the term 'this' in the verse, Abhinavagupta tells us, refers to the external cognition of the pot as an object and to the inner cognition 'this is a pot', both of which rest on 'I'-consciousness. So the statement 'the pot shines' (where the term 'shines', bhati, has the implication of 'appears') refers not to the light of consciousness belonging to the object but rather the light of consciousness shines as the object. This is demonstrated, says Abhinavagupta, in statements such as 'the pot shines (or appears) for me', because the object always appears for a subject. The external manifestation of succession is only due to the power of consciousness which presents itself to itself as an object.

The student of Abhinavagupta, Ksemaraja, gives a simplified version of this doctrine in his summary of this 'recognition' philosophy (pratyabhijna) that consciousness manifests itself as though external and becomes wholly objectified and identified with its objects. Ksemaraja's phenomenology of consciousness presents us with a five stage description of the process of awareness, firstly manifesting or appearing as object (abhasana), becoming immersed in its object (rakti), the reflexive awareness or internalization of the object or the subjective representation of the object, the impression left on consciousness by the act of cognition, and finally the dissolving of that impression which means the expansion of individual subjectivity to Shivaness, its true nature. (10) The process then begins again in each thought moment or act of cognition. The identification of awareness with projected objects is, of course, a condition of ignorance and a higher cognition is the recognition of this process of external projection and a realization that the flow of objects apparently external to consciousness is in fact only constituted within it. Indeed, temporal succession and spatial differentiation are only constituted within consciousness. Utpaladeva's verses read:

    Time in reality is only succession seen in [the movement of] summer
    and winter, the birth of various flowers, and the movement of the
    sun [across the sky] and so on.
    Succession depends upon difference and difference is due to the
    existence or non-existence of a manifest thing. As regards the
    existence or non-existence of a manifest thing it is the Lord who
    has made [these] variegated manifestations.
    Due to the variety of bodily forms the manifestation of spatial
    succession appears. The Lord similarly [creates] temporal succession
    through the appearance of the variety of actions. (11)

The flow of objects is temporal and this temporality for Abhinavagupta, and Utpaladeva's text on which he comments, is nothing other than apparent succession. Time in reality is nothing but succession which itself depends upon difference (bheda), which in turn depends upon the non-existence of another. (12) That is, the particularity of an object of consciousness entails the non-existence of something else, but this differential nature of particularity is dependent only on the Lord himself who manifests the variety of appearances. That is, the power of time is in fact the power of the Lord to manifest the variety of appearances. (13) This is anthropomorphic kind of language for saying that manifestation appears within consciousness and that language itself is a sign (lingo) that points to and rests in absolute subjectivity. (14)

But it is not the limited awareness which is the subject of first person predicates that manifests spatial and temporal succession, although temporal and spatial succession only appear to the limited subject. Indeed, statements locating the subject in time and space such as 'I am sitting in the house, the wilderness or the temple' indicate how the limited subject is enmeshed in extension and statements such as 'I am no longer a child, now I am a man' indicate how the limited subject is enmeshed in temporality. Rather to the true, universal subject, objects of consciousness in space and time appear as identical with itself. Both self and world are beyond limitation.

Although the texts do speak in theistic language of a Lord who manifests space and time, Abhinavagupta's language is atheistic in the more rigorous form of his doctrine that the subject of first person predicates enmeshed in time and space is the appearance of a universal consciousness which constantly creates, sustains, destroys, reveals and conceals itself. If this pure consciousness can be characterized, it can be done most importantly in terms of pure will or autonomous agency. Absolute consciousness performs the five acts of creating objects, destroying them, and so on, purely as an act of will which is the very nature of the Lord. Indeed, there is a sense in which this pure consciousness can do no other than objectify itself in emanation and simultaneously recognize its fall into differentiation.

Abhinavagupta's commentary is a promotion of his own philosophy partly by a refutation of others. He critiques the idea of a self as an object of consciousness proposed by some schools, but above all he critiques the dualist doctrine of the Shaiva Siddhanta and, while accepting it at one level, critiques the ontological hierarchy of that tradition in which lower things have their being in higher. He also offers a sustained critique of the Buddhist idea of the absence of self. Abhinavagupta represents the high point of a tradition and with some exceptions there is a great silence after about the 12th century and we have no Buddhist responses to his critique. Abhinavagupta is keen for his arguments not to be simply his own, but rather to be reasoning from scripture. He has an ornate theology of revelation, which there is no time to go into here, from which flows, he claims, his purified and uncompromising philosophy of consciousness. I wish to highlight this claim to revelation and will make further remarks about it towards the end of my paper.

Abhinavagupta is clearly concerned with themes familiar from the history of philosophy (one is reminded particularly of Fichte) but also from the history of Christian ideas about the self, particularly in his concern with will, time and memory. But for a moment I wish to leave aside Abhinavagupta and move on to a brief description of some of these themes in Augustine who, like Abhinavagupta, has a deep interest in both revelation and the self, and a concern for the truth of his ideas through the refutation of other positions.

Augustine on the Self

Augustine inhabits a very different world and the language he uses to speak about the human person is very different to that of Abhinavagupta. The Latin animus, which dictionaries give as an equivalent to the English 'consciousness,' entails quite a different semantic range. Indeed, one could argue that consciousness in the sense of the quality of an individual's awareness is not a particularly important category for Augustine, although there are other clearly related categories that are important to him, such as substance, memory and the soul. But Augustine's problems are parallel to those of Abhinavagupta. Like him, Augustine is concerned with time and the relation of time to an absolute power. Like him Augustine in concerned with the nature of the self, especially in relation to the body, and like him Augustine is concerned with memory. Indeed, time, memory, inwardness and the self are interrelated concepts in different stages of Augustine's thought. As Rist describes, Augustine wishes to maintain both that the soul is created in the image of God and that the person is a composite of two substances, a soul and a body, (16) although the emphasis does seem to shift from the more Platonic concern with the soul as a distinct substance to the Christian concern with bodily resurrection. A theme strongly developed throughout his work is that of inwardness or interiority which, Cary claims, is invented in a full form by Augustine; that truth lies within and that an inner world or inner space contains the truth of God accessed through introspection. (17) Understanding oneself through introspection is not an end in itself but leads to God 'who is more truly within him than he is within himself (interior intimeo meo). (18) There are different stages in the complex development of Augustine's thinking but let us take a passage from the mature Augustine of the Confessions to develop some of these themes. Here he is speaking about the power of memory and the way memory is entailed in personal identity.

    So I must go beyond this natural faculty of mine [i.e. the body] as
    I rise by stages towards the God who made me. The next stage is
    memory, which is like a great field of a spacious palace, a
    storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to
    it by the senses. In it are stored away all the thoughts by which we
    enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at
    which we arrive through the senses, an it also contains anything
    else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping until such a
    time as these things are swallowed up and buried in
    forgetfulness. (19)

He goes on to underline the power of memory (... memoria) as a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. (20)

We have in Augustine the Neo-Platonic idea of ascent to God and that this ascent in something which occurs in a person's interiority. Augustine develops and elaborates this model so that memory, a stage beyond the body in this hierarchy, becomes vast like an inner landscape. Indeed, one is reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins writing over one and a half thousand years later that 'O the mind, mind has mountains' (21) perhaps reflecting an idea that occurs according to Clary for the first time here. Memory is a great chamber containing not only memories of the past but forms of knowledge, a place 'where all those images of great things are stored,' (22) and above all a place where God can be found, the ultimate meaning of human life.

Augustine's memoria has a wider semantic range than its English translation and is a power that prevents the progress of the devotee towards self knowledge and towards God through raising obstacles such as desire and curiosity, but also a power which enables that progress through the recollection of God. It is at the heart of the self and constitutes self-identity telling us not so much what we are as that we are. (23) Neo-Platonic language would have the soul rising towards the One within interiority but Augustine's treatise is far less clinical than this and he dwells in the idea of interiority identified with the vastness of memoria but which is also intimate and particular to oneself. Indeed, he relates the verb for 'I think', cogito to the verb 'I gather', cogo, in the sense that a life gathers memories through time. (24)

The true self then, the soul, is an immaterial substance whose source of life is in the higher world found within the person. For Plotinus this inner self lies in the intelligible world whereas for Augustine the soul lies in a middle realm between the sensible and the intelligible, although there are different views presented in the development of Augustine's thinking about the relationship between body and soul. But we can say that the mature Augustine unequivocally rejects the Manichaean's rejection of the flesh as 'human vanity, not divine truth' (25) and rejects the Platonic view of body and soul because it ascribes all vices to the flesh, although better than that of the Manichaeans. Augustine sees the whole human person, the persona, as comprising both. In the City of God we read:

    For man is not a body alone not a soul alone; rather, he is composed
    of both soul and body. It is indeed true that the soul is not the
    whole man, but the better part of man, and that the body is not the
    whole man but the inferior part of man; and it is when both are
    joined together that they receive the name of man. (26)

A man is a conjunction (coniunctum) of both parts. 'Blending', says Rist, 'seems to be the best single word available in English to describe the constant in Augustine's developing view of the relationship between soul and body' (27) which conveys the sense of the Latin coniunctum, as above, mixtura, and contemperatio. With Augustine we have a person as a single rational being, comprising both soul and body.

Towards a Comparative Theology of the Self

We are, with Augustine's persona, well along the way in Mauss' evolutionary scheme towards the development of the modern notion of the self. For Mauss, a comparative study of the self across cultures shows the inadequacy of accounts other than that of the western individual, but such a scheme, in spite of Mauss's breadth of knowledge, must be rejected not only for its oversimplification of other civilizations, particularly India, but also for its lack of justification for the moral superiority of the view of the self that he advocates. But surely Mauss's desire to understand the human person through comparison of different and diverse views in different languages and cultures is laudable. Could there not be a world history of cultures? Comparison clarifies what we are in relation to what we are not and presents the opportunity to offer more general theoretical accounts of the self. The descriptions I have presented of Abhinavagupta's and Augustine's views of the self immediately strike us for their difference. Indeed, in many ways these views of the self could not be further from each other--the one presenting a rejection of dualism in favor of a monistic philosophy of consciousness, the other similarly rejecting dualism in favor of a philosophy of the person which struggles with a dualist tension. These descriptions arguably demonstrate the cultural-linguistic particularity of views of the self and how, in Lindbeck's terms, 'the linguistic-cultural model is part of an outlook that stresses the degree to which human experience is shaped, molded, and in a sense constituted by cultural and linguistic forms.' (28)

But because all humans are shaped by language and culture does not mean that we are inescapably trapped in closed cultural worlds as some extreme postmodern theorists in the late twentieth century might have claimed. We can learn each others languages and if religions are characterized in terms of performance and the internalization of certain skills, behaviors and narratives, then we can, at least partially, learn to inhabit the religious and cultural worlds of others. We may not want to, of course, and remaining within a closed cultural world is certainly an option (an option, in my view, with dire political consequences). But arguably Theology has a duty to critically engage not only with secular Philosophy but other religions in order that its concerns remain relevant to the wider intellectual culture we inhabit. One of its tasks is arguably the clarification of difference, a model presented by John Clayton derived from the Indian philosophical tradition. (29) Part of my task today is clearly within this frame of thinking; namely the clarification of difference as regards views of the self in two exemplars of the Christian and shaiva traditions. We can also go further than the clarification of difference and this is to generate theory at a different level about the nature of that difference and the nature of similarity. That is, accepting the cultural-linguistic thesis about religion put forward by Lindbeck in a theological context some years ago and by others in Anthropological and Religions Studies contexts, we can nevertheless propose theories which do not so much account for diverse views of the self, but offer some account of the ways those views function within the traditions. In contrast to the Maussian evolutionist approach to comparison, I would therefore wish to claim that to understand diverse theological accounts of the self we need at one level (or initially) a phenomenological account but also need to go further than this to an interpretative and dialogical account that allows different theological articulations of the self to speak to each other and to present theologically informed theory of traditions; a theory of traditions that also allows for critical engagement with social science. I would therefore wish to present what might be called a first level phenomenology of the self which is descriptive across traditions and a second level hermeneutical phenomenology that allows the generation of theory.

A First Level Phenomenology of the Self

Although severely criticized in recent years, not least by myself, a descriptive phenomenology along the lines advocated by my old teacher Ninian Smart does have some merits but it is not sufficient to rest there. We need to go beyond description or beyond phenomenology understood as mere description. I do not wish to rehearse old arguments that critique the phenomenology of religion--that it can never be neutral and without theory but covers over implicit theoretical and theological assumptions and that it entails a problematic philosophy of consciousness--but would wish to reclaim its merits. The key idea in a first level phenomenology is the suspension of the being behind appearances, Husserl's epoche, which has often been incoherently understood by some Religious Studies colleagues as the suspension of subjectivity and belief. This is a letting be seen that which shows itself. While this suspension of the being behind appearances has been criticized as impossible, we can arguably use the epoche strategically in simply describing views of the self. It is at this level of description that I have presented, albeit briefly, the views of Abhinavagupta and Augustine. Within such a descriptive phenomenology we can develop thematic comparison such as the links between self, time and memory.

Although they are both concerned with the human person and his relation to the world and to a transcendent power, at a first level phenomenology the differences between Abhinavagupta and Augustine are striking. Abhinavagupta sees both subjects and objects as appearances of a supreme, universal consciousness in contrast to Augustine's separation of world, subject of first person predicates, and Lord. Abhinagavupta's analysis is focussed on ontology and a phenomenology of consciousness, Augustine's analysis is focused more on ethics and the fallen state of human beings in relation to their potential. For Augustine there is a gulf to the bridged between self and God through a process of an inner exploration and withdrawal from sensory world, for Abhinavagupta there is a radical undermining of hierarchy in the spontaneous recognition that one's true identity is a universal consciousness and that this expansion of consciousness is the cognition that subjects and objects are co-constituted in it.

Within the shaiva traditions other positions could have been taken that more closely resemble Augustine, or perhaps more closely resemble his Neo-Platonist sources, that the divine is located within a person realized in an inner worship or inner sacrifice (antary_ga), that the journey of the self to the Lord is through a hierarchy of stages located within the person, and that the mind takes on the form of its objects. But the innovative doctrines of Abhinavagupta and Augustine serve to highlight the distinctive character of each.

But we must not overemphasize the differences as there are also similarities in their views of the self, perhaps because both are functioning in a pre-modern world in which human life is located in a broader cosmology. For example, both Abhinavagupta and Augustine are concerned with time and therefore with memory. For Augustine, from a human perspective time moves from the future to the past and is intimately associated with the movement of objects. (30) God, who is in eternity, does not perceive time in this way but rather experiences past and future as a present and in so far as we become like God we transcend time. (31) Thus memory for Augustine gives us access to partial and incomplete knowledge of the past, a knowledge distorted by the fall, which for God is complete, undistorted and present. In this sense, God does not remember anything, all time being present before his gaze immediately. For Abhinavaupta time is the succession of objects in space although from the perspective of absolute consciousness all apparent temporal succession is experienced as simultaneous. Both thinkers make the same philosophical move in characterizing the ultimate reference of their systems, God and supreme consciousness, as being outside of time.

But this move does not allow us to identify these two reference points. Augustine's God and Abhinavagupta's samvit are so intimately connected with other doctrines in their systems and the process of reasoning that has lead to their assertion that such an inference would be unjustified. But it does indicate a parallelism of process and of theological reasoning. Both thinkers assume the revelations of their tradition--Augustine the witness of the Gospels to the revelation of Christ, Abhinavagupta the highest revelation of his non-dual shaiva scriptures--and both thinkers develop reasoning from their texts. Indeed, their arguments are peppered with scriptural quotation which they assume has intrinsic authority and which gives force to their arguments. Furthermore in their scripture based arguments they are both responding to previous thinkers and other, rival philosophical and theological positions. Augustine is rejecting Manichaeism, rejecting the Pagan gods, and adapting Platonism to Christianity. Abhinavagupta is rejecting shaiva dualism, rejecting the Buddhist philosophers (especially the ones close to himself) and conscripting non-dual shaiva philosophies to the service of his own position.

I do not think that we can find common ontologies here. But we can find shared processes of reasoning in textual traditions of revelation. We can take Augustine and Abhinavagupta as exemplars that illustrate a general theory that self and text are inseparable in theological discourse and that the theological self is formed by the text. Such a religious subjectivity, formed by text and the history of traditions, is a resource that can function in the development of contemporary theological theory. Let me end by moving away from simple text-historical description of a first level phenomenology to a second level hermeneutical phenomenology which can offer a theologically informed theory of the religious self. I wish to move from a descriptive phenomenology to a necessarily weak Theology.

A Second Level Hermeneutical Phenomenology

What our first level or descriptive phenomenology has shown is that accounts of the self in different traditions that describe the self in terms of tradition specific problems and categories, cannot be reduced to a universal account. As Gavin d'Costa has shown with holiness, we cannot assume that the category of the self is trans-religious found in many different religions, although with the self there may well be some universals because all persons are bounded by a narrative, as McIntyre reminds us, that entails birth and death, beginnings and endings, the body, and languages in which one can (surely) say 'I want.' But to do theological justice to the self-representations of traditions we need to resist the modernist impulse to universalizing claims about the self, even if, in the end, we do arrive at some shared features. There needs to be a hesitation and such a hesitation is allowed in the first instance by our descriptive phenomenology if it is a true attempt at allowing the voice of the other to speak, and secondly by a hermeneutical phenomenology that allows the distinctive nature of theories of the self to remain while presenting interpretative theories that relate these diverse accounts in meaningful ways. I am happy to call such an account a weak theology, weak in the sense that it does not consciously stand in a Christian or shaiva theological tradition but nevertheless theology because it takes seriously traditions' accounts of the self and the self's relation to world and putative transcendence. Indeed, a comparative theology is weak by necessity in not wishing to read the texts of others in a way that subordinates other's scriptures but is nevertheless hermeneutical in offering readings consciously developed.

Such a weak theology which is a kind of hermeneutical phenomenology of the self might look like something as follows. In both Augustine and Abhinavagupta we have a vision of the self as a category that operates outside of the everyday, transactional world but one which is constructed through a reading of sacred scripture. Abhinavagupta's vision of the subject and object as constituted within a spontaneous expansion of consciousness is a doctrine that should be known in experience but is mediated through the texts of tradition. The spontaneous expansion of consciousness that Abhinavagupta presents is the articulation of a textually mediated subjectivity. Similarly, Augustine's account of the self as being the location of the encounter with God is closely linked with his understanding of Christian revelation and is constantly textually supported. Furthermore, through the descriptive phenomenology we can see that behind their particular understandings is a view of the self embedded within a hierarchical cosmology in which lower forms have their being in higher. Augustine modifies this to lay stress on the individual whereas Abhinavagupta radically interprets it to the extent that it is dissolved in the ecstatic recognition of the self as pure subjectivity. If there is only pure consciousness how can there be any impurity? he rhetorically asks. But both views of the self are textually located and justified through revelation of a truth that transcends limited, human functioning.

Let me finally briefly turn to speculation about what a theological religious studies might look like. My main concern here has been with the ontology of the self as represented in two pre-modern thinkers which has implicitly refused to render theological concerns as purely concerns of economics, politics or gender. This is not to say that such concerns are not relevant--the issue of gender and the silence about gender in these texts cries out for analysis--but it is to privilege internal accounts. My problem has been how we can hear these internal accounts and what they can say to us and to each other in the place of my scholarship. I hope to have shown that we are not dealing with common ontologies, that we need to resist the reduction to a universal category of the self or a Maussian evolutionary scheme, that tradition specific views of the self develop through tradition-internal, textual reasoning, and that the history of religions might be a resource for the construction of comparative theological agendas which, I think, must be necessarily weak.

Works Cited

Augustine Confessions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004).

Augustine City of God (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)

Balibar, E. 'Introduction', in Locke, John Identite et difference: L'invention de la conscience. Translated by and commentary by Etienne Balibar (Paris: Seuil, 1998).

Carruthers, Michael, Steven Collins, Steven Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Cary, Phillip Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (OUP, 2000).

Clayton, John 'Thomas Jefferson and the Study of Religion', Inaugural Lecture, University of Lancaster, 1992.

Dyczkowski, Mark The Doctrine of Vibration (Albany: SUNY, 1988).

Mauss, M. 'A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self.' (trs W.D. Halls) in Carruthers et al (eds) The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, pp. 1-25.

Mauss, M. 'Techniques of the Body' in Sociology and Psychology trs. B. Brewster (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979 [1935]).

Rist, John M. Augustine (Cambridge: CUP, 1994).

Sanderson, Alexis 'Purity and power among the Brhamans of Kashmir.' In Carruthers et al (eds) The Category of the Person, pp. 190-216.

Notes

1. Gavin d'Costa, paper delivered at the Society for the Study of Theology, April 2006.

2. Mauss, M. 'A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self,' (trs W.D. Halls) in Carruthers, Michael, Steven Collins, Steven Lukes (eds) The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1-25.

3. Mauss, 'Techniques of the Body' in Sociology and Psychology trs. B. Brewster (London: Routledge 4. Kegan Paul, 1979 [1935]), pp. 00-00.

4. Mauss, 'A category of the human mind', p. 22.

5. Mauss, 'A category of the human mind,' p. 13.

6. Sanderson, Alexis 'Purity and power among the Brahmans of Kashmir,' p. 190. In Carruthers et al (eds) The Category of the Person, pp. 190-216.

7. On this tradition see the work of Sanderson. On the social conditions see 'Purity and power' (above); on ritual and cultic context see 'The meanings of ritual ...' on Abhinavagupta's philosophy see 'A commentary on /..' see also Mark Dyczkowski The Doctrine of Vibration (SUNY, 1988).

8. Balibar, E. 'Introduction', in Locke, John Identite et difference: L'invention de la conscience. Translated by and commentary by Etienne Balibar (Paris: Seuil, 1998).

9. Abhinavagupta Isvarapratyabhijnakarika vimsrmini (ISP), jnanadhikara 7.1. // My translation guided by K.C. Pandey, p. 99.

10. Ksemaraja Pratyabhijnakarika (PH) 11.

11. ISP Kriyadhikara I.3

12. ISP Kriyadhikara ahnika I.3, p.10

13. ISP, p. 16.

14. A Lacanian interpretation might be tempting here as linga has a primary designation of 'sign' (of which language is the primary exemplum) and a secondary designation of 'phallus', particularly the 'phallic' icon of Shiva.

15. ISPV I.3. 6-7, p. 20.

16. Rist, John M. Augustine (CUP, 1994), p. 94.

17. Cary, Phillip Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (OUP, 2000), especially chapter 10.

18. Rist, Augustine, p. 89.

19. Augustine Confessions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 10.8.1.

20. Augustine Confessions 10.8.15

21. Hopkins, terrible sonnets no. 42 Selected Poems p. 61.

22. Augustine Confessions 10.8.14.

23. Rist, Augustine, p. 88.

24. Augustine Confessions 10.11.

25. Augustine City of God (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 14.5.p. 589.

26. Augustine City of God 13.24.2.

27. Rist, Augustine, p. 99.

28. Lindbeck, G. The Nature of Doctrine (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1984), p. 34.

29. Clayton, John "Thomas Jefferson and the Study of Religion', Inaugural Lecture, University of Lancaster, 1992.

30. Augustine, Confessions 11.15.20.

31. Rist, Augustine, pp. 84-85.