In Chinese religions in comparative perspective, an essay published on The Immanent Frame blog, and that presents some of the ideas of a chapter in his forthcoming book, Prasenjit Duara pursues the following question: How did state and religions manage the question of transcendence? Duara argues that contrary to what axial age theorists think (among those specialists might be Robert Bellah whose last book is: Religion in human evolution: from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Harvard UP, 2011), transcendental dimensions existed in Chinese religions and have been missed by analysts because of the Abrahamic framework of their thinking. Given the brevity of the essay, it is hard to see what exactly he means by “Abrahamic framework,” so the following questions and comments regarding this “framework” can only be tentative. Is it a view of the divine as single, radically separate from creation, yet mysteriously engaged in human history? And this view would be so militantly bound to monotheism and so impatient with more embedded, complex pantheons, that it has long blinded its theologians and followers to the existence of other forms of transcendence? I agree (and many theologians would too, I suspect) that there is good reason to broaden the field and think of transcendence as a universal capacity to see beyond the immediate horizon; a capacity to anthropomorphize personal or impersonal, living, powerful forces hidden below, beyond, and above. A capacity to shape hopes. In that wider sense, it can be observed in all societies. Its figuration, access to it, and leveraging, have been and are a locus of political give and take. That is how I understand Duara’s contrast of “dialogical transcendence” with what he presents as radical transcendence and dualism. He is showing that the theologies and politics of transcendence are not the exclusive province of monotheistic faiths, far from it. They took many highly contested forms and no simple evolutionary scheme can account for their history. The complexity he sees in that history is not unlike Jullien’s reasoning on landscape and perspective: the intricacy of “mountain(s) and water(s)” versus the objectification in modern European painting.

In his essay, Duara starts with Guoyu, a fourth-century bce text that points to the monopolistic use of shamanism and exclusive access to heavenly powers by kings and their subordinate priests. Duara asserts that this “vertical division between state and people in relation to transcendence” was “different from that of other so-called Axial Age civilizations which often integrated states and believers vertically through the clergy.” This last sentence implies, I suppose, that priests were the leading element in first millenium bce societies of India and the Mediterranean region. What Duara calls an “integration,” however, was actually a claim by kings (sometimes kings-priests and priests-kings) to special and monopolizing access to divine power(s), very much like what the ancient Chinese text pointed to. In spite of occasional cycles of what he calls “Caesaro-papism” in Eurasia, and in spite of the long Confucian-led (or masked) attempts by (free-standing?) elites to assert authority over religious interpretation of divine will (my vocabulary: read Heavens, and metaphoric application to society of its perceived regularities), he sees the domination of the imperial state as being uncontested in this respect. It asserted exclusive power over expressing and interpreting two major religious aspects: first, divine will (“Heavens”), and secondly the ancestor cult, primarily via the primacy of the imperial ancestors (with Confucius eventually integrated into this cult).

That the first one (divine will, or heavenly power) is considered transcendent by Duara, and not the ancestors’ cult, puzzles me. It would be important to know if heavenly powers were considered part of the cosmos (constellations, laws setting courses of stars, etc.), or on the contrary external agents of creation. This is a key issue, I believe, that separates Abrahamic-style transcendence from other forms. Secondly, the ancestor cult seems to me to be another kind of transcendental activity, in that it reaches out to absent bodies whose past reconstructed lives can become and are made to be authoritative patterns for the living (social divisions, labor division, etc.).

Not surprisingly, as Duara makes clear, imperial claims in China didn’t necessarily carry much weight with the masses and even less with elites when they felt they could shake off the yoke. A parallel would be the Roman attempts at the beginning of our era to spread their own version of an imperial cult. In China, there was (and is, Duara implies at the end) a complex “interface” between local elites and the population regarding religious customs and beliefs. And this could lead to protracted, irreducible struggles over authority. From time to time, there were attempts by state powers and elites to eradicate popular forms of religion if they were perceived as outside the state or elite forms. These attempts could have the contrary effect. At this interface, there were complex games of power, of accommodation and resistance… And claims of access from within popular cults to heavenly power and knowledge, as well as claims to authority for utopian programs. Buddhism in particular provoked or elicited this complex behavior (an example given by Duara: world negation as potentially contrary to filial and familial duties, but tempered by stories of filial devotion).

Back to Abraham and Christian or post-Christian (European?) exclusivist claims on the notion of transcendence. Duara thinks the main difference between Eurasian and Indic or Abrahamic traditions was that the latter were controlled by priests, brahmins, ulamas. This was not true of polytheistic societies like Egypt or Mesopotamia. Kings were very much interested in controlling access to heavenly (or subterranean?) powers, which could be contentious, granted (think of Egypt’s Amenhotep’s attempt to wrest power completely from the temples). But it was not true either of more recent small kingdoms like Israel and Judah, or the dozen neighboring kingdoms of Iron Age Levant where palaces dominated temples. A most important change occurred in Israel/Judah when their monarchies were displaced (ca. 700-600 bce), the monarchy-related temples stopped functioning at the same time, and priesthood or prophets survived as the only trusted voices that could lead people in reshaping a kind of potentially universal access to divine power(s), formulated as exclusive monotheism. It is only then that the book of Exodus configured access to the divinity in a more radical way, though still ambiguously: without kings but via a mediator who disappears from the story and can’t be imitated (Moses), directly at times for the people (including direct access to the text/Torah), and still—secondarily—via the priests and levites. What seems clear, though, is that the divinity inherited from a semi-transcendent, astral, king-supported pantheon (Yahweh) saw its sphere of action expanded to all of human history by the end of the sixth century before our era, and its locus placed outside of cosmos and time. This way of framing a unique, personal power as radically transcendent made it possible to envision politics without kings, suffer empires, and keep hopes of freedom and dignity alive. The Abraham cycle of stories is written then and there as exemplary escape from politics as usual.