DIVINE EMBODIMENT IN HINDUISM AND CHRISTIANITY

392 33 DIVINE EMBODIMENT IN HINDUISM AND CHRISTIANITY Jon Paul Sydnor Infinite absolute, finite particular Is it more blessed to be everything everywhere, utterly transcendent, the Infinite Absolute? Or is it more blessed to be a person who is somewhere, utterly immanent, the Finite Particular? Hinduism and Christianity have given different answers to these questions, differing both within themselves and between themselves. The answers given bear great importance, because they influence our own interpretation of human existence, which is originally finite, particular, and related. Is this status a blessing to be celebrated or a limitation to be overcome? Could it possibly characterize God? Or, more intriguingly, could God be both? This debate about particularity and transcendence articulates itself in thought about the good, the true, and the beautiful—and what is most good, most true, and most beautiful. To celebrate embodiment is to celebrate particularity and relationality. To reject embodiment is to reject particularity and relationality, yet also to posit that there is a superior state of being available, a transcendent state beyond the limitations of individual particularity. We need not be a particular person who is conscious of particular things, struggling with all the anxiety that such particularity entails. Instead, we can be pure being and pure consciousness, blessed with the pure bliss that such perfection entails. Śrī Śaṅkarācārya writes, The stupid man thinks he is the body, the book-learned man identifies himself with the mixture of body and soul, while the sage possessed of realization due to discrimination looks upon the eternal Ātman as his Self, and thinks, “I am Brahman.” (Śaṅkarācārya 2000, p. 61) Śaṅkara’s anthropology rejects life as it is but offers a resplendent vision of life as it can be. Versions of it can be found in Hinduism as orthodox, and in Christianity as heterodox. Hence, to declare yourself as Hindu or Christian does not reveal your celebration or lament of embodiment. To know that, we must dig deeper. Every essayist must strike a cruel compromise between depth and breadth. Were we to survey all permutations of divine embodiment in Hinduism and Christianity, then our space limitations would compel a very shallow engagement. Were we to go in depth into only one aspect of divine embodiment, then we would simply neglect too many facets of a multifaceted 392 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 392 14-Oct-20 22:47:36 393 Divine embodiment, Hindu and Christian doctrine. Below, we will discuss divine personal embodiment (the possibility that God literally possesses a humanlike body), gender and divine embodiment, and the divine experience of embodiment. Alas, we will overlook much of value. Readers who are interested in conceptualizing the universe as the body of God, that is, the belief that matter, energy, space, and time are all derived from the divine person, may wish to explore Anne Hunt Overzee’s The Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanuja (Overzee 1992). Readers interested in a broad comparison of God’s personal, embodied presence on earth may examine Geoffrey Parrinder’s Avatar and Incarnation: A Comparison of Indian and Christian Beliefs (Parrinder 1982). For a fascinating comparison of devotees’ attitudes toward divinity embodied as child, see Kristen Johnston Largen’s Baby Krishna, Infant Christ: A Comparative Theology of Salvation (Largen 2011). And readers interested in exploring devotion to the feminine divine can find stimulating material in Francis X. Clooney’s Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Clooney 2005). Although we cannot delve deeply into these subjects, the three themes below will provide us with comparative insight into divine embodiment, thereby granting us critical perspective and creative possibility. God as person, God as body Celebrating personal embodiment as divine The highest celebration of human embodiment is the ascription of embodiment to God. The Hebrew tradition, which Christianity inherited and adapted, offers a few texts that suggest such embodiment: God walks in a garden (Genesis 3:8), speaks with Moses face to face (Exodus 33:11), and covers Moses’ eyes with his (God’s) hand, preventing Moses from seeing his face, but allowing Moses to see his back (Exodus 33:22–23).Yet, even as the Hebrew tradition offers a few texts that suggest divine embodiment, it also denies any ability to image this God. The second commandment warns, You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents. (Exodus 20:4–5a) Moreover, as the Hebrew tradition matures, it increasingly insists that God transcends the limitations of embodiment; even the heavens cannot hold God (1 Kings 8:27), who fills the heavens and the earth (Jeremiah 23:24), and stretches from the beginning to the end of time (Psalm 90:2). Later, the Christian tradition adopts the Hebraic suspicion of divine limitation, baldly insisting that “God is spirit” (John 4:24), cannot be seen, and dwells in unapproachable light (1 Timothy 6:16). Even as Western theism came to reject divine embodiment, the idea achieved orthodoxy in certain strands of Hinduism, such as Vaiṣṇavism. The Śrīvaiṣṇava theologian, Rāmānuja, for example, asserts that God is fully embodied, located in Vaikuṇṭhā, yet omnipresent on earth. Rāmānuja even emphasizes the full particularity of the divine body by describing its magnificent physical appearance (Rāmānuja 1956, §220, pp. 172–73). Indeed, Rāmānuja celebrates God’s particularity and relationality by lifting up Śrīvaiṣṇavism’s personal name for God, Nārāyaṇa. Nārāyaṇa is not a generic “God,” an Infinite Absolute, or undifferentiated consciousness. Nārāyaṇa is fully a person, with a personal appearance, personal name, and personality.The 393 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 393 14-Oct-20 22:47:36 394 Jon Paul Sydnor ground of all being and all beings is not being itself; it is personhood itself. And not only personhood, but personhood-in-relation (Sydnor 2011, p. 8). Moreover, for Rāmānuja and/or his developing tradition, salvation is entirely physical and personal—to see Nārāyaṇa, and to be seen by Nārāyaṇa, in the splendors of Vaikuṇṭha. Salvation is not a change in our underlying state of being. It is not freedom from limitation, finitude, or embodiment. Instead, salvation is the perfect placement of our God-given bodies within the vision of God, where we dance in the joy of worship. For Rāmānuja and his Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, salvation is continuing finitude in relationship to the infinite Nārāyaṇa, whose transcendence is exceeded only by his accessibility. But how can Nārāyaṇa be somewhere and everywhere, in Vaikuṇṭha yet sustaining all reality, at the same time? Some Christian theologians reject any possibility of divine embodiment based on this tension. They reason that, if God has a body, then God has a location. And if God has a location, then God must be somewhere, not everywhere. Therefore, God would not be omnipresent, and there would be places that God would not be. In our deepest shame, we could hide from God. In our deepest grief, God could not rescue us. Rāmānuja elegantly resolves this conundrum. He dedicates his Vedārthasaṉgraha to Viṣṇu (Nārāyaṇa) reclining on Śeṣa, the cosmic serpent who floats on the primordial ocean. In this image,Viṣṇu dreams the universe into creation, which resides within the dream of Viṣṇu.Within Viṣṇu’s dream, we have a location, as can Viṣṇu. At the same time,Viṣṇu’s dream is pervaded by Viṣṇu’s mind, which sustains all the elements of the dream. Hence,Viṣṇu is somewhere, producing the dream, while Viṣṇu is everywhere, pervading the dream. And Viṣṇu can be somewhere again, within the dream.Viṣṇu is in three places at once. Hence, divine locatedness, much like human locatedness, cannot be reduced to simplistic either/or binaries. If a daydreaming student can be in a classroom, yet mentally on a beach, and interacting with other mental persons on that beach, then surely Nārāyaṇa can be in Vaikuṇṭha, ever-present within the universe, and personally present to us, as well. God can be embodied, and God can embody us, without contradiction. God’s body, unlike ours, is without limitation. Could the Christian God be personally embodied? Remarkably, Rāmānuja’s theology anticipates and answers most orthodox Christian objections to divine personal embodiment, i.e., the belief that the ultimate God has a personal body. Some Christian theologians, such as Irenaeus, have suggested that the image of God is in the body, although the weight of the tradition has denied it (Voss Roberts 2017, pp. 102–104). Feuerbach argues that all thought about God, especially thought of God as embodied, is necessarily anthropomorphic. Due to our epistemological limitations, we make God in our own image, projecting our being onto the Godhead (Feuerbach 1957 [1841], p. 111). Rāmānuja simply replies that God has graciously created us (or better, graciously sustains us) in the image of God—we are theomorphic. Accusations of anthropomorphism read the situation in the wrong direction. Instead of worrying about anthropomorphism (making God in our own image), we should celebrate our theomorphism (being made in the image of God; Sydnor 2018, pp. 5–6). Aquinas argues against embodiment, asserting that embodiment necessitates finitude. The infinite God could not be constrained by a finite body (Aquinas 1955–1957, §43.17). Rāmānuja replies that an embodied Nārāyaṇa can indeed imagine the infinite universe, thereby sustaining, pervading, and controlling the infinite, even while located and embodied (Rāmānuja 1956, §95, 76). Aquinas rebuts that if God is embodied, then God would be something that we know sensibly rather than intellectually. But, since intellectual knowledge is higher, more universal, 394 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 394 14-Oct-20 22:47:36 395 Divine embodiment, Hindu and Christian and more reliable than sensible knowledge, God must be something or someone we know intellectually. Hence, God must be disembodied (Aquinas 1955–1957, §20, 6). But Rāmānuja is not working within Aquinas’s Platonic hierarchy of being. For Rāmānuja, all is of God—spirit, intellect, and matter—hence both material nature and intellectual truth are fully divine. One cannot be ranked over the other, as God cannot be ranked over God (Sydnor 2015, p. 46). St. John of Damascus taps in by arguing that, if God is embodied, then God’s body would displace all other bodies. Since two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and God is omnipresent, there wouldn’t be any room for anyone else in a universe sustained by an embodied God (Damascus 1958, p. 171). But, as we have seen above, Rāmānuja’s doctrine of dreaming creation addresses this objection. Nārāyaṇa dreams the universe into being. He is an embodied dreamer, pervading his dream, within which he participates. His dreaming embodiment is hospitable to other embodied beings (like the boy, daydreaming that he is on the beach with his friends); indeed, it invites them into being (Rāmānuja 1956, Dedication). Rāmānuja answers by anticipation most orthodox Christian objections to divine embodiment. His success re-situates the question of divine embodiment for Christianity. The Christian tradition’s insistence on the disembodiment of God is no longer a rationally compelled conclusion. Instead, it is a theological choice, with theological and pastoral implications. If we relate as persons through our bodies, then how does God express personhood without a body? How can we celebrate our own embodiment, if the source of our being is disembodied? And perhaps most importantly, what is salvation for embodied beings? Rāmānuja’s answers to these questions cannot simply become the Christian answers, but they can help Christians to generate new questions, and perhaps, new answers as well. Body of the Goddess, body of the woman To celebrate the female body Feminists, both Hindu and Christian, have long labored to celebrate embodiment. Rejecting any dualism of soul and body, which prefers the soul to the body, they have instead argued for the nondualism of soul and body. We are best conceptualized as embodied souls or ensouled bodies. The two are inseparable, interdependent, and compenetrating. Each flows into the other, supports, informs, and fulfills the other. Soul and body are conceptually distinguishable, but experientially inseparable. They are two—soul and body—as one person (Hilkert 1995, pp. 197–98). In this section, we will compare (semi-)divine embodiment in the person of the Virgin Mary according to the Roman Catholic tradition with divine embodiment in the goddess Devī according to the Śākta (Goddess-worshipping) tradition. On the one hand, this comparison may seem unequal. The Virgin Mary is, after all, an historic human, whereas Devī is the eternal Goddess. But closer scrutiny reveals more parallels. According to the Devī Gītā, Devī is the mother of all gods and goddesses (Brown 1998, p. 79, 130). According to the Council of Ephesus, Mary is Theotokos, the Mother of God. Moreover, if we consider the role that Mary plays in Catholic practice, then her status draws closer to that of Devī. Like Devī, she hears prayer, appears to devotees, performs miracles, charges locations with her sacred power so that they become pilgrimage sites, and blesses followers through her image in icons and statues. According to Catholic dogma in Lumen Gentium, Mary is Mediatrix with, but adjutant to, Christ (Vatican Council 1965, III.62). And in the popular but nondogmatic imagination, she is designated Co-Redemptrix with, but adjutant to, Christ (John Paul II 1985, p. 7). Thus, while 395 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 395 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 396 Jon Paul Sydnor there may appear to be a superficial imbalance between the two, in practice they provide a rich resource for comparison (Clooney 2005, pp. 16–23). The Virgin Mary exceeds humanity through her status as both virgin (symbol of female purity) and mother (symbol of life-giving nurture). As such, she expresses twin, though exclusive, blessings of femininity in one person. On the one hand, the capacity for a female body to birth God, and receive adoration, would seem to celebrate—perhaps even divinize—women’s embodiment, even in everyday life. For instance, artists regularly portrayed Mary nursing the infant Jesus, the Madonna Lactans, until Gutenberg’s printing press popularized pornography and sexualized breasts (Gripsrud 2008, pp. 34–36). So, the Christian tradition, in the person of Mary, offers resources for the celebration of female embodiment as an expression of divinity. But, on the other hand, Mary also poses challenges. Indeed, one way to scorn sexual reproduction and women’s perseverance through labor is to affirm the perpetual virginity of Mary. To idealize her as simultaneously Virgin and Mother creates an unattainable ideal, an exemplar who sets an impossible example. Mary may rise to mystical heights of holiness, but all other women must fail. In this analysis, rather than affirming the inherent sanctity of female embodiment, the Virgin-Mother concept of Mary threatens all women with felt inadequacy (Warner 1976, pp. 336–38). The menstruating Goddess What if female reproductive processes were fully divinized? What if both women and men could worship a goddess so thoroughly embodied that she explicitly menstruated? Hinduism offers such a goddess in its most authoritative Śākta (Goddess-worshipping) text, the Devī Gītā. The Devī Gītā, or Song of the Goddess, is a philosophical treatise found within the much longer Devī Bhāgavatapurāṇa. It expresses devotion to the Goddess as identical with Brahman, or supreme reality. Hence, philosophically she is impersonal: ultimate truth, pure consciousness, and highest intelligence, pervading all beings even as she sustains them in their being (Devī Gītā, 2.2–3, 3.16–17). Yet, devotionally she is personal: the compassionate protector, nurturing mother, and gracious ruler who “is filled with the sentiment of passion and is ever distressed by the sorrows of her devotees; Disposed to kindness, she is the Mother bearing a crescent moon in her locks” (Ibid., 9.41). The Devī Gītā asserts that the Goddess is the fundamental source of all reality, including the gods themselves. Hence, the Goddess’s supremacy is absolute: she is within, beneath, and beyond the universe that she sustains, preceding and exceeding it both ontologically and chronologically (Ibid., 1.49–50). Devī the Goddess is the supreme being and the ground of being, the soul of the Cosmos and the Cosmos itself, delusion and liberation, pure consciousness and maternal compassion, utter transcendence and utter immanence. Her supremacy is so absolute that the gods, even the greatest god,Viṣṇu, worship her, and she rewards their worship with boons and freedom from fear (Ibid., 1.20–25, 55–58). And she is embodied; indeed, she is so embodied that she menstruates (Ibid., 8.15–18). At Kamakhya Temple in Assam, the Goddess’s menstruation is iconographically explicit, in accordance with its origin legend. Śiva’s first wife, Satī, immolated herself after her father insulted her husband. Overwrought by grief, Śiva began a dance of destruction with her charred body; this dance threatened to destroy the world. Viṣṇu intervened and stopped the dance by slowly cutting away Satī’s body until Śiva had no one left to dance with. Each body part fell to earth and became a śakti pīṭha, a seat of the divine feminine energy. Kamakhya lies where her 396 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 396 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 397 Divine embodiment, Hindu and Christian genitalia fell (Dobia 2007, pp. 69–70). Appropriately, the main shrine is a yoni, an iconic depiction of a vagina.This yoni is a naturally occurring rock fissure perpetually moistened by ground water (Shin 2010, p. 5). Devotees decorate the yoni with sindoor, a red-orange powder, further indicating the mythological origin of the temple. Here, we have a confluence of gender, myth, theology, and practice stifled in Christianity: the Goddess Devī is the source of reality, including all gods and goddesses. She is also an embodied female deity, so embodied that she menstruates somewhere among us; specifically, she menstruates in Kamakhya Temple, which is concretely located in the metropolis of Guwahati, in the state of Assam, in the country of India (Dobia 2000, pp. 231–33). Devotees honor the Goddess’s blood as life-giving: coordinated with the monsoon rains, essential to a successful harvest, emblematic of human reproduction, and supportive of social order (Urban 2008, p. 514). Paradoxically, as of this writing in 2019, women who are menstruating cannot enter Kamakhya Temple. And no one can enter Kamakhya Temple during Devī’s annual three-day menstrual cycle, when the temple closes. Like most temples in India, Kamakhya deems menstruating women to be impure and polluting—even the Goddess herself (Ibid., p. 501). In so doing, they join a general patriarchal tradition of stigmatizing female reproductive processes. The traditions frequently deem these processes not only contaminating, but contagious as well, since the menstruating woman’s uncleanness can be communicated to others in her household. For this reason, both the Bible (Leviticus 15:19–24) and the Laws of Manu (4.41–42) prescribe shunning menstruating women, at least partly, to protect men from impurity. Is the Goddess a feminist? Many Christian feminists, both female and male, have advocated liberating female imagery for God. Harkening to Mary Daly’s admonition that “if God is male then the male is God,” they prefer gender-balanced and gender-neutral language for God, insisting that both genders image the divine. However, Kamakhya’s celebrations and prohibitions question this effort. The high status of the Goddess conflicts with the low status of women, but she does not raise that status. The Goddess is worshipped by men, even gods; women must worship their husband, no matter how vicious, as a god (Laws of Manu, 5.154). Devotees celebrate the life-giving power of menstrual blood but fear it as well. The (menstruating) Goddess liberates (Devī Gītā, 7.11–27), but menstruating women contaminate. The menstruating Goddess resides in the temple; menstruating women are banned from the temple. The Goddess is free from social conventions of modesty; women must be modest. Nevertheless, the current failure of female divinity to produce feminist liberation does not warrant abandoning gender-balanced imagery for God; it is one datum in a very large data set. While there is little sociological evidence for female empowerment through the feminine divine, we cannot know the deep psychological effect that Goddess-worship provokes in women or men. Moreover, from the perspective of the Christian tradition, numerous other justifications for inclusive language proffer themselves: Christian biblical texts that suggest a feminine aspect of God; the panentheistic residency of God in all persons; a religious commitment to egalitarianism; a progressive commitment to universalism; basic ideals of fairness; the desire for young girls to become strong women; the desire for young boys to become feminist men. The feminization of the divine will not necessarily help, but it may help us achieve gender justice, if we allow it to. In other words, fault for the co-existence of female divinity and male chauvinism may lie more with us than the Goddess (Pintchman 2000, pp. 197–99). 397 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 397 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 398 Jon Paul Sydnor Embodiment as avatar, embodiment as incarnation Descent without modification Both Hinduism and Christianity assert that God acts in human form on earth, but the traditions flesh out this conviction by very different means, and both differ internally as well. Comparing them on this topic presents grave difficulties, as the settings of one theological register tend to distort reception of the other. For example, the term “divine embodiment” has more Christian than Hindu overtones, since the Christian tradition broadly agrees that God at least assumed a human body like our own. (Indeed, this was the minimalist assertion of the Alexandrian “Word– Flesh” Christology, whereas the Antiochene “Word–Human” Christologies asserted that God assumed our entire humanity in the person of Jesus Christ; Schwarz 1998, pp. 152–56). As we shall see, the Hindu tradition generally asserts that God may appear in human form, but in no way possesses or, more importantly, experiences a body like ours. Indeed, were any god to experience temporal, material existence as we do, then this experience would disqualify that god as God. For example, the polemical Śaivite text Śivajñāna Siddhiyār Parapakkam declares that Kṛṣṇa’s incarnations resulted from a curse, caused him sorrow and pain, and stained him. Therefore, he is unworthy of worship and his followers should turn to Śiva (Balasubramanian 2013, pp. 342–44). Śrīvaiṣṇava theologian Vedānta Deśika (1268–1369) notes the many avatars (descents) of Viṣṇu to earth and the apparent suffering of some of these avatars. Yet, he insists that this suffering is the play-acting of Viṣṇu, not the real suffering of a human: in the stories of the avatars, the distress is only of the nature of play-acting and that, too, has compassion as its cause. “It is of the nature of sport to the Omnipotent” (Deśika 1956, pp. 239–40). According to Deśika, Viṣṇu cannot truly suffer. Human suffering is the result of sin, ignorance, and imprudence (aviveka). Karma, which is administered by Viṣṇu, binds individual souls (jīvas) to prakṛti, within which they suffer. This suffering is a blessing, since it chastises humans for their failures, impelling them to surrender to their true Lord (Ibid, pp. 43–44). This is Viṣṇu’s scheme of salvation, which Viṣṇu creates, executes, and enjoys.Viṣṇu is the playwright; he may act in his play, but he is only acting, and he always controls the plot. Devotees recognize his gracious control and know that his suffering is only apparent; only the wicked think that his suffering is real, that he can be defeated, and that they can seize control of the plot (Ibid, pp. 239–40). When Viṣṇu appears in human form, when he acts in his play, he is not composed of the same material that composes our human bodies.We are condemned by our karma to association with prakṛti (the profane psycho/physical complex), and this association contracts our knowledge, thereby causing suffering. Since Viṣṇu is perfect knowledge, and prakṛti contracts knowledge,Viṣṇu cannot be associated with prakṛti.Viṣṇu must be composed of some other substance, which Deśika designates śuddha-sattva. Ayyangar translates this term as “pure being,” but it could also be loosely translated as pure goodness, absolute knowledge, or perfect serenity. Indeed, all of Vaikuṇṭhā,Viṣṇu’s heaven, is composed of śuddha-sattva, including Viṣṇu’s devotees. There is no suffering or ignorance in Vaikuṇṭhā and, when Viṣṇu descends to earth to restore the dharma, he retains his substrate of śuddha-sattva. Hence, there can be no suffering or ignorance in Viṣṇu (Ibid, pp. 66–67). Deśika paints Viṣṇu as the savior we need. As suffering humans, we can fall into the pit of despair. Unable to extricate ourselves, we need a God who can pull us out, not a God who jumps into the pit with us, denying us hope of rescue.When we are grief-stricken, our assurance comes from the presence of the transcendent God, ever compassionate and ever reposed, who 398 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 398 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 399 Divine embodiment, Hindu and Christian extends the right hand of deliverance.The infinite bliss of God promises to remove our suffering, not succumb to it. God’s love lifts us into God’s serenity; it does not sacrifice the divine serenity to our human desperation. Indeed, St. Augustine seems to agree with Deśika: “A man bends over and extends his hand to someone lying down, for he does not cast himself down so that they are both lying, but only bends down to raise up the one lying down” (Augustine 1981, p. 181, quoted in Eikrem 2018, p. 107). Seeming to descend The early Christian tradition offered concepts of embodiment analogous to that of Vedānta Deśika, in which Christ only seems to assume a human body, the material reality of which is illusory. Utilizing the Greek verb dokeĩn, “to seem,” Christian theologians of embodiment derided these disembodied theologies of Christ as Docetism. They also deemed them heretical. The controversy over the reality of God’s enfleshment may extend to the earliest Christian communities, since the New Testament itself wavers on the nature of Jesus’ body. On the one hand, some biblical passages suggest that Christ is disembodied, or at least differently embodied from regular humans; he walks on water (Mark 6:45–53), is able to fast from food for forty days (Luke 4:1–2), and slips through angry mobs like a mist (Luke 4:30). Indeed, so attractive was this spiritualized Jesus that the second century Gnostic gospel Acts of John claimed that Jesus walked without leaving footprints (Acts of John, 93) and was never crucified; the true Jesus talked to John while the empty body of Jesus was crucified (Ibid., 97). Most of what we know about these early theologians of spirit comes from arguments against them made by the theologians of embodiment, who won the struggle for control of the church. Although the (later deemed) orthodox polemicists rarely record the motivations of the (pejoratively designated) Docetists, we may infer several possibilities, some of which resonate with Deśika’s own concerns. First, Gnostic sects in the classical world frequently asserted the superiority of spirit to matter and deemed salvation to be (at least in part) the release of spirit from matter. God’s appearance in Christ was to this end, not to sacramentalize matter through the divine presence (Pagels 1979, p. 144). Indeed, in the Valentinian (Gnostic) tradition, the secret sacrament of redemption was named apolytrosis, or “release,” a term that had political as well as religious overtones (Ibid., p. 37). Second, absolute monotheists believed that Jesus was the appearance of the one God on earth, rather than the appearance of a unique person within the tripersonal Godhead. Because the source of matter, space, and time cannot be limited by matter, space, and time, God’s appearance as a human must have been just that—appearance (Greek: dókēsis).Third, many Greeks shared Deśika’s conviction that God is impassible, so utterly transcendent that our actions do not affect the Godhead. God acts but is not acted upon. The suffering of Jesus poses certain challenges to this view, which Docetists like Cerinthus (according to his detractors) addressed by asserting that the spirit of Christ only temporarily assumed Jesus’ body at his baptism, leaving it before his crucifixion. Thus, the divine did not suffer through the passion (Hall 2000, p. 173). Descent as incarnation Concurrent with these celebrations of spirit over (and sometimes against) matter, other Christians were asserting the basic goodness of embodied, temporal, material life. These assertions extend all the way back into the New Testament, which repeatedly emphasizes the fleshly nature of Christ. Speaking of the incarnation, the Gospel of John begins: “In the 399 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 399 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 400 Jon Paul Sydnor beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh [sarx] and lived among us” (John 1:1, 14a). Speaking of the resurrection, the Gospel of Luke records Jesus’ fully embodied return to the disciples, his invitation to touch him, and even his request for and consumption of food in their presence (Luke 24:38–43). Reflecting on these events and their implicit theological assertions, the biblical writer John emphasizes the centrality of divine embodiment by declaring, “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh [en sarki] is from God” (1 John 4:2b, italics added). These early Christian confessions of the embodiment of God in Christ raise perplexing theological questions. God is everywhere; Jesus was somewhere. God is infinite; Jesus was finite. God transcends time; Jesus was within time. God is omnipotent; Jesus died, powerless, on the cross. How then could Jesus be divine and human, reconciling these heretofore mutually exclusive opposites in one person? As theologians studied, debated, and spun their thoughtworlds, they eventually concluded that Christ could not be half human and half God, a curious admixture of earthly and heavenly elements. The Christ had to be fully human and fully God. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, if God saves humankind by taking part in our humanity, and God wants to save our entire humanity, then God must assume our full humanity—memory, reason, will, soul—the divine and human co-existing, without confusion or separation, in one person, Jesus the Christ (Gregory of Nazianzus 1894 [c. 380], p. 440). Christologically, Gregory refuses to assemble a God–Man, configuring divine and human natures like some sort of jigsaw puzzle. Instead, the two natures join without fusing, in the fullness of both. The Orthodox Church agreed with Gregory’s maxim, “That which was not assumed has not been redeemed.” Gregory’s insight became dogma at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which declared Jesus to be both fully human and fully divine, the Savior in whom the divine and human natures are united without confusion. But how absolute was the divine assumption of human vulnerability? The God-forsaken God According to the twentieth-century theologian Jürgen Moltmann, this assumption was absolute. If Christ came to redeem suffering, then Christ had to suffer, unto the deepest form of suffering: God-forsakenness. Jesus cried from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). This cry harkens back to Psalm 22:1, from Jesus’ own scriptures, which reads, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1). In Jesus, God the Son has taken the God-forsakenness of the psalmist onto himself (Moltmann 1995b, pp. 175–77). God the Father must suffer his Son’s suffering and death. While Moltmann rejects any “death of God” language, he insists that God has taken even God-forsakenness into the Godhead, thereby redeeming it. Moltmann’s theology of divine descent creates “a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God” (Moltmann 1993, p. 71). We try to rise to God, only to find that God is always already here. We seek to become God, only to find that God has become human. And, by assuming our humanity, God in Christ reveals our humanity to us.Yet we, in response, dehumanized the perfectly human. Our crucifixion of Christ reflects our continuing rejection of the divine potential within us. Confronted with God as human, we respond by dehumanizing God, because we cannot bear the truth of our own inhumanity. The crucifixion is an act of avoidance. 400 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 400 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 401 Divine embodiment, Hindu and Christian Wounds that scar, scars that heal Moltmann’s theology of the cross would be dismal were it not for his faith in the resurrection. Suffering, rejection, and death do not have the last word; joy does. God raises Jesus from the dead as a symbol of divine perseverance, radical forgiveness, and the sacred promise of new life, made available in this life. Understood this way, resurrection is continually available. We experience resurrection in the healing of spiritual wounds, in the reconciliation of broken relationships, and in the liberation of the oppressed from bondage.Thus, faith in the resurrection does not dull us with patient expectation of heaven; rather, it energizes us with hope for the Kingdom of God and invites us to enact resurrection in history (Moltmann 1994, pp. 81–82). Moltmann portrays Jesus as the savior we need. As suffering humans, we can fall into the pit of despair. Yet we can find the divine presence even here, for Christ himself so despaired. Moltmann may introduce the first truly omnipresent God, the true God who precedes us and accompanies us through every situation, including those situations in which God is absent. God the Son experiences the absence of God the Father, who anguishes over the abandonment of the Son. Through Jesus’ experience, the healing power of God is available to us, even when we cannot feel the presence of God. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” cries Jesus from the cross, echoing Psalm 22, and assuring us that he too has known abandonment. But, in echoing Psalm 22, he also reminds us of that poem’s faith-filled conclusion: You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. (Psalm 22: 23–24) For Christians, the arc of Psalm 22, from despair to trust, finds historical expression in the arc of Jesus’ life, through which the extremes of suffering and joy are expressed, with joy receiving the final word. According to the Christian faith, we too can trust joy, for God has promised life a final victory over death and joy a final victory over suffering. The infinitely compassionate God No theologian speaks for the entirety of her or his tradition. Vedānta Deśika and Moltmann certainly do not speak for theirs. Still, in each we get a taste of the feeling for life that their subtradition offers. And, by comparing the two, we gain deeper critical insight into the choices that theologians must make. Moltmann proposes a suffering God that Deśika would find incomprehensible, or even degrading. For Deśika, a God stripped of majesty is no God. But according to Moltmann, Deśika’s God of glory turns a blind eye to the depth of our affliction. The divine splendor, recoiling from stain, abandons us to our abandonment. Moltmann criticizes the utter transcendence of Deśika’s God; Deśika criticizes the utter immanence of Moltmann’s God. Does divine embodiment extend into the hell of human bodily suffering? Or does divinity instead stand above, compassionate yet detached, offering a vision of bliss to those with tears in their eyes? 401 9780367000707pre-end_pi-484.indd 401 14-Oct-20 22:47:37 402 Jon Paul Sydnor Who is right, Deśika or Moltmann? Maybe both are, and God’s loving kindness exceeds the apparent exclusivity of our theologies. In this view, God appears to the suffering in the form that they most need. 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