Given the dominance of an idealism exalting a transcendent spiritual center,
it might seem surprising that Hindu orthodoxy should have produced this
variety of positions. This variety is the product of two conditions. One is the
inevitable workings of the intellectual law of small numbers: a dominant
position has a number of slots available in the attention space, and its thinkers
find the lines of dispute which can fill them. Philosophical division provides
intellectual ammunition for religious factionalism, which thrives on the mate-
rial conditions of political decentralization and instability. The second condi-
tion is the nature of theism itself. Theistic cults are closer to the conceptions
of everyday life, exalting an anthropomorphic god presiding over the world in
which worshippers live. This sets up a tension with pure religious monism,
which is the product of intellectuals who follow to its extreme implications the
concept of an all-powerful entity and reduce everything else to nothingness.
Both sides of this argument can locate religious contradictions in the other.
Using the criterion of highest respect for God, the monists can accuse the theists
of bringing God down to human categories and allowing the world to encroach
on Its infinite capacity. Theists can accuse monists of disrespecting God by
merging Him with mere humans, demeaning the higher by absorbing it in the
experience of the lower. We see a parallel in the period of Christian ascendancy
in the late Roman Empire, when the pure monism of Neoplatonism was
countered by the emphasis given by Christian theism to the independent
existence of the lower material world. The theist-monist debate is one of those
puzzle spaces which can sustain interminable controversy, a fruitful territory
on which intellectuals can generate both passion and attention.
Theological issues, departicularized, are issues of metaphysics. In the case
of Hindu theologies after Shankara, the metaphysical field forms around the
assumption of a single highest substance. The struggle for intellectual differ-
entiation can then seize on the problems of explaining the experience of
empirical plurality—indeed the very existence of the phenomenal world—from
a monist viewpoint. In addition to the obvious poles of monism and dualism,
there are a number of intermediating tacks: substance and attribute, stasis and
process, mind and body. The Indian development differs from the philosophical
theology of Christendom and Islam by a greater emphasis on sheer ontological
issues and less concern for the moral dimension of free will, divine foreknowl-
edge, and responsibility for evil. This difference comes in part from the more
depersonalized theology of the Indian cosmology and its praxis of salvation
through meditation or insight, as opposed to the Western insistence on God
as an authoritative Person and the concomitant praxis of salvation through
moral attitudes. Thus the European philosophy which most resembles the
Vedantins’ is that of the period of transition to secularism, the post-medieval
ontologies worked out from Descartes through the German Idealists.
In India after 1100 we see once again one side of the intellectual field split
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