This devious path from enforced doctrinal orthodoxy to critical epistemol-
ogy is not found unless religion is state-enforced. This route toward epistemo-
logical issues did not exist in China, where the state usually supported all
manner of ritualistic exercises, in a kind of pluralistic tolerance. There was no
sacred scripture to be officially enforced; the nearest thing to it was the
Confucian texts, but these were held to be products of human reason, and thus
on the side of philosophy. Taoist religion by the late 400s c.e. claimed its texts
to be charismatically revealed, but political weakness prevented Taoists from
elevating them to uniquely enforced scriptural truth. It follows that if the Taoist
church had acquired long-term political power, its relations with non-dogmatic
intellectuals would also have given rise to epistemological issues. The same
should have happened if Buddhism had continued as the state religion beyond
its short episodes of imperial favor in the T’ang.^2
The initial effect of religion on philosophy is not to produce epistemological
controversy; that tends to come later as philosophers build up their own
positions. Initially the religion sets forth a content on which intellectuals may
work. The Western religions begin with a pre-reflective anthropomorphism.
God is a person, possessing human attributes such as knowledge, power,
goodness, and will, raised of course to a superlative degree. God creates the
physical world, and will bring it to an end, much as any human could manu-
facture an object and then destroy it. Islam includes other supernaturally
endowed persons: the Prophet and various angels, with their missions and
announcements. Christianity in some ways redoubles the anthropomorphic
elements, focusing not only on God but also on Christ, who is both a man and
Son of God; on the miraculous elements of his virgin birth (which thereby
elevate the person of his miraculous mother) and his crucifixion and resurrec-
tion; the doctrine of human sin and redemption, the Day of Judgment, and the
resurrection of human bodies to eternal life in heaven or hell. Human events
are given cosmic significance; conversely, the cosmos is tied to a personal scale.
Such doctrines give rise to problems if the church, as a social organization
carrying out rituals and justifying them by faith in holy scripture, declares that
the texts are to be taken in a literal, commonsensical way. Originally it is not
laypersons who question the literal meaning of these doctrines; it is, after all,
the miraculous aspect of this picture that makes it so impressive for ordinary
people. It is the specialists within the church entrusted with the care and
teaching of the holy documents, who feel a need to reduce the anthropomor-
phic elements because of their sophisticated conception of religious impressive-
ness. If God is superlative in every respect, how can he have merely physical
qualities? The QurÁan speaks of God sitting on his throne; the early theologians
argued that this is only a metaphor for his grandeur. In response the conser-
vative legalist Malik thundered: “The sitting is given, its modality is unknown.
390 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths