Abstract
This essay engages the relationship between revelation and hermeneutics by reflection on an influential Indian system of hermeneutics known as Mīmāṃsā, “intense investigation” of ancient Vedic Sanskrit texts of ritual practice. I take up six points in order. First, we can learn to think anew about hermeneutics and revelation by learning from Mīmāṃsā, which is interesting for the detailed rules of interpretation it proposes, and because it stands in a two-way relationship to Vedic revelation, namely: formed by revelation and formative of how revelation is identified and understood. Second, I introduce specific Mīmāṃsā hermeneutical practices, highlighting interpretive rules characteristic of Mīmāṃsā. Third, I note how this mode of reading offers a hermeneutics arising from a distinctive, older corpus of revelatory (oral) texts, hymns used in ritual performance, plus prescriptions about ritual performance (including those hymns). Fourth, Mīmāṃsā was instrumental in reshaping how revelation was understood and construed, as a reordering of ordinary life meanings and experiences, a revelation preferring instead immanence in the details. Fifth, granting that Mīmāṃsā was influential in many contexts, including the realm of religious and secular law, I note specifically how Vedānta, grounded in the late Vedic texts known as the Upaniṣads, has aptly been called the “latter Mīmāṃsā” (uttara mīmāṃsā), because it extends Mīmāṃsā hermeneutics to new texts in reflection on a transcendent reality beyond the texts. Sixth, I reflect on how we—modern scholars, writing in the contemporary West—can find in Mīmāṃsā an illumination of insights important to the Christian tradition, differences in culture, religion, and hermeneutics notwithstanding.
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview of Mīmāṃsā, see my “Mīmāṃsā as Introspective Literature and as Philosophy,” The Encyclopedia of Indian Religions (Springer Publishing, forthcoming).
- 2.
See also Francis X. Clooney, “Contribution and Challenge of Mīmāṃsā to the Dream of a Global Hermeneutics,” Musings and Meanings: Hermeneutical Ripples… (2016). Edited by Nishant Alphonse Iruyadason. Christian World Imprints and Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, pp. 135–151.
- 3.
Although Jaimini is named in relation in a number of ancient Indian traditions, we can say very little about him as the author of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. Śabara and Kumārila are known to us from their expansive commentaries on Jaimini’s Sūtras.
- 4.
See Francis X. Clooney, “Madhava’s Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons as Exemplary Mīmāṃsā Philosophy.” The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2017, pages 577–497. See also my essay, “Difficult Remainders: Seeking Comparative Theology’s Really Difficult Other,” How to Do Comparative Theology, edited by Francis X. Clooney and Klaus von Stosch. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017, pages 206–228.
- 5.
There are, indeed, preliminary matters in the first chapter of the first book that pose some striking presuppositions: Sanskrit is eternal, and the relation between words and referents innate; the Vedic texts are authoritative regarding matters that cannot be known by perception or reason; the Veda has no author, but only a beginningless succession of teachers of the text. Such matters are fascinating and even startling, of course, but they occupy a very small portion of the Sūtras, which are for the most part given over to arguing small cases of sacrificial detail.
- 6.
See also my exposition of Book III.5, on remainders, in “Difficult Remainders.”
- 7.
The Jaiminīya Nyāya Mālā by Mādhavācārya (1297–1388).
- 8.
Translations from Madhava’s Garland are my own.
- 9.
On this complex idea of apūrva, see Chapter 7 of Clooney, Thinking Ritually: Retrieving the Purva Mīmāṃsā of Jaimini. De Nobili Research Series. University of Vienna. 1990
- 10.
The conclusion to VII.1’s first case had already argued this point: “Because the subsidiary and primary acts are in harmony with distinct apūrvas in the primary, at first they are to be taken as belonging in just those specific contexts. Hence a consideration of the transfer of details must be undertaken.” See also Francis X. Clooney, “Pragmatism and Anti-Essentialism in the Construction of Dharma in Mīmāṃsā Sūtras 7.1.1–12,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 32, no. 5 (2004): 751–768.
- 11.
“Discerning Comparison: Between the Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons and Catholic Theology,” in The Past, Present and Future of Theology of Interreligious Dialogue. Terrence Merrigan and John Friday, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. See also, “Devatādhikaraṇa: A Theological Debate in the Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta Traditions,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 16 (1988), 277–298; “What’s a God? The Quest for the Right Understanding of devatā in Brahmanical Ritual Theory (Mīmāṃsā,)” International Journal of Hindu Studies I.2 (1997) 337–385.
- 12.
The second case (Sūtras 2–3) asks whether the preparations of materials and persons involved the sacrifice are for the sake of those materials and persons, and not the larger purpose, the apūrva. It seems by common sense easy to recognize that those things and persons are the intended recipients of the action. The rejoinder is that since the materials and persons contribute to the apūrva, then too their preparations contribute, albeit at a remove, to the sacrifice.
- 13.
As translated by James Benson in Mahadeva Vedāntin, Mīmāṃsānyaysaṃgraha: A Compendium of the Principles of Mīmāṃsā (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 594.
- 14.
See Thinking Ritually, Chapter 6.
- 15.
Jacob Neusner, Judaism as Philosophy: The Method and Message of the Mishnah. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, 55.
- 16.
Judaism as Philosophy, p 55.
- 17.
Neusner, 76.
- 18.
The preceding paragraphs are in part drawn from “The Contribution and Challenge of Mīmāṃsā to the Dream of a Global Hermeneutics,” Musings and Meanings: Hermeneutical Ripples… Edited by Nishant Alphonse Iruyadason. Christian World Imprints and Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, pp. 135–151.
- 19.
On Wittgenstein, see also my essays, “The Contribution and Challenge of Mīmāṃsā” and “Madhava’s Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons as Exemplary Mīmāṃsā Philosophy,” and “Reading with Wittgenstein: Resistant, Particular, Poetic,” Chapter 4 of Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters. (University of Virginia Press, 2019, pages 105–117).
- 20.
Maria McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. New York: Routledge, 1997, 10.
- 21.
She continues: how these investigations constitute “a means to unravel philosophical problems can only properly be understood by looking at how his method works in practice.” (13) Accordingly, working through the examples is not an accidental feature of the work, since “by using these techniques [Wittgenstein] attempts, not a systematization of the rules that govern our use of words, but an evocation of the distinctive patterns of use that characterize our employment of them; it is by making ourselves aware of these distinctive patterns of use that we clarify the grammar of our concepts.” Thus, Wittgenstein wants “to make us aware of the clash between our philosophically reflective idea of how a concept works and the way it actually functions;” he wants “to draw our attention to the profound differences in the patterns of use that characterize the different regions of our language.” (McGinn, 14)
- 22.
This is not the place to explore the literature on Wittgenstein and theology, which is of course a large field. But we can at least note books such as Anthony C. Thiselton’s The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (1980) (and particularly the last chapter, “Wittgenstein, “Grammar,” and the New Testament,” Fergus Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein (1986), and Stephen Muhall’s The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (2016).
- 23.
Also known as the Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, in recognition of the fact that they follow up the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras of Jaimini.
- 24.
See the list given earlier in this essay.
- 25.
Although it is not possible to delve deeply into Vedānta hermeneutics, we can in general terms usefully compare the four books of the Brahma Sūtras with the 12 books of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. Each book has a particular exegetical focus. The first focuses on texts regarding brahman (and ātman) as treated with clarity or only indirectly in texts expository of the nature of brahman. The second deals with contestations of the meaning of the texts about brahman, either by kindred traditions within the Vedic fold or by skeptics outside it. The third turns to the practice of meditation: the dispassion that prompts meditation, the object of meditation and the nature of the meditator, the possible summation of qualities used in meditation gleaned from various texts, and clarification regarding accessories helpful to the practice of meditation. The fourth considers the liberation of the living being; the northern path after death; the attainment of brahman, and the world of brahman. See Francis X. Clooney, “The Principle of Upasamhara and the Development of Vedānta as an Uttara Mīmāṃsā” in Studies in Mīmāṃsā, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 279–297 (1994).
- 26.
The opening of the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras (“Next then, the inquiry into Dharma”) is exactly parallel to the first of the Brahma Sūtras: “Next then, the inquiry into brahman.” I.1.2 (“Whence (the world’s) birth, etc.”) indicates that while brahman is a difficult and rare object of inquiry, it is not entirely unknown, since the order and intelligibility of the world indicates that there is an intelligent, ordering source for it.
- 27.
On Vedānta as a uttara or latter Mīmāṃsā, see my essay, “On the Style of Vedānta: Reading Bhāratītīrtha’s Vaiyāsikanyāyamālā in Light of Mādhava’s Jaiminīyanyāyamālā,” in the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta, edited by Ayon Maharaj (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming.)
- 28.
This is so even if some portions of a revelatory scripture, even whole chapters, may be insufficient on their own, and require reading in a larger context, such a set of chapters. Thus, for example, chapters 14–17 of John, the Last Supper discourse, might arguably require being read as a unit.
- 29.
I do not wish to exaggerate the uniqueness of the contribution of Mīmāṃsā to Christian hermeneutics and the Christian reading of the Gospels. The Veda and the hermeneutics of the Veda are quite different from those of the Gospels, and Christians will always read the Gospels in other ways too; but is this not true regarding every hermeneutical approach to scripture?
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Clooney SJ, F.X. (2020). Revelatory Hermeneutics: How to Read a Gospel, in Light of Mīmāṃsā, India’s Greatest Interpretive Tradition. In: Marion, JL., Jacobs-Vandegeer, C. (eds) The Enigma of Divine Revelation. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28132-8_13
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