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Bhagavad Gītā, Edmund Burke, Elisa Freschi, Immanuel Kant, Krishna, Mahābhārata, nondualism, saksit, theodicy
I don’t believe in God. But if I did, that God might need to be Krishna.
I have come to believe that the problem of suffering is effectively insurmountable. That is, the vast suffering in the world clearly implies that there cannot be an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, as the God of the Abrahamic traditions is generally supposed to be.
But what about a god who isn’t omnipotent or omnibenevolent?
If we deny one of those two attributes, then the problem of suffering goes away. It is really only a problem for those who believe in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, which is why Indians spent so little time asking the question “Why do good people suffer?”, even though they had an answer to it.
So when Elisa Freschi asked me about later Vaiṣṇava Mīmāṃsakas who believed in a god attained through worship, irrespective of qualities of omnipotence or omnibenevolence, I said sure, such a god could exist, in a way that the Abrahamic God could not. I just didn’t have particular reason to believe in one.
As I grapple a bit more with nondualism, though, the possibility of a God comes up again. The ultimate One of nondualism can look a lot like many conceptions of god. And that leads me to start thinking about concepts of God that I could accept.
Here I see a lot of power in the figure of Krishna, for a simple reason: not only is Krishna not omnibenevolent, it’s not even clear that Krishna is good. Krishna just is. In all the main stories told about him, he is at least morally questionable – whether he’s stealing butter as a kid or being an adulterous adult. (I greatly appreciated stories of Krishna when I was a child myself; he seemed far more “relatable”, as the kids say now, than did “little Lord Jesus / No crying he makes”.) The Bhagavad Gītā portrays Krishna as a font of ethical wisdom – but it is embedded in the larger Mahābhārata in which Krishna later quite flagrantly urges the violation of that same advice.
What the Gītā also depicts, though, is Krishna’s awesomeness – in the older sense of “awesome”, not the one popularized by my generation in which it simply means “really good”. Krishna is not omnibenevolent, but he does seem omnipotent or something close to it; he may not be good, but he still inspires awe. Possibly the most famous part of that text is its eleventh chapter, in which Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna: a terrifying yet beautiful vision in which he is covered in dazzling adornments but devours everyone in his “blazing deathlike faces and awful teeth”. And this, it seems to me, is a good representation of the true nature of the world: terrifyingly indifferent to the aspirations and sufferings of human subjects, yet amazing and beautiful and awe-inspiring all the same. A cruel, crazy, beautiful world.
Crucially, such a god does not seem to merit our trust. It is not clear that what he does is all for the best. Krishna is the divine agent who brings about the events of the Mahābhārata – a famously apocalyptic war, pitting family against family and often involving brutal, wholesale, vengeful slaughter. The most notorious such slaughter, Aśvatthāma’s massacre of his foes in their sleep, comes out of Aśvatthāma’s rage at his father being slain through deception: a deception recommended by none other than Krishna. And what is it all for? Krishna needs to makes the great destruction of the Mahābhārata happen in order to clear away the old historical age and bring about a new one. But the new age is the kaliyuga, an era even worse than the one before. Congratulations?
A next question might be: does Krishna merit worship? That, perhaps, depends on what we mean by “worship”. Krishna, as far as I can tell, is a being who merits awe but not trust. This should not be an unfamiliar combination of feelings – we can feel it before the music of Wagner, or the Egyptian pyramids built on the backs of slaves. That absence of trust does seem like it could get in the way of saksit; it’s harder for a feeling of awe and reverence to motivate you to be a better person, when it is directed at an object that is itself morally questionable. Still, I think there is something valuable to the experience of awe even when it is directed at such a questionable object. At the very least the experience can teach us some humility, reminding us of something out there greater than ourselves. Burke and Kant would call such an object sublime. Perhaps “sublime” is the best word for us to think about Krishna. If so, then perhaps even more importantly, it is a way to think about nature and the universe themselves: the grand, majestic, awesome, even delightful infinity to which we human beings are an afterthought.
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As an aside/discussion point, the Jewish answer to this problem is precisely the opposite: “God is omnibenevolent, but not as omnipotent as God looks at first glance.”
Long story short, the act of creation is unfinished, possibly because of a mishap during the creation process: the Divine Light got scattered into pieces and sparks, rather than arriving whole in the world. (Some of the myths and stories are quite evocative; happy to share but it’s too much for this post.) The work of humankind is to find these lost sparks of the divine and thereby finish the process of creation.
This has a real impact on Jewish practice and life. The term that most modern Jews use for moral responsibility and social justice – for the idea that Jewish people bear responsibility for the moral, spiritual, and material welfare of the whole world, not just themselves – is “tikkun olam,” literally translated as “repairing the world.”
Yeah, I see this as another option: a celestial bodhisattva like Mañjuśrī could be omnibenevolent without being omnipotent.
You could even have both kinds of gods existing in the world at once: an omnipotent but non-omnibenevolent Krishna coexisting with an omnibenevolent but non-omnipotent Mañjuśrī. In the West I think that’s pretty much where the Marcionites went: the creator god vs. the saving god.
What’s interesting to me here is that your and Seth’s interpretations of the Hebrew God seem incompatible with each other: you’re saying the Jewish God is omnibenevolent but not (fully) omnipotent, whereas Seth is basically saying that the God of Job is omnipotent but not omnibenevolent. You can have two different gods who respectively have each set of characteristics, but I don’t see how the same god could be as you each describe. (The Marcionites could get around this by assigning one such god to the Hebrew Bible and one to the New Testament, but an option like that doesn’t seem to be available here.)
Certainly the “biblical Hebrew God” is not a consistent figure! This is why Jewish tradition places so much focus on commentaries and interpretations (e.g. talmud) atop the original text. There are, naturally, a wide variety of interpretations of the Book of Job, and I am no expert.
What I can say is that “what Jews believe” also does not have a single consistent answer, neither between groups nor across time. These contradictions are not conclusively resolved, nor will they be.
My impression of the predominant American Jewish (Reform/Conservative) interpretation is “Job is challenging and weird, so we base our conclusions on all this other stuff that disagrees with Job.”
…So essentially yes, two different gods :)
I agree that any viable idea of god could not be omnibenevolent. Krishna is not a bad role model for this kind of god, and neither is the God of Job who is also awesome, but whose idea of the good is complerely incomprehensible. I disagree, however, with your suggestion that human beings (and maybe life and consciousness?) are merely an afterthought to infinity. The larger universe may not care very much about what is good for human beings and what makes us happy, but we are as intrinsic and essential to the totality of the universe as every atom, star, galaxy, and pebble in it.
That’s an interesting take. It seems to me that a comparison being made here can be phrased in two very different ways. You are saying we are no less important to the universe than a pebble is. I am saying we are no more important to the universe than a pebble is.
There is an interesting recent body of literature on the question of the cosmic in/significance of humans. One piece that I found enlightening is: Guy Kahane, “Our cosmic insignificance”, Noûs, 48(4), 2014, 745–772. From Kahane’s abstract: “Worries about cosmic insignificance do not express metaethical worries about objectivity or nihilism, and we can make good sense of the idea of cosmic significance and its absence. It is also possible to explain why the vastness of the universe can make us feel insignificant. This impression does turn out to be mistaken, but not for the reasons typically assumed. In fact, we might be of immense cosmic significance—though we cannot, at this point, tell whether this is the case.”
Very interesting reflection, thanks Amod! Coming from Buddhism, I find it easier to relate to the Shiva family of Hindu deities, and had never really given serious consideration to Vishnu and his avatars. The figure of Krishna as God does seem to capture the mind-blowing literal ‘awesomeness’ of reality, including the fact that he is not depicted as omnibenevolent.
Yet there is something intellectually unsatisfying about a God that is not all-powerful or omnibenevolent. It seems to me that the philosophical idea of God very much arises as a reaction to the intellectual horror of infinite regress. As Buddhism recognises, phenomena in time seem to arise in dependence on phenomena ‘other’ than them, and ideas are defined and validated in dependence on other ideas ‘other’ than them. So if one posits a special type of entity that can be self-causing and self-validating (let’s call it ‘God’), the intellectual problem is solved. Then it turns out that people get into mystical states of consciousness that are experienced as self-causing and self-validating… and it doesn’t take much to identify these two types of self-sufficiency with each other (“tat tvam asi”), and we talk about some lucky individuals having ‘reached God’.
But then, if our idea of God is not all-powerful, then that implies that this God is himself part of some wider reality, and if he is not omnibenevolent, that implies that there is a true benevolence that is beyond him, without which we could not even make the call that he is not omnibenevolent. Either way that makes him not quite self-sufficient, and this entire neat theological edifice falls down.
Maybe one way to get around this conundrum is for the intellect itself to step down a bit from its own professed all-inclusiveness, and admit to the humbling possibility that any ideas we form about the Ultimate are just ideas, and can never fully capture what the Ultimate really is. I think this recognition appears in one form or another in all spiritual traditions – in the West it goes by the name of apophatic theology. Advaita Vedanta often stresses the immanent aspect of the ultimate, the fact that ultimate Consciousness is not separate from this very conscious awareness right now… but it does very much recognise the difference between ultimate non-duality, and ideas about it. As long as the separate mind functions, there is a sense in which the reactive ego-mind and awakened awareness are utterly inconmensurable to each other. In the wider Hindu tradition, maybe the fact that the gods are not one but many, and that they are often seen to go back and forth between complete self-sufficiency and involved multiplicity, including apparent displays of ego-states like pride and competitiveness, can be most sympathetically understood as a warning not to create an intellectual duality between two ‘worlds’, divine and samsaric.
Buddhism does very much recognise this insight too, especially in the Prajnaparamita literature, but in its mythology it rather chooses to keep samsaric and nirvanic functioning fully apart and unconfused. I’ve never seen a Buddhist sūtra where a buddha or high bodhisattva would suddenly display signs of a gross ego. Only in the much later Tantric literature this distinction is sometimes blurred.
Of course, the alternative to all of this is to go fully dualistic and just say that entire samsaric mechanism arises out of non-divine or natural causes… as in the Theravada “it’s always been like this and it sustains itself”, or as in the prakriti of the Samkhya. More generally, if we just allow for inanimate reality to have some level of autonomous existence and logic to itself, then you can invoke modern science and claim natural evolutionary processes shaping our brains as the cause of samsaric existence. Two gods indeed.