NISHITANI Keiji’s chief work, Religion and Nothingness (1961), is often seen to present a stiff challenge to Christianity, but it would be wrong to regard his philosophy as deliberately hostile or malicious. The real challenge, and this applies to Western philosophy as much as Christian metaphysics, lies in the overcoming of what became known as Aristotelian theology. Not by addressing Christianity directly, necessarily, but merely as a result of overcoming the Greek thinker’s ontological conflation of substance with being. In other words, Nishitani tackles the philosopher’s ideas as they appear prior to the founding of Christianity itself and this clearly affects the long-term credibility of those theological tenets which came to exert such a profound impact on the religion.
Spirituality, for Nishitani, is of the utmost importance and yet he believes that Christianity serves an important purpose in the sense that its modern-day clash with the forces of scientism opens up an ironic possibility for a reactive nihilism that provokes the kind of self-questioning that can lead to Śūnyatā. As far as Nishitani is concerned,
“until the problem of religion and science reaches a level that is fundamental enough to render the approach to the question of God itself problematical, we cannot say that the issue has really been faced. It is as serious as that.”
Nishitani is certainly no supporter of atheism, but understands that it presents an opportunity for a dramatic reinterpretation of religion and, in terms of theism in general, of formulating an “impersonal personality” (or “personal impersonality”) that moves beyond the concept of a transcendent or objectified God. Nishitani did not set out to attack Christianity, however, and was solely interested in developing a form of Christian-Buddhist dialogue that could act as an effective platform for his approach towards religion as a whole.
One of the main problems identified in the pages of Religion and Nothingness, involves the rise of natural science and the eradication of Christianity’s teleological qualities through the mechanisation of nature itself. This drove a stake through the heart of the more traditional relationship that had existed between religion and nature, with the latter breaking free of the divine will that had always been said to dominate the natural world. With God separated from his creation, therefore, the personal dimension was eroded to the extent that nature acquired its own set of independent laws. Although this process encouraged the onset of nihilism, at the same time it has led to the decline of God as a personality.
Following this radical shift of emphasis, the natural world was said to be under the control of human reason and the fact that theology has been replaced by rationalism led, in Nishitani’s view, to the rise of atheistic philosophy in the shape of Nietzsche and Sartre. Ironically, atheism itself has become so thoroughly subjectified that it has come to fulfil the Christian prophecy of a future subjective humanity that has turned its back on God. As the Japanese observes:
“Might it not be the case that these two mutually exclusive positions – the freedom of man carried all the way through to a subjective nothingness and a subjectified atheism, and the religious freedom appearing in Christianity – require some sort of higher synthesis in our time? Christianity cannot, and must not, look on modern atheism merely as something to be eliminated. It must instead accept atheism as a mediation to a new development of Christianity itself.”
Whilst this sounds like some kind of perverse liberalism, at least in the context in which this dichotomy is ordinarily discussed, Nishitani is calling for a re-evaluation of the idea of a divine personality that pervades theistic religion in the wider quest for a form of salvation that is more akin to the “dependent co-origination” that one finds in Buddhism. In other words, he believes that the relationship between God, man and nature must be changed to heal the modern rift between the impersonality of materialism and the personality of religion.
Once again, Nishitani’s theory of “impersonal personality” (or “personal impersonality”) is achieved in the context of Śūnyatā and, in this case, involves reinterpreting man as a manifestation of absolute nothingness and not as the image of the ego-subject that he represents currently. Whilst the objectified personality is detached from the human condition, Nishitani applies the same methodology to God and thus his concept of jitai (”in itself”) results in the following declaration:
“God is not-God; precisely because he is not, God is truly God.”
This message is consistent with the idea that in Śūnyatā “things” empty themselves and, in relation to God, that which is considered transcendent becomes One with man and nature.
