Gavin Flood, The Symbol of Ascent in Brahmanical and Christian Discourse

The symbol of ascent has been a persistent theme in the histories of Brahmanical and Christian religion, representing human striving for transcendence. This lecture will examine the symbol, taking two examples from Christian and Śaiva religious literature, and arguing that the symbol of ascent articulates a redemptive understanding of human persons. The examples taken will be from the Netratantra along with Kṣemarāja’s commentary and Hugh of St Victor’s The Mystic Arc (De arca Noe mystica). I have chosen these works because they were both culturally resonant in the 12th and 13th centuries, there is a prima facie parallelism in their symbols of ascent, but also because there is a vast difference in conception of what such a hierarchical symbol comprises. Moreover, we might take both texts to be exemplars of a wider intellectual culture in which faith in transcendence was understood to involve the whole person and engagement with the created order. Such comparison has philosophical implication and raises methodological and hermeneutical questions about why one would wish to compare in the first place, how we go about it, and what this tells us about how we understand human persons across cultures.

Professor Gavin Flood FBA is the Dean of Academic Affairs at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford University. His research interests are in medieval Hindu texts (especially from the traditions of Shiva), comparative religion, and phenomenology. Developing from the comparative interests of these books, he is currently working on a project on holiness as well as developing closer textual work on a Sanskrit text called the Netra Tantra.

His publications include Religion and the Philosophy of Life (2019), The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism (2013), The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in Our Strange World (2012), and The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory, and Tradition (2004). He is also the General Editor of the series ‘The Oxford History of Hinduism’ and is a Fellow of the British Academy