HIDDEN AND INACCESSIBLE KNOWLEDGE

A well-intentioned but meandering discussion of God’s sublimity that frequently sinks into invective on the evils of organized religion.

Luyinduladio’s central claims about enlightened religious inquiry are admirable–they should be articulated and written about more often. The author argues that we should access our religious urges through our rational capacities. He further suggests that God is too great to be confined by any one religious tradition or sacred text–or even, really, by language. This is where the movement religious scholars call negative theology begins–with the suggestion that any God we can imagine would necessarily be too sublime, too inexplicable to be conceived. (God is in some ways the “hidden and inaccessible knowledge” of Luyinduladio’s title.) However, even the great negative theologians were ultimately stymied in their efforts to explain religious experience on their own terms. Meister Eckhart lapsed into mysticism, and Saint John of the Cross into gorgeous but obscure poetry. Luyinduladio has similar problems, but without the genius of an Eckhart or John of the Cross, he falls too often into wandering rants. Some are expected–the author abhors bigotry, religiously motivated violence, sectarian arrogance and the ignorance of the zealot. Others, however, come straight from left field. He castigates the second Bush administration for sending the United States to war in Iraq on false evidence–and Colin Powell for abetting. Luyinduladio goes on about the evils of slavery and applauds the archbishop of Canterbury for discussing the possibility of reparations. These are valid complaints but seem hugely out of place in a tract on God and spirituality. Further, too many of the author’s central insights come straight from the religious imagination of one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine. In fact, so fond is the author of Paine that he repeatedly quotes him at long length–once for a laughable 22-page stretch. Readers may wonder if they should go straight to Paine instead.

Hidden and inaccessible indeed.