The One and the Many

This recent book from Robert Bolton is an uncompromising response to an issue that confronts all shades of religious belief, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, because even for followers of non-dualistic Vedanta, the possibility of believing in a false God becomes greater, not less, as religion becomes more metaphysical. This is a challenge to the usual belief that religion must necessarily be more pure the more inward it is; and the reasons for this are presented with clarity. What is consciousness? What is experience? The answers to these questions are not nearly as obvious as common sense supposes, and this issue is also shown to be laden with consequences for religions that are based above all on experience. Ideas are presented that are a light in the dark for those concerned with the metaphysical dimension of religion, but who wish to find it in an open universe where they do not have to identify with just one form of theory, dictated too often by sectarian ambition. The author, a practicing Catholic, endorses traditional wisdom and its metaphysics while arguing against the ideas of some perennialists who wish to recast it all as a system of monism. The roots of present-day religious conflicts are to be found here, because demands for an absolute unity are in practice tied to sense-bound and political ideas of unity of a kind that must be obvious to almost anyone. When misunderstood in this way, the demand for unity always turns into a demand for violence because of the inevitable clash between reality and crude conceptions of unity. As in his other books, Bolton helps the reader to a deeper understanding of the complex relations between God, the world, and the self, without facile reductions that eliminate realities we ought rather to be trying to understand.