Review Essay*

Before Hegel and Beyond Kant: Risto

Saarinen’s Recognition and Religion
Suzanne E. Smith
Harvard University

If there is to be a question of toleration, it is necessary that there should be

something to be tolerated; there has to be some belief or practice or way of
life that one group thinks (however fanatically or unreasonably) wrong, mis-
taken, or undesirable. If one group simply hates another . . . it is not really
toleration that is needed: the people involved need rather to lose their hatred,
their prejudice, or their implacable memories.—Bernard Williams1

When religious tolerance appears in the literature on ecumenicism, religious

pluralism, and other modes of peaceful coexistence, it is frequently juxtaposed with
the words “beyond,” “more than,” and “is not enough.” To be sure, it is generally
conceded in these contexts, tolerance is an improvement on intolerance, and,
relatively speaking, then, a fine thing, as far it goes. For many, however, it does not
go very far. “Religious tolerance,” we are told, “however virtuous, does nothing
to remove our ignorance of one another.”2 It is thought to lack strenuousness, and
hence, to be unsuited for modern moral conflicts, which tend increasingly toward

*
Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016); 304 pp; $80 hb; page references appear in parentheses in the text.
1
Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?,” in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (ed.
David Heyd; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 18-27, at 19.
2
James L. Fredericks, Faith Among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999) 172.

HTR 110:2 (2017) 301–313

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 302 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

the polarity characteristic of war: “Tolerance, especially of the knee-jerk variety . . .
works as long as people can slink off by themselves, avoiding contact, and never
facing up to what they truly believe.”3 No one says, “I am fighting for [fill in the
blank] with all the toleration I can muster.”
Consistent with the implicit scolding of cowardice in complaints about tolerance
is the sense that it does too little—that it “can be a very passive kind of thing.”4
Being excessively passive seems to go along with being insufficiently positive. Thus,
for some, tolerance “is only a negative (political) principle, lacking the positive,
affective mutual engagement called for by a stable society.”5 Putting up with the
existence of what are taken to be the offensive beliefs and practices of others does
not quiet the desire to wound those others in some way, or heal the memories of the
imagined or all-too-real offenses from which that desire continually draws fresh fuel.
If, for the sake of argument, we were to take tolerance to be defective in the
respects just mentioned, how should it be supplemented? The means and aims
of the movement beyond tolerance to something better often point towards a
religiously-inflected version of Kantian cosmopolitanism, understood as “an attitude
of recognition, respect, openness, interest, beneficence, and concern toward other
human individuals, cultures, and peoples as members of one global community.”6
This common understanding of cosmopolitanism, as variously seen in the contexts
of Christian ecumenicism, “wider ecumenicism,” and religious pluralism, varies
from Kant’s own version of cosmopolitanism, which he noted was concerned
“not with philanthropy, but with right.”7 More specifically, Kant stipulated that
“cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality,” and that
this mode of hospitality “means the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy
upon his arrival in another’s country.”8 The right is negative, not positive. Ethically
attractive extrapolations from Kant’s norm of “universal hospitality” aside, his
aim, as stipulated in Perpetual Peace, is not to bring peoples and individuals alike
together in friendship but rather to secure peace through respect for individuals

3
Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005) 287.
4
Robert J. Schreiter, “Summation: Call to Action,” in A Dome of Many Colors: Studies in
Religious Pluralism, Identity, and Unity (ed. Arvind Sharma and Kathleen M. Dugan; Harrisburg,
PA: Trinity Press, 1999) 190.
5
This is David Heyd’s description of Barbara Herman’s argument in his introduction to David
Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 7 [italics
in original].
6
Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 1.
7
Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Perpetual Peace and Other
Essays (trans. Ted Humphrey; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983) 118. “Wider ecumenicism” pertains to a
branch of Christian ecumenicism that extends its scope to include other religions. See, for example,
Eugene Hillman, C.S.Sp., The Wider Ecumenicism (New York: Herder, 1968).
8
Kant, Perpetual Peace, 118.

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 SUZANNE E. SMITH 303

in their capacity as bearers of universal human rights. The norm of respect for
human beings as self-legislators of universal moral law is distinctively Kantian,
whereas already in antiquity norms of openness were associated with modes of
cosmopolitanism.
What is the “attitude of recognition” that is said to figure in Kantian
cosmopolitanism? His brand of respect does not demand “recognition” in the
now-familiar sense of mutual interest in and deference to, as well as good will and
friendliness towards other individuals. Peoples, taken collectively, are not required
to be friendly to one another, true though it is that the cosmopolite is supposed to
be interested in them as objects of curiosity. Indeed, in his discussion of what he
takes to be the natural predispositions of people of different nationalities, Kant
singles out “the Spaniard” on the grounds that he “does not learn from foreigners
[or] . . . travel in order to get to know other peoples.”9 To his mind, other peoples
do a bit better in this vein. Of Spaniards, Kant complains:
The limitation of spirit of all peoples who are not prompted by disinterested
curiosity to get to know the outside world with their own eyes, still less to
be transplanted there (as citizens of the world), is something characteristic
of [Spaniards], whereby the French, English, and Germans favorably differ
from other peoples.10

In the Kantian scheme, then, respect for universal human dignity ought properly to
be supplemented by curiosity, exercised, for example, through travel. But curiosity
about the world and about “peoples” need not be supplemented by feelings of
“concern.” For Kant, affects and inclinations, including those pertaining to love
and concern, are not a source of binding moral law: “Love as inclination cannot
be commanded; but beneficence from duty when no inclination impels us . . . is
practical . . . . Such love resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in
principles of action and not in tender sympathy.”11 The cosmopolite need not “care”
about people as individuals, much less as members of particular religious traditions.
Kantian cosmopolitanism is consistent with, although more expansive than,
the quasi-Lockean religious toleration that features in the laws of liberal nations,
which stress respect for other people’s rights. Kantian cosmopolitanism supplements
toleration, understood in its minimal sense as the practical respect of civil rights,
with 1) the norm of equal innate human dignity, 2) the norm of universal hospitality,
3) the norm of principled respect grounded in universal moral law, and 4) the norm
of disinterested curiosity in “peoples” in the world around oneself.

9
Immanuel Kant, “Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View,” in Anthropology, History,
and Education (trans. R. B. Louden; The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 227–429, at 411.
10
Ibid.
11
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie
because of Philanthropic Concerns (ed. James W. Ellington; 3rd ed.; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993) 12.

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 304 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

It would seem that we cannot get from respect to “recognition” in the robust
sense in which it functions in the context of contemporary religious pluralist
and ecumenical thought by turning to Kant, whose notions of cosmopolitanism
(particularly those pertaining to equal human dignity and universal moral law) are
arguably foundational for the universalist dimensions of such thought. Nor, looking
slightly further ahead in history, can we get it from Hegel, the ostensible father
of modern recognition.12 Must we, then, have recourse to theological resources
in order to think about recognition as it pertains specifically to religion? How
was “recognition” understood prior to Hegel, in the context of Western religious
traditions? Might earlier modes of “religious recognition” (4) be recovered, so
that the West might use them in attempting to move beyond norms of religious
toleration? Why invoke recognition at all in this context?
In his new book, Risto Saarinen, Professor of Ecumenics at the University
of Helsinki and a Lutheran theologian, argues that recognition, far from being
exclusively a secular notion of Hegelian parentage, and the late descendent of
less developed—and less demanding—notions of “mere” toleration, should be
understood as a theological concept that was already robust in the ancient (Latinate
Christian) world. He seeks to defend the claim that “recognition is a theological
topic that is relatively independent of post-Hegelian philosophical developments”
(4). In order to support this argument, the book provides “the first intellectual
history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to the present
day. It connects the history of religion and theology with philosophical approaches,
arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the
religious processes of recognition” (4).
Saarinen has chosen a topic that relates closely to his longstanding interest
in religious dialogue between Christian denominations and relational practices
such as gift-giving, as well as intellectual history. Saarinen’s new book is written
for academic specialists in historical and systematic Christian theology; it may
prompt interest in recognition among scholars of other religions, and of religious
pluralism, as well.

12
Hegel develops his notion of recognition in Chapter 4 of his 1807 text, Phenomenology of
Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 104–119. Amongst the vast
literature on this topic, see especially Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (ed.
Allan Bloom; trans. J. H. Nichols, Jr.; New York: Basic Books, 1969); Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Idee
einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1973); Robert Brandom, “The Structure of
Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution,” Philosophy & Social Criticism
33 (2007) 127–150; and Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). The seminal text that
prompted the philosophical recovery of recognition in the 1990s is Axel Honneth, The Struggle
for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (trans. Joel Anderson; Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1996).

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 SUZANNE E. SMITH 305

Because Saarinen believes that “a relatively stable terminology designating the

phenomenon of religious recognition can already be found in early Christianity”
(26), he does not attempt to separate various conceptions of recognition from a
concept of it that is understood as “a cluster concept with several dimensions” (29).
This “cluster concept” is historically situated, deriving from the use of the Latin
verbs cognosco, agnosco, and recognosco, as well as the substantives cognitio,
agnitio, and recognitio, and looking back to the Greek gi[g]nosko, epignosko,
gnosis, and epignosis. His account of religious recognition in this context is
purposefully a bit elastic. Religious recognition, then, features a cognitive element,
in that “somebody or something is perceived and known in the sense that the
recognizer can say who or what is concerned” (27). To this is added a dimension
of attachment: “the recognizer not only perceives the recognizee but also attaches
a certain positive value or commitment to him/her/it” (27). To attachment, which
entails “involvement and creating a social bond,” Saarinen adds as a third feature
of recognition, “availability,” by which he means that “at least two participants
are able to relate to one another as ‘the recognizer’ and ‘the recognizee’” (28).
Unlike toleration, recognition in Saarinen’s account does not proceed from less
to more demanding formulations; rather he claims that in Christianity, recognition
is demanding from the outset. In this historical context, love and gratitude appear
as “upward and downward instances of recognition” (31).
From this point forward, things become more difficult, as Saarinen presents
a complicated rubric of the different modes of recognition—so complicated that
readers may find themselves repeatedly having to turn back to the pages detailing
that rubric (I did this so many times that I finally had to write them down on a piece
of paper). In brief, a mode of recognition called R1 (in which A recognizes B) is
distinguished from R1U (“upward” recognition from lower to higher, as from a
servant to a master), R1D (“downward” recognition from higher to lower), and R1E
(recognition between equals), as well as from R0 (an act of seeking recognition),
R0F (in which “B has a favourable attitude toward potential As”), R1D/E, RD/E,
and Rdef (the last of which contains elements of F, D, U, and E) (35–40). Relational
recognition may occur within the self as well as between selves; in that context,
Saarinen also works with “A” and “B” (235).
The presumed academic audience for this book is implicit not only in this rubric
but also in the habits of patient, detailed argumentation employed here. Saarinen is
measured in making even fairly modest claims and, in response to his own posited
questions tends, to settle diplomatically for “yes and no” with qualifications.13
That said, the book’s central claim—that a theological mode of recognition exists
independently of Hegel and that post-Hegelian philosophy is indebted to that

13
See, for example, Saarinen, Recognition and Religion, 96, 189, and 248.

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 306 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

tradition—is a bold, very well-defended, and, I think, eminently defensible one,

albeit, as I shall suggest, for different reasons from the ones cited primarily by
Saarinen. This book should open up new avenues of research regarding religious
recognition within the study of Christianity and other religious traditions as well.
Overall, the book aims to provide a historical and theologically systematic
account of recognition as it figures mostly in Christian theology prior to and beyond
Hegel. More pointedly, the book aims to “deconstruct the process of recognition,”
in order to fulfill its intellectual and theologically normative aims. The latter
include the recovery of a hitherto unrecognized tradition of religious recognition
that may be employed as a supplement to toleration. Consistent with the aims of
ecumenical and pluralist thought, Saarinen seeks to make “religious recognition”
available as a normative resource. In order to go beyond toleration to something
more than secular Kantian cosmopolitanism and its variants, he needs to go back
before Hegel, locate ancient “religious recognition,” and usher it, intact, into the
proverbial contemporary “multicultural and multireligious world” (1). Such a
world, Saarinen remarks, “requires new personal attitudes and societal strategies to
enable peaceful coexistence among different convictions. In Western democracies,
toleration has been the prevailing attitude and societal framework promoting such
coexistence” (1).
As Saarinen correctly observes, “While most democratic thinkers agree that
toleration continues to be vitally important in our times, many argue that it needs
to be complimented by other attitudes and strategies” (1). Thus, we face the
predicament sketched by Bernard Williams and others that is mentioned at the
beginning of this essay: toleration does not ask us to lose our hatred of or prejudice
against certain practices, beliefs, and ways of life. It just asks us to permit their
existence without engaging in interference or inflicting injury. No individuals
have to change their feelings; they just have to restrain them to the point that the
laws protecting the tolerated are not transgressed. The low standard of toleration,
necessary though it may be, is just one step towards the development of the mutual
regard and affirmation associated with recognition.
From the perspective of intellectual history, Saarinen aims to show that
while the history of toleration evolves from mere permission [that smaller,
less powerful religions can be peacefully allowed to exist] towards respect
and mutual esteem, no similar evolution towards “fuller” conceptions of reli-
gious recognition can be found. Rather, the ancient discussions appearing in,
for instance, the Latin Recognitions [a pseudo-Clementine romance that exists
in a translation from the early fifth century C.E.], already assume a complex
and demanding view of religious recognition. (215)

This view suggests what is, for Saarinen, the distinctive aim of “religious
recognition” as such, which entails “producing a self-definition and self-preservation
of the recognizer” (251). His objective is to show that this distinctive aim was
in place from early Christianity onwards. Importantly, at no point does religious

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 SUZANNE E. SMITH 307

recognition emphasize equality. Rather, from its putative “ancient beginnings, and
increasingly during the medieval and Reformation periods, religious recognition
is considered to be a relational act that involves and redefines its participants”
(246). In this context, “the personal identity of the individual who performs the
act of recognition is not an unchanging substance but is expressed in terms of her
attachment and social bond. She is qualified as a ‘servant,’ a ‘bride,’ a ‘lover,’ or
a ‘believer’” (246).
According to the Recognitions, recognition has interpersonal, human-divine,
and truth-regarding dimensions to it. For Saarinen, interpersonal recognition in this
context evokes the Aristotelian notion of anagnorisis, which entails the passage
from ignorance to knowledge, while recognition in its truth-regarding capacity
reflects the Pauline account of knowing the truth. In this text, Saarinen detects a pre-
Hegelian association of recognition with struggle: “The one who has new awareness
separates himself from earlier lords; the separation nevertheless originates with the
lords who are responsible for the struggle [for truth]. . . . Separation leads to truth
and liberation; it is truthful heteronomy with the absolute” (51). This interpretation
assumes quite readily the usefulness of Hegelian and Kantian vocabulary in this
context, even while noting that comparison with Hegel’s account of the struggle
for recognition would be anachronistic.
The Recognitions is but one early destination in a trajectory stretching from
Aristotle and the New Testament to modernity. This trajectory runs through some
little-known as well as some much better known sources, including, among others,
Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, Martin Luther’s Lectures
on Romans, Marsilio Ficino’s fifteenth-century Neoplatonist treatise, De Amore,
John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, a text dubbed Religion, eine
Anglegenheit des Menschen by eighteenth-century German Protestant theologian
Johann Joachim Spalding (the discussion of which is excellent), and several texts
by modern ecumenical thinkers, both Protestant and Catholic.
The two chapters following the introduction are structured chronologically,
moving from “The Latin Traditions” to “The Modern Era.” Chapter Four
then offers a “systematic outline” of religious recognition. This last chapter
concludes with reflections on the connections between the theological accounts
of recognition detailed here and current philosophical discussions of recognition
that characteristically ignore its religious dimensions. Here, for example, we learn
that “religious recognition is a strong attitude in our sources that changes and
transforms the person who recognizes. Normally, the object of recognition, the
recognizee, also undergoes . . . change. Especially in older texts, recognition is a
much stronger attitude than toleration . . . which does not question the position of
one who tolerates” (242).
The discussions of particular theologians, though brief, are generally of high
quality. Saarinen is very good at showing patterns of continuity and discontinuity
in the treatment of religious recognition. His carefully structured prose, which

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 308 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

is notably unadorned with stylistic flourishes,14 clearly shows significant

variations among accounts of religious recognition. One example of his approach,
which features discrete discussions followed by summary accounts that reveal
relationships, will have to suffice in this context:
Although Ficino, Luther, and Calvin differ considerably from one another,
some common features can be mentioned. First, the Augustinian sense of
recognition as recollection from memory is relegated to the background,
though not completely forgotten. Second, the medieval tradition exercises
some influence on authors. The feudal relationship between lord and servant
is assumed. The recognition performed by the servant is a normative and
performative act in which honour remains important. At the same time, this
situation expresses the individual situation and decision of the individual, not
a feudal bond. . . . Third, all three authors outline a mutuality that is different
from medieval discussions. Ficino is the only one who has an explicit con-
cept of mutual recognition. . . . As Ficino is a Platonist, this event does not,
however, depict “otherness” in any modern sense. (107)

Carefulness about differentiating between modern and pre-modern understandings

of recognition is a hallmark of this book. Mercifully, there is no attempt to pretend
that concepts such as “otherness” in the post-Hegelian Levinas-ian sense figured in
the ancient world. Beyond that, Saarinen makes a very interesting point about the
treatment of the theme of recognition in the history of modern Christian theology,
namely that it is unevenly treated and that it does not show up where and when
one might have good cause to expect it:
Given the rich texts of Vatican II as well as the Protestant heritage of Barth
and Bultmann, one would expect that the notion of religious recognition
would remain significant after 1965. As the new theological currents of the
1960s take Hegel, Marx, social sciences, and human rights seriously, this
expectation is even stronger. However, one seeks discussions of recognition
in liberation theology or in the political theology of the 1960s and 1970s in
vain. . . . Generally speaking, recognition does not belong to the themes of
the progressive social sciences during this period. Its introduction by Charles
Taylor and Axel Honneth has only taken place since the end of the cold war
period. (172)

Strikingly, Saarinen remarks, there is “one genre of theological literature in

which recognition is discussed throughout the twentieth century. The ecumenical
movement has employed this term consistently since the 1920s, reflecting the
concept of recognition extensively, especially in the 1970s” (173). The apparent

14
On occasion, Saarinen’s statements are perhaps a little too flatly obvious. For example, he
remarks that “Augustine’s writings are formative for Latin Christianity” (54), that “[Cicero’s]
thoughts remain influential in early modern Europe” (60), and that “the Italian Renaissance of the
fifteenth century revived the knowledge of Greek and Latin” (79).

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 SUZANNE E. SMITH 309

mystery deepens, given that “paradoxically, discussions on ecumenical recognition

faded in the 1980s, some time before the philosophers started to employ the
concept” (173).
Had Saarinen more explicitly included a discussion not merely of Christian
ecumenicism but also religious pluralism in his account, I would speculate that
the uneven and at points paradoxical fortunes of religious recognition in modern
theology might be better accounted for. The mode of equal, affirmative, potentially
loving recognition featured in religious pluralism represents a response and
supplement to toleration. Toleration itself, of the post-Lockean, law-bound variety,
was the dominant response to intra-Christian religious dissention, and toleration
could accommodate varying degrees of recognition understood as a voluntary,
subjective phenomenon.
Recognition becomes prominent in the context of ecumenicism during the
very period when Christian denominations start to be imagined by other Christian
denominations as equal religious “others” along the lines by which non-Christian
religions are recognized in the context of religious pluralism. Once the idea of
recognition was joined to the idea of equal cosmopolitan right, the notion of a
universal right to equal recognition became a foregone conclusion. The idea of
other religions as equals, while functioning in some sense as a development of the
norms underpinning the wider ecumenicism, ultimately runs counter to the notion
of all people as “anonymous Christians” that features in that context.15 Since the
problem addressed by pluralism is one of a world joined by technology but not
joined by social attitudes (love, affirmation, etc.) that make closeness tolerable,
then recognition comes into play. Ironically but unsurprisingly, estranged factions
within Christianity needed to be made into rights-bearing strangers in order for a
new mode of closeness to be secured through recourse to the notion of love for the
stranger. As the stranger becomes the neighbor, and love for the stranger-neighbor
becomes paradigmatic in ethical and theological terms, relative familiars need to
become more strange in order to be better loved.
In the 1980s, as religious pluralism ascended to greater prominence, recognition
needed to be rehabilitated and, more specifically, rendered both more abstract (since
it applies to “the other” as such) and more intimate, such that love for the other-as-
neighbor-and-stranger is demanded. The norm of equality had to be accommodated.
The mode of recognition we see in contemporary religious pluralism is the result
of this accommodation. Here, we might rethink what Saarinen calls the “new
personal attitudes and societal strategies” called for by the “multicultural and
multireligious world” (1).

15
On anonymous Christianity, see Karl Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” Theological Investigations
(trans. David Bourke; 23 vols.; New York: Seabury Press, 1974) 6:390–98 as well as Hillman, The
Wider Ecumenicism. On Rahner’s critical incorporation of and argument with German philosophical
ideas, especially those of Kant and Heidegger, into his theology, see Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner:
Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004) 14.

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 310 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

To my mind, the concepts of religious recognition that become relevant in the

context of pluralism (as the complex of principles and practices designed for such
a world) are those found particularly in the ancient Near East and in at least one
book of the Hebrew Bible, because of the extent to which both, their significant
differences aside, use fictions of familial bonds that can be formalized to forge
modes of commonality between strangers. Religious pluralism requires such notions
of constructed kinship, albeit along very different lines, because of 1) its emphasis
on the stranger in an expansive sense that includes foreigners, 2) its utilization
of both obligatory and voluntary notions of love, and 3) its political dimensions,
including attention to power.
Briefly, and again, speculatively, the concept of recognition between vassal and
suzerain, for example, lends itself to dramatic reinvention (indeed, transvaluation)
in the 1980s-vintage religious pluralism, which commonly aimed at the articulation
of purportedly shared (or at least potentially shareable) stipulations, rules, and
norms.16 One thinks, for example, of the guidelines for dialogue issued by the
World Council of Churches, as well as the work of individual theologians, such as
Paul Knitter and Leonard Swidler, the latter of whom went so far as to compose a
“Decalogue for Dialogue” in 1983.17 In the “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic”
drafted by Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng and endorsed at the 1993 World
Parliament of Religions, we find an attempt to formalize a post-legal common
ethic that governs the hearts of religious humankind while creating stipulations for
conduct.18 No one religion is suzerain or vassal with respect to another. The suzerain
is excised from the code altogether. Within the code, all are brothers and sisters,
but oddly, brothers and sisters in need of stipulations concerning the means and
aims of their bonds of love. While non-systematic norms of uncoded “recognition”
were ebbing in 1980s ecumenical theology, a sort of retro-covenantalism (with
stipulations, declarations, and the like) was cropping up in religious pluralism.
This covenantalism was arguably as much inspired by John Rawls’ massively
influential reimagination of social contract philosophy in his 1971 A Theory of
Justice as it was by theological declarations, such as those made during the course
of Vatican II. Thus, it tends heavily toward articulating ostensibly basic or minimal
commitments or agreements with respect to proceduralism that are to be consented
to before dialogue can begin.
16
The classic source on the relation between a sovereign lord (the suzerain) and his subject (the
vassal) as it figures in the convenantal language employed in the Hebrew Bible is William L. Moran,
“The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963) 77–87.
17
The “Decalogue for Dialogue” still survives, but it is now called “Dialogue Principles.” See
“Dialogue Principles,” Dialogue Institute and Journal of Ecumenical Studies, http://dialogueinstitute.
org/dialogue-principles/. For Knitter’s discussion of ground rules and a priori commitments, and
the objections that have been made against such preconditions, see Chapter 5 of Paul F. Knitter,
One Earth, Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1995).
18
See A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (ed. Hans
Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel; New York: Continuum, 1993).

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 SUZANNE E. SMITH 311

In the wake of the turn toward recognition that followed upon the publication of
Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition in 1992, pluralist thought absorbed
the philosophical recovery of recognition and swerved away from codes toward
relationships. Here is where the concept of recognition from the book of Ruth
comes in, which is often employed in both homiletic and ideologically-inflected
theology. Writing in 2005, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that
Ruth asks Boaz a question: “Why have I found such favour in your eyes that
you recognize me [lehakireni] a foreigner [nokhriah]”. . . . In Hebrew the
root n-k-r is a contronym. . . . A single Hebrew word spans the spectrum of
human interaction between recognition and estrangement, compassion and
indifference. The question posed by the book of Ruth is: do we, or do we
not, recognize our common humanity across cultural and religious divides?19

Recognition here is not codified. It requires no stipulations and goes against

expectations to the point that it prompts incredulity. It consists of the “kindness
of strangers.”20
With respect to Saarinen’s book, given that it aims to define and recover a
neglected tradition of “religious” rather than solely “Christian” recognition, it
would have been valuable to have a more wide-ranging perspective, especially with
respect to the recognition of rulers that is such a central theological concept in the
ancient Near Eastern treaty literature and the Hebrew Bible. There is, of course,
nothing whatsoever wrong with a book primarily on “Christian recognition,” but
that is arguably not quite “religious recognition.”
Finally, the assumption in this book that toleration is less “strong” and demanding
than recognition deserves more critical attention. Because toleration has been
legally recognized in the West, it may seem that deferring to its constraints is no
more demanding than obeying any other settled law. Should one try to practice
toleration of Judaism or Christianity in Saudi Arabia, however, one may find such
deference very strong and demanding indeed, even to the point that it may demand
the sacrifice of one’s life. In liberal democracies, toleration may succeed to the
extent that it does only because it is enshrined and defended by the law. If it were
undemanding, why would the law have been dragged into the matter in the first
place? Exhortation could have taken care of the problem.
Unlike toleration, recognition, in the sense of feelings of esteem and respect,
cannot (at least yet) be legally regulated. When one norm is backed up by the law
and another is not, their relative strength cannot be readily compared. If I feel or
do not feel esteem toward someone of another faith, or indeed for religion more
generally, no one need necessarily know of that. The ebbs and flows of recognition
go undetected by the law.

19
Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken
Books, 2005) 110.
20
Ibid.

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 312 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

When ecumenical or religious pluralist thought calls for movement beyond

tolerance, it is often suggested that we need increased “mutual understanding” of
religious others and, more maximally, that we ought to esteem, affirm, or even love
religious others as such. But, arguably, we cannot do any or all of these if we still
view them through lenses colored by hatred, prejudice, and implacable memories.
Thus, ecumenism and pluralism, unlike toleration, seem to demand not only that
we “lose” our negative affects (and the memories that sustain them) by some
undefined means, but also that we replace them with some sort of positive affect,
such as that entailed in recognition.
What are the reasons that a given person in a particular situation might come
to believe that he or she should not only respect religious others (as manifested
in non-interference with their rights of expression, association, and free exercise)
but, beyond that, also recognize them? Is there some other prompt to voluntary
recognition of others that can evade entirely the question of the inequality of esteem
and love, and resultant painful disappointments? What happens when recognition-
fueled engagement with religious others leads not to esteem or affection but to
estrangement and grief, as is potentially the case with any mode of engagement?
In normative terms, it is hard to make the case that one “must” feel esteem for
(much less rejoice over) someone else’s religious conviction—or indeed, religious
conviction in general in a way that is respectful of the conscience of others, and
of their freedom and autonomy. Morally respectable people may well think that
all religions are opium for the masses, Platonism for the people, breeding grounds
for intellectual dishonesty, collections of colorful but childish folk superstitions,
etc. One may respect the persons in question while finding their views to be sadly
reductive and perhaps as self-congratulatory as they are uninformed. It is, after
all, possible not only respectfully to disagree with someone but to feel frustration,
indignation, and even grief that someone else may take something that one believes
to be a source of truth and joy as a pathetic, quaint, or offensive delusion. Such
feelings are, I think, inevitably part of the everyday experience of closely interacting
with others who hold very different understandings of what it means to be a good
thinker, a good citizen, a good friend, a good Kantian, a good Hindu or Christian
or humanist (or whatever), and a good human being.
Current ecumenical and pluralist thought alike, then, is faced with the challenge
of self-definition and reflection with respect to the ethos of recognition, which
varies across cultures and historical moments. Such reflection could conceivably
benefit from a consideration of the extent to which modes of recognition may entail
frailty, fickleness, or desperation. For example, esteem may be granted lavishly
where it is not warranted and then withdrawn. Looking up to someone everyone
else enjoys despising is very difficult. Love itself can fail to see and choose not to
know. We may think we recognize the truth, and believe that we do love it, while
living and engaging with others in such a way that gives the lie to our pretensions.

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 SUZANNE E. SMITH 313

How are we to recognize defects in our habits of recognition? Self-knowledge

as to our limitations in this capacity would seem to be available only through
actively undertaking the effort to recognize, and being open to acknowledgment
and correction of our errors when we fail. But just what would such an effort entail?
What is the worth of recognition that must be willed? With recognition of any sort
(including that of truth) comes judgment as to the nature of the thing recognized.
To take recognition seriously is to ask not only why we cannot recognize what
we tolerate but also how we would have to live differently if, in fact, we were to
find that we do.

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