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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 Kṣ emarāja’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.

About the speaker:

Apart from being a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Gavin is a Professor Emeritus of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in the Theology and Religion Faculty and is currently the Piramal Dean of Academic Affairs for the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Gavin read Religious Studies and Social Anthropology at Lancaster University and taught at the universities of Wales (Lampeter) and Stirling before coming to Oxford in 2005. He was given a personal chair in Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in 2009 and elected to the British Academy in 2014.

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