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The perfection of the deeper and often unrecognized ways by which the experienced person relates to the world and continually revises that relationship is the goal of Advaita, because only in that accomplishment is the tension between doing and knowing resolved. To do/know Advaita entails becomingor being made intoa certain kind of person who makes distinctions in certain ways, thereby transforming all of her or his relations. Analogously, the Christian tradition recognizes in the appropriation of religious knowledge a transformation of one's way of acting, explicitly and in more enduring habitual patterns: what one might term the complex event of conversion. Comparative theology therefore attends closely to the ways in which comparativists' engagement in their materials and response to the new demands articulated during a comparative project reconfigure their religious and theological understanding. |
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Lee Yearley's recent Mencius and Aquinas,
8an exemplary work which confronts the problems of comparison and which skillfully finds an intermediate path between abstraction and the undigested accumulation of detail, helps us to extend our thinking about comparison as a reflective practice.9 He identifies three kinds of theory: first, primary theories, which "provide explanations that allow people to predict, plan and cope with the normal problems the world presents;" second, secondary theories, "which differ from culture to culture, [and] are usually built from primary theories in order to explain peculiar or distressing occurrences;"10 third, practical theories, which "often work on the ideas primary theory produces and can link with notions of secondary theory." Practical theory ''presents a more theoretical account than does primary theory and stays closer to normal phenomena than does secondary theory. Moreover, the aim is to guide people toward full actualization and therefore concepts like virtue, obligation, and disposition are utilized. Much of practical theory, then, concerns what we call ethics."11 In the conclusion of his study Yearley returns to this distinction, again stressing the "in-between" status of practical theories which "aim at a more conceptually precise ordering of human experience than does primary theory; but they stay far |
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