Imagine two completely different religious worlds
just, you know, colliding. OK. Let's say a 17th
century Muslim prince on one side and a society
of Hindu mystics on the other. Right. So two
very distinct groups. Exactly. And by all conventional
logic, they should just clash. Yeah. Right. Over
their wildly different rules, their distinct
rituals, the opposing dogmas. Oh, absolutely.
That's what you'd expect. But instead, they forge
this profound civilization altering connection.
Really? Yeah. And how do they do it? Not by sitting
down and finding safe, easily defined common
ground. Like they don't just find a compromise.
Nope. They did it by weaponizing the one thing
we usually assume drives people apart. Which
is? Their deepest, darkest, most unutterable
secrets. Oh, wow! Right. Because when we usually
talk about secrets, especially in religion, there's
this immediate... Almost visceral image that
comes to mind. Yeah, the heavy oak door with
the iron hinges. Exactly. It's the whispered
password in a dark alley. It's that exclusive
esoteric mystery cult where you are either on
the inside bathed in the light of hidden truth
or you are on the outside. In the dark. Right.
We inherently think of secrets as walls. They
are the ultimate tools of gatekeeping. But that's
what makes this so wild. It goes against everything
we're taught about human behavior and sociology.
It really does. Because a secret is fundamentally
defined, well, at least in our common imagination,
by the barrier it creates between the knower
and the non -knower. It's an exclusionary mechanism
by design. You build a wall to protect what's
yours. Exactly. But then you step into the world
of comparative religious studies and you look
at how different faiths actually interact out
there in the messy real world. And suddenly that
heavy oak door starts to look a lot less like
a wall and a lot more like a bridge, which is
what we're getting into today. We are exploring
this conceptual landscape where the very things
we thought were designed to keep outsiders out,
the deep unexplainable mysteries of a faith,
are actually the most effective, profound interfaces
connecting totally different traditions. It completely
upends our basic assumptions about what a secret
is doing when two different worldviews collide.
It's this massive counterintuitive paradigm shift.
Because we assume transparency builds trust.
Right. And secrecy breeds suspicion. Right. But
history shows us something far more complex.
And that complexity is exactly what we are exploring
today. We're taking a deep dive into some really
fascinating 2026 research by scholars Philip
Reichling and Knit Martin Stunkel. It's a brilliant
text. It really is. It focuses on secrecy as
a promoter of contact between religious traditions.
So our mission for this deep dive is to unpack
the hidden mechanics of religious secrecy. To
move past the gatekeeping idea. Exactly. And
discover how the blank spaces created by secrets
actually serve as these incredibly dynamic, powerful
interfaces for interfaith understanding and translation.
It's a huge topic. It is. OK, let's unpack this.
Where do we even begin when the very thing we
were trying to study is defined by the fact that
it's hidden? Yeah, you're hitting on the exact
epistemological nightmare that plagues this entire
field of study. It's a nightmare. Oh, totally.
It's what scholars call the methodological double
bind. Double bind. OK, how does that work? Well,
if you want to study a secret. objectively to
truly understand its internal architecture and
how it functions in society you essentially have
to break it apart right you have to look inside
you have to expose it to the light of inquiry
but the very moment you do that the moment you
drag it out of the shadows dissect it and publish
a paper on it it's destroyed exactly it is fundamentally
no longer a secret oh man It's like trying to
study a snowflake by holding it in your warm
hand. That's a perfect analogy. The act of observation
melts the very thing you're trying to observe.
Right. Or to borrow a metaphor I've heard in
these academic circles, if you take the secret
house and its inhabitants to pieces just to see
how the plumbing works. You ruin the house. Right.
You can't live in it anymore. Exactly. Which
creates this massive anxiety, particularly within
the modern scientific worldview. I can imagine.
Cicela Buck, who is a really prominent ethicist,
makes this brilliant observation. She says scientists
have developed what she calls a ritualistic denunciation
of secrecy. Ritualistic denunciation. That's
intense. It is. But think about the foundational
pillars of the scientific method. What are they?
Free, open, transparent communication. Peer review.
Shared data. Reproducible results. Transparency
is the literal oxygen of science. Right. Because
of that, modern scholars often treat secrecy
almost like a rival sinister religion that they
have to actively conjure away or exercise. Wow.
Yeah. They view a secret purely as a withholding
of truth, you know, an obstacle to human progress.
Which is incredibly ironic when you think about
it. Well, so. Well. The scholars are treating
the concept of the secret with the exact same
ritualistic fervor and absolute dogma as the
religious adherents who are keeping the secret.
Ah, that's so true. It's a clash of fundamentalisms.
The scientist says everything must be illuminated
and the mystic says some things must remain in
the dark. Right. It's two completely incompatible
approaches to truth. But before we get too deep
into how these shadows actually connect people,
we need to define our terms. In everyday conversation,
we blur a lot of lines, but there is a crucial
distinction we need to make here between a mystery
and a secret oh this distinction is absolutely
foundational right yeah we toss those words around
interchangeably all the time but conceptually
they operate on entirely different planes of
reality jan assman an incredible scholar of egyptian
religion provides a really clarifying framework
here okay let's hear it so a mystery is something
that is fundamentally unfathomable it's rooted
in the very nature of the cosmos or the divine
It is not hidden because a group of priests decided
to lock it in a gold box and throw away the key.
It's hidden because the human mind is neurologically
conceptually incapable of fully grasping it.
So like the origins of time, the experience of
death, the absolute. Essence of a creator. Exactly.
Those are mysteries. Right. Whereas a secret,
which sometimes gets called an arcanum in these
historical texts, is something that is just hidden
from most people by strategic human action. Yes.
It's something that could be perfectly known
and understood by a human brain, but it is intentionally
concealed by a group or an individual. That's
it. And Immanuel Kant gives us a really useful
threefold taxonomy to break this down even further,
which really helps clarify the stakes here. Okay.
What's Kant's breakdown? First, Kant says there
are secrets of nature, the arcana. These are
things like the laws of quantum mechanics, dark
matter, or the cure for certain diseases. Things
we just don't know yet. Right. They're currently
hidden from us, but through scientific discovery
and time, they might one day become known. The
universe is hiding them, but they are discoverable.
Okay, so arcana are puzzles waiting to be solved.
Correct. Second, there are political or strategic
secrets, the secreta. These are state secrets,
military troop movements, the recipe for Coca
-Cola or your bank password. The stuff humans
actively hide. Exactly. These are facts deliberately
hidden by humans from other humans. If I steal
the recipe, I understand the secret completely.
Makes sense. And third, Kant identifies the holy
secret of religion, the Mysterium. Ah, the mystery.
Yes. This is the substantial secret that is forever
beyond human capacity to unravel, no matter how
much science advances or how many spies you hire.
Okay, let me make sure I'm mapping this correctly.
A secret, the arcanum or the secreture, is like
a stage magic trick. Okay, I like that. If I
go to Las Vegas and see a magician make a tiger
disappear, I'm amazed. But once I pull back the
velvet curtain, go backstage and see the trap
doors and the mirrors, the illusion is totally
gone. The magic is dead. Right. It's just mechanics.
The secret is dead. But a mystery. The Mysterium
is like the mathematical concept of infinity.
Oh, that's good. Even if I explain the math to
you, even if I write the equation on a chalkboard
and you memorize it, it still completely blows
your mind. You literally cannot hold the entirety
of infinity in your physical brain. That is a
great way to delineate them. The Mysterium retains
its power even when it's placed right in the
center of the fully lit room. But here is my
pushback. This is the exact thing that was tripping
me up as I was looking through this research.
What's that? If a mystery is inherently unknowable
to everyone, how can two different religions
ever use it to understand each other? If a Muslim
and a Christian are sitting across from each
other and they both have this core mysterium
that they literally cannot articulate, aren't
they just staring at each other in the dark?
That's a fair point. How do you build a bridge
out of something neither of you can see or describe?
It's the most logical question to ask. And it's
the hurdle that has stumped interfaith dialogue
for centuries. Right. To understand how that
bridge is actually built out of the unknowable.
Yeah. We first have to deconstruct how we have
traditionally misunderstood the social function
of a secret. OK. We have to look at why we've
always assumed secrets are just walls. And that
brings us to the foundational sociology of secrecy.
If we want to look at the traditional view, we
have to talk about Georg Simmel. Right, Simmel.
If you're studying the sociology of secrecy,
Georg Simmel is the godfather of the field. He
really is. He wrote a cornerstone text back in
the early 20th century, and he essentially viewed
the secret as a tool of what he called egoistic
individualization. It was all about group isolation.
Yeah, Simmel was obsessed with how societies
form boundaries. He argued that the primary function
of a secret is to form a protective border. He
used a very specific German term of Scheidungsfecht,
which translates roughly to the aim to separate.
The aim to separate. Right. In Simmel's view,
the secret unites the in -group, the people who
possess the hidden knowledge, by creating a rigid,
impermeable wall against the out -group, the
profane masses who don't know. Right. Us versus
them. Exactly. The shared secret gives the in
-group a sense of intense prestige, deep trust,
and mutual protection against a hostile outside
world. There's a metaphor from researchers Paul
Christopher Johnson and Hugh B. Urban that perfectly
encapsulates this traditional view. Oh, the revolving
door one. Yes. They describe secrecy as a revolving
door of information that keeps some information
and some people in and others out. It's a great
image. It's just a sorting mechanism. You walk
up to the revolving door. If you have the password,
it spins you into the lobby. If you don't, it
spits you back out onto the street. Exactly.
And if we stop there, Simmel's view makes total
pragmatic sense. Secrets divide us. They create
factions. But this newer research proposes a
revolutionary pivot in how we look at this. It
really does. They argue that to understand historical
interfaith contact, we have to stop obsessing
over the hidden content of the secret. We have
to stop trying to pick the lock to see what's
inside the vault. And instead, we need to look
at the form of secrecy as a social practice.
And that pivot changes everything. Think about
it. If we accept Kant's premise that the content
of the Holy Secret, the Mysterium, is ultimately
unknowable anyway, then as scholars or even just
as neighbors trying to understand each other,
obsessing over the content is a complete dead
end. Because you can't know it anyway. Right.
You're trying to solve an unsolvable math problem.
Instead, you have to look at the act of keeping
a secret. Secrecy isn't just a passive absence
of information. It's a highly active, dynamic
social practice. How so? Well, the historian
Daniel Jute points out that secrecy actually
generates a dynamic market. A market. Yeah. When
a group claims to have a secret, it doesn't represent
a decline of open knowledge. Rather, the very
act of hiding something creates a claim to authority.
Oh, I see. It creates an aura of prestige. It
creates a highly emphasized, energized space.
By drawing a curtain around something, you are
signaling to the entire world what is behind
here is incredibly valuable. Right. And paradoxically,
that energized space. becomes a genuine zone
of contact. People are drawn to the curtain.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Because
if we start viewing secrecy as a dynamic economy
or a type of currency, rather than just a locked
vault that we can't open, we can start to see
how different religions historically traded,
negotiated, and interacted using this very specific
currency. It's not about what the secret is.
It's about what the secret does when it enters
the marketplace of human interaction. That is
the exact mechanism. And when we look at history
through this lens, we see a really robust taxonomy
of how this plays out. Like different categories
of interaction. Exactly. We can break down the
mechanisms of interfaith contact involving secrets
into a few distinct scenarios. But before we
look at how different faiths collide over secrets,
we should briefly touch on why groups create
secrets internally in the first place. What the
research calls endogenous secrets. Yeah. Let's
explore that, because internally, a religious
group usually secretizes something for survival,
right? Right. They're either trying to protect
their members physically, or they are trying
to preserve the absolute purity of their spiritual
experience from being deluded, co -opted, or
mocked by the outside world. And history gives
us incredibly powerful examples of this internal
protection. Let's look at taqiyya in Shi 'i Islam.
Okay. This isn't just a theological concept.
It was a gritty life -or -death survival tactic.
Taqiyya is the practice of concealing one's faith
or dispensing with ordinary religious ordinances
when under threat of death or extreme persecution.
Wow. Yeah. For centuries, minority Shi 'i populations
lived under hostile rulers. By creating an endogenous
secret, By hiding their true allegiance and rituals,
they ensured the physical and communal survival
of their faith against an oppressive majority.
The secret was a literal shield. Another incredibly
striking example of this comes from the Christian
tradition, specifically during the rise of totalitarianism
in the 20th century. Think about Germany in the
1930s. You have the Nazi regime rising to power,
and Nazis have functioned very much like a rival
religion. It had its own absolute dogmas, its
own rituals, its own demand for total devotion.
It was an all -encompassing ideology. Exactly.
So in response to this, the German theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who eventually died in a
concentration camp for resisting Hitler, called
for the church to return to what he called an
arch and discipline. A discipline of the secret.
Yes. Bonhoeffer looked around and saw the Nazi
regime trying to co -opt. Christian language,
trying to merge the church with the state. Right.
He argued that the Christian church needed to
actively hide its most profound mysteries. They
needed to stop throwing their deepest sacraments
and theology out into the public square because
the public square had been poisoned. That makes
total sense. He wanted to protect the Mysterium
from being profaned, cheapened, or twisted by
the totalitarian ideology of the state. He wasn't
hiding the faith because he was embarrassed by
it. He was hiding it because it was too precious
to be left out in the open where the Nazis could
weaponize it. It's an immune system response.
In both the case of Takiyah and the Ark in Discipline,
the secret is an internal defense mechanism.
Right. But the truly groundbreaking part of analyzing
secrecy comes when we move from those internal
immune responses to exogenous contact. External
contact. Exactly. What happens when two completely
different religious traditions, both possessing
their own profound, heavily guarded secrets actually
collide in the marketplace. This is the core
of the deep dive. Yeah, and this research outlines
a few historical scenarios that are just fascinating.
Let's look at the first one, which we might call
mutual secrets. Okay. This is where the shared
practice of secrecy literally unites diverse
groups, leading them to search for a philosophia
perennis. A perennial universal philosophy that
they believe underlies all distinct faiths. Precisely.
This historical example they give completely
blew my mind. We're going back to 17... century
Germany, specifically to the small Salzbach court
of Count Palatine Christian August. That's a
wild historical moment. It is. And to understand
why this is so radical, you really have to understand
the context. This is the 1600s in Europe. They
have just gone through the meat grinder of the
Thirty Years' War. Oh, yeah. Which was essentially
a continent -wide slaughter driven by rigid,
dogmatic, religious differences between Catholics
and Protestants. millions of people died over
defined theological boundaries. The trauma of
that era really cannot be overstated. The semiospheres,
the atmospheric bubbles of meaning and truth
that these different groups breathed were completely
toxic to one another. Completely. If a Catholic
and a Protestant interacted, it was usually,
you know, at the end of a pike. Right. So into
this blood -soaked environment steps Christian
August. He is incredibly forward -thinking, and
he decides to deliberately bring together Catholics,
Protestants, and Jews at his court in Salzburg.
He even sets up a printing press to publish their
combined works. Yeah, but he didn't just invite
them to sit around a table and debate their dogmas.
He knew that would just lead to another war.
Instead, he brought them together to study the
deeply secret, esoteric knowledge of the Jewish
Kabbalah. alongside other occult philosophies
this is the absolute genius of the move he didn't
ask them to compromise on their bright clearly
defined daytime dogmas he invited them into the
shadows wow yeah he used the shared pursuit of
deep, complex, inherently hidden secrets as the
foundation to foster a utopian ecumenical community.
They were united by the fact that they were all
seekers of the hidden truth. So they bonded over
what they didn't fully grasp yet. Yes. The Christian
scholars believed that hidden within the Jewish
Kabbalah were the secret, uncorrupted truths
of early Christianity. And the Jewish scholars
were eager to share and elevate their mystical
texts. It's a beautiful example of the secret
as a bridge. Because the content of the secret
was so obscure, so difficult to grasp, and required
intense collaborative study across different
languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, the actual
process of seeking the secret forced them into
cooperative contact. Yes, the process itself
is what united them. They had to rely on each
other. to decode the mystery they built a micro
society of religious tolerance based entirely
on the premise that none of them had the full
transparent truth it's incredibly moving but
unfortunately history isn't always a utopian
court in sulzbach right more often than not religions
don't want to hold hands and seek a shared perennial
philosophy they want to win yeah human nature
and that brings us to the second scenario of
exogenous contact one secret One explanation.
The battle for supremacy. Exactly. This is what
happens when religions compete in a shared marketplace.
And instead of merging or cooperating, one tradition
aggressively tries to explain away the other
tradition's secret. This is basically intellectual
colonization. Right. You aren't killing the other
group. You're just claiming that their deepest
mystery is actually just a footnote in your theology.
We see this vividly in the early centuries of
the Christian church, when Christianity was trying
to establish dominance in the Roman Empire. Right,
because at the time, the Roman world was full
of these incredibly popular, highly secretive
mystery cults, like the cult of Mithras. Yeah,
the cult of Mithras was a massive rival to early
Christianity. They had secret initiation rites.
They had sacred communal meals involving bread
and wine. They had themes of salvation and rebirth.
To an outside observer, they look uncomfortably
similar to Christian sacraments. Very similar.
So how did the early Christian writers handle
this? You have a figure like Justin Martyr looking
at the Mithraic mysteries. He doesn't say, oh,
wow, look at this. We share a similar mystery.
Let's achieve concrescence. No, definitely not.
No, Justin Martyr goes on the offensive. He claims
that the secrets of Mithras are actually demonic
imitations. Demonic imitations. He argued that
demons had foreseen the coming of Christ and
they planted these fake copycat mysteries in
the Roman world to confuse people and steal souls.
It's a ruthless rhetorical strategy. It really
is. Or you have writers like Lactantius who looked
at the ancient, highly revered secrets of Hermes
Trismegistus, which were foundational to a lot
of Hellenistic philosophy and mysticism. Lactantius
argued that those ancient secrets weren't demonic,
but they were just a flawed preliminary overture.
He claimed they were just breadcrumbs leading
up to the true and final revelation of Jesus
Christ. So they are dissolving the rival secret.
By claiming to have the ultimate decoder ring.
Precisely. Justin Martyr and Lactantius are looking
at the pagans and saying, we know what your secret
actually means better than you do. It's a way
of asserting total dominance over the rival's
meaning -making world without ever having to
engage on its own terms. And while that's an
aggressive strategy, there is a third scenario
of interfaith contact that might be the most
fascinating of all. Oh, this was my favorite.
Yeah, this is when the contact between a religion
and a surrounding culture actually forces the
religion to generate a new secret. just to survive.
I found this part of the research so compelling,
it totally flips the script. It does. Because
usually we think of religions slowly abandoning
their superstitions and secrets as they become
more modern and rational, right? That's the secularization
theory, yes. But the research points out that
sometimes when a religious tradition is enveloped
by a highly rational, secular, or philosophical
culture, it has to invent or heavily emphasize
a secret. to avoid being completely assimilated.
And if you look at early 20th century liberal
Judaism, you see this exact survival mechanism
playing out brilliantly. Okay, set the scene
for us. You had brilliant rabbis and thinkers
like Leo Beck and Max Wiener, and they were operating
in the long wake of the Haskalah, which was the
Jewish Enlightenment. For decades, the Haskalah
had heavily emphasized reason, universal ethics,
and rational philosophy. The goal had been to
show that Judaism was perfectly compatible with
modern, enlightened European thought. But thinkers
like Leo Baik looked around and realized they
had a massive problem. The danger was that Judaism
was becoming too explainable. Too rational. Exactly.
If you strip away all the mystery... all the
paradox, and you reduce a thousands of years
old faith only to a set of good ethical postulates
like be kind to your neighbor and pursue justice,
then it just dissolves into generic secular ethical
philosophy. Right. Why be Jewish if it's the
exact same thing as being a secular humanist?
Exactly. It loses the very ground that supports
it. So to counter this hyper -rationality, Baik
and others executed a brilliant philosophical
pivot. They aggressively re -emphasized the secret
and the inherent unresolvable paradox of Judaism.
You leaned into the mystery. They argued that
true religion must contain a core that defies
human logic. They weaponized the mystery as a
survival mechanism. By asserting that there is
a profound irrational secret at the heart of
the faith, they built a fortress that secular
rationality couldn't penetrate. They saved the
distinct identity of the religion by plunging
its core back into the dark. Okay, so let's synthesize
where we are. We have seen secrets act as literal
shields for physical survival, like Takiyah.
We've seen them act as shared utopian projects
in Solspach. We've seen them used as battlegrounds
for intellectual supremacy by early Christians.
And we've seen them utilized as life rafts against
the rising tide of secularization in liberal
Judaism. It's a very dynamic tool. It is. But
I keep coming back to the listener. If you are
listening to this deep dive and you are sitting
in a room with someone of a totally different
faith, say you are a Christian and they are a
Buddhist or you are a Muslim and they are a secular
humanist, logically it sounds like avoiding the
deep unexplainable mysteries of your respective
worldviews would prevent a real connection. Which
is what we're always taught. Right. We are taught
to find common ground. We are taught to find
the things we can clearly define and agree on.
How on earth do we connect over something neither
of us can articulate? What's fascinating here
is that the research argues the exact opposite
of our standard intuition. Okay. The inability
to articulate the secret is not a bug in the
system of human communication. It is the ultimate
feature. A feature, not a bug. Yes. The fact
that the secret is conceptually empty of defined,
rigid, exclusionary dogma is exactly what makes
it the perfect interface. And this brings us
to the conceptual core of this entire framework,
the theory of the secret as a blank space. The
blank space. The German word used in the research
is Leerstell. Right. And what's wild is that
the authors borrow this concept not from theology,
but from a literary theorist named Wolfgang Eiser.
Now, Iser wasn't writing about religion at all.
He was writing about how human beings read books.
Right, literary theory. And Iser argued that
in any piece of literature, there are blank spaces,
things the author deliberately leaves unsaid,
undetermined gaps in the narrative. Think about
reading a novel. The author doesn't describe
every single leaf on a tree or every single microscopic
facial expression of a character. They leave
gaps. And Iser pointed out that these blank spaces
aren't just empty voids where the author got
lazy. They are an active, highly charged matrix.
They are the elementary conditions of communication
because they force the reader to use their own
imagination, their own memories, their own life
experience to connect the dots. The blank space
invites the reader into the text to co -create
the meaning. Exactly. If the author explains
every single detail, the reader is just a passive
observer. But if there is a blank space, the
reader has to step up and participate. Precisely.
And the absolute genius of Reichling and Schrunkel's
work is taking Iser's literary theory and applying
it directly to religious secrecy. It's a huge
conceptual leap. It is. They argue that a religious
secret acts as a linguistic and conceptual blank
space. It is an empty frame. By lightly declaring
this is our deepest unutterable secret, a religion
is conspicuously indicating that something is
absent from everyday language and understanding.
But because that frame is technically empty of
rigid, easily debated dogma, It actually invites
the other tradition to step up, look at the frame,
and relate to it using their own vocabulary.
To help us visualize this, because it's a heavy
concept, the research uses a brilliant analogy
from art history, the hitomasia, or the empty
throne. Oh, this is such a good visual. Right.
If you look at religious and political art across
vastly different cultures throughout history,
you see this recurring motif of an unoccupied
seat of power. It's everywhere once you know
to look for it. Let's look at Buddhist art. You
might see an intricately carved beautiful throne
with absolutely no one sitting on it, perhaps
just a set of footprints resting on the footstool.
Right. In that specific cultural context, the
empty throne symbolizes the Buddha's enlightenment,
his absolute transcending of the physical form
into nirvana. But then if you travel across the
world and look at Roman art from a similar period,
you see another empty throne. Maybe this one
is draped to the specific purple cloths or has
a diadem resting on it. In the Roman context,
that empty throne. symbolizes the invisible,
omnipresent, unchallengeable power of the emperor.
And if you move forward in time and look at early
Christian Byzantine art, you see the exact same
visual, an empty throne, perhaps with the cross
or a book of gospels resting on the cushion.
And what does it mean there? In Christian theology,
this symbolizes the parousia. the intense apocalyptic
anticipation of christ's return to judge the
living and the dead so it is the exact same visual
nimble an empty chair right but because the throne
is empty because the central defining figure
is missing because it's a literal blank space
It acts as a universal interface. Different faiths,
different empires, different worldviews can look
at the exact same image, the exact same blank
space, and translate it perfectly into their
own spiritual or political vocabulary without
violating the image itself. Mark Tawin, a scholar
cited in the research who studies Japanese religion,
has a wonderful way of describing this dynamic.
He calls the secret a vacuum displayed in a conspicuous
place. A vacuum? Yeah. And because nature and
human psychology abhors a vacuum, this conspicuously
placed blank space has what he calls a black
hole potency. A black hole potency. It irresistibly
attracts people, theories, and interpretations
from all sides. It pulls you in because you naturally
desperately want to fill the void with meaning.
I was trying to think of an everyday analogy
for this, something that clicks instantly and
it hit me. It's exactly like a blank tile in
a game of Scrabble. Oh, I love that. Let's break
that down. Think about how Scrabble works. Every
other letter in the bag has a rigidly defined
value and identity. An A is an A. A Q is a Q.
They are dogmatic. Right. They can only be played
in specific, limited ways. If I have a Z and
you have an X and we are trying to build a word
together, we are probably going to clash. The
linguistic structures are too rigid, too incompatible.
That is a phenomenal analogy. The rigid letters
are the defined dogmas of a religion. The dietary
laws, the historical claims, the specific rituals.
Exactly. But the blank tile has no inherent letter
printed on it. It has no strict identity. And
because it is completely empty, because it is
a Leerstell, it can be whatever letter the player
needs it to be to connect their word to the rest
of the board. It adapts. The blank tile is the
ultimate interface. The secret, the mystery,
is the blank tile of interface dialogue. It allows
two entirely different words, two entirely different
worldviews to intersect on the board. And this
leads us to the most profound relevation of this
entire framework. What happens when two different
religious traditions essentially play their brank
tiles at the exact same time? Right. We get a
dynamic process of coming together, of shared
meaning making that doesn't erase the distinctiveness
of either tradition. Which brings us to the final
major concept of the research. And it's a word
we really need to unpack carefully. Concrescence.
The authors specifically. and firmly warn us
against using the word hybridization when we
talk about this kind of interfaith contact. Yes,
they do. Why is hybridization a dirty word in
this context? Because hybridization implies mashing
two distinct things together into a diluted soup.
It implies a compromise where both sides lose
a bit of their unique historical identity to
form a new, generic, watered -down middle ground.
And religions hate that. religious traditions
generally hate that idea yes they don't want
to be diluted they believe the revelation is
true so the authors borrow a term from the philosopher
alfred north whitehead Compressors. Yes. It translates
literally to growing together. Whitehead defined
it as the production of novel togetherness. Novel
togetherness. It's like two distinct vines growing
up the same trellis. The distinct religions remain
entirely distinct. They keep their own leaves,
their own roots, their own rigid scrabble letters.
But they grow together by connecting at the interface
of their shared blank spaces. They touch without
merging. They create a new field of mutual understanding
without destroying their original borders. OK,
let's look at how this concrescence actually
works in the real world, because the research
gives us two mind blowing historical case studies
where we can see the blank tile being played.
OK, let's do it. The first is the story of Muhammad
Darashikis in the 17th century. Ah, yes. This
is one of the most remarkable and ultimately
tragic figures in religious history. Dara Shikash
was a devout Muslim prince, the favored son of
the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, the man who built
the Taj Mahal. Right. He was the heir apparent
to an empire in India where Orthodox Islam and
deeply rooted Hinduism were living side by side,
often in deep tension. His younger brother, Arun
Zeb, was a strict Orthodox conservative who believed
the two faiths must remain entirely separate.
But Dara Shik believes something different. Very
different. He didn't try to force the two religions
to hybridize into a generic soup. Instead, he
looked for the blank spaces. He did something
incredibly ambitious and dangerous. He gathered
Hindu scholars and mystics, and he translated
50 of the Hindu Upanishads, their most deeply
philosophical, mystical, esoteric text, from
Sanskrit into Persian, which was the language
of the Muslim court. A massive undertaking. And
he called his translation Sir A. Akbar, which
translates to The Great Secret. And his method
of translation is exactly what we've been talking
about today. He didn't try to align the rigid
dogmas. He didn't try to argue that the Hindu
gods were the same as Islamic prophets. Right.
He used the secret spiritual meaning as his interface.
He played the blank tile. In his introduction
to the translation, Darashiku argued that the
Upanishads were, in fact, the hidden secret book
that is mysteriously referred to within the Quran
itself. Let's just pause and appreciate the sheer
intellectual audacity of that move. It's staggering.
unutterable secret of hinduism the mystical concept
of advaita vedanta the ultimate oneness of reality
and mapped it directly onto the unutterable hidden
references within orthodox islam the concept
of tahit the absolute oneness of god yes he used
the secret as the bridge by doing so he allowed
these two massive semiospheres to achieve congressman's
they could remain distinct A Muslim remained
a Muslim, a Hindu remained a Hindu, but they
now had a shared interface, a shared blank space
where they could actually converse about the
ultimate hidden nature of reality. He proved
that the mystery wasn't a wall, it was a door.
Unfortunately, history is brutal. His Orthodox
brother, Oran Zeb, defeated him in a war of succession,
had Darashikas executed for heresy, and instituted
a deeply intolerant regime. It's heartbreaking.
It is. But Darashika's intellectual achievement,
his translation, survived and had a massive impact
on how Eastern philosophy was eventually understood
in the West. And that leads us to the research's
culminating example of this process. It is perhaps
one of the most famous encounters in Western
religious history. And it perfectly illustrates
playing the blank scrabble tile, the Apostle
Paul, at the Areopagus in Athens, as recorded
in the book of Acts, chapter 17. This is an absolute
masterclass in reading the sociology of secrecy.
To set the scene, Paul is a devout Jewish Christian
steeped in the Hebrew scriptures and the new
revelation of Christ. He walks into Athens. Now,
Athens at this time is the intellectual, philosophical
and religious center of the Hellenistic world.
It is crawling with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.
It is a city that loves to debate, but it is
also a city steeped in anxiety. Right. They are
absolutely covered in idols and temples to a
thousand different strictly defined Greek gods.
Zeus, Athena, Hermes, every god has a specific
domain, a specific rigid letter in their alphabet.
And Paul is deeply distressed by this. He looks
around and from his perspective, it's a city
drowning in idolatry. Now, if Paul had just walked
into the marketplace and started arguing dogma,
if he had just started slamming his rigid letters
down on the board saying, your use is a fake,
my... God is the only real God. Let me explain
the theology of the cross. He would have hit
a brick wall. The Athenian philosophers would
have just dismissed him as a babbler. The semiospheres
were too incompatible. But Paul is brilliant.
He surveys the city and he looks past all the
rigid dogmas. He looks for a gap. And he finds
a literal, physical blank space in the Greek
religious framework. He finds an altar with a
very specific, curious inscription. To the unknown
God. To the unknown God. It's the ultimate Hedoimasia,
the ultimate empty throne. The Greeks, in their
deep anxiety to cover all their bases and not
accidentally offend some powerful deity they
might have missed in their massive pantheon,
had built an altar to a god they explicitly admitted
they knew absolutely nothing about. It was a
monument to a secret? Yes. It was an empty frame.
It was a vacuum displayed in a conspicuous place.
And Paul seizes on this black hole potency. He
stands up at the Areopagus, the high court of
Athens, and he uses this exact blank space as
his interface. He says, for as I pass by and
beheld your diversions, I found an altar with
this inscription, to the unknown God, whom therefore
ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
He plays the blank tile. He doesn't aggressively
destroy the Greek framework. He utilizes its
own acknowledged gap. He essentially says, that
blank space you've left open, that mystery you
admit you can't articulate, I have the vocabulary
for that. He takes the secret of the Christian
gospel, the mystery of Christ, which was entirely
foreign and nonsensical to Greek philosophy,
and he translates it directly into the blank
space provided by the Athenian altar. He achieves
concrescence by connecting his unutterable truth
to their acknowledged mystery. It's a flawless
execution of what we've been discussing. He doesn't
hybridize Christianity with worship of Zeus.
He finds the boundary where Greek rationality
fails, where they admit a secret exists, and
he builds this bridge right there. If we connect
this to the bigger picture. to what this all
means for you, the listener, because it completely
changes how we might approach conversations with
people who hold fundamentally different worldviews.
Oh, absolutely. In modern interfaith dialogue
or even just an everyday political or social
discourse, we spend almost all our energy trying
to find common ground in the bright light of
day. We compare our rules, our ethical codes,
our historical facts. We try to find the things
we can clearly articulate and agree upon. We
keep trying to match up our rigid Scrabble letters.
and while establishing basic ethical common ground
is important for a functioning society this research
suggests that true profound connection the kind
that builds lasting bridges between entirely
different meaning -making worlds often happens
not in the bright light of defined dogma but
in the shared shadows of the ineffable it happens
in the blank spaces exactly acknowledging that
we both have mysteries we cannot explain that
we both possess secrets that defy our own language
actually provides strongest possible bond. Wow.
The shared experience of awe before the unknown
is a more universal language than any specific
theology. When the Muslim prince and the Hindi
mystic or the Christian apostle and the Greek
philosopher admit that the universe contains
a mysterium they cannot fully master, they suddenly
have a place to stand together. It's a profound
realization. We started this deep dive by looking
at secrets as annoying obstacles. We saw them
as the enemies of science and transparency, as
Cicelo Bach pointed out with her concept of ritualistic
denunciation. We saw them as typical tools for
social exclusion and egoistic isolation. as George
Simmel argued, the heavy oak doors built to keep
the profane masses out. But by diving deep into
the actual history of religious contact, from
the eclectic scholars at the 17th century Solspot
Court finding a perennial philosophy, to Dara
Shiko translating the Upanishads as the Great
Secret, to Paul preaching in the shadow of the
Parthenon, we discovered that those oak doors
operate much more like a revolving door. And
even more profoundly, they operate as dynamic
currencies. They are the blank scrabble tiles.
They are the empty thrones. Empty thrones that
have historically allowed totally different traditions
to translate their deepest truths to one another
without losing their own souls in the process.
It requires a massive shift in perspective. It
requires humility and an acceptance that the
most important parts of our identity, the core
of our worldview, might be the parts we have
the least vocabulary for. And that isn't a weakness.
It's the very thing that allows us to connect
with the other. So the next time you encounter
someone from a totally different background,
different faith or a wildly different worldview,
maybe don't start the conversation by demanding
they explain everything perfectly. Don't start
by comparing your rigid letters and arguing over
who has the better alphabet. Definitely not.
Maybe ask them what they can't explain. Look
for their blank spaces. Look for their altars
to the unknown. And offer up your own mysteries
in return. You might find that the very things
you thought were walls are actually the only
bridges that can reach across the divide. It's
a transformative way to view human communication.
We leave you with this final, provocative thought
to mull over. We live in an age, the digital
age, the information age, that aggressively demands
total transparency. We do. We expect every institution,
every tradition, and every individual to be fully
laid bare, totally categorized. And explained
in simple, bite -sized, rational terms. We want
all the lights turned on all the time. Transparency
is our modern dogma. But if this research is
right, if secrets, mysteries, and the unexplainable
are the very blank spaces that allow human beings
to connect across vast cultural and spiritual
divides, what happens to our ability to truly
understand each other? when we successfully eradicate
all the secrets. If we light up every shadow,
we might find we have lost the very canvas on
which we draw our connections. Something to think
about. Until next time.