Grounding Religious Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 argues that Vivekananda’s views on the harmony of religions evolved from 1893 to 1901 in three phases. In the first phase from September 1893 to March 1894, Vivekananda defended the equal salvific efficacy of the major world religions but claimed that a “universal religion” that would harmonize all the world religions was an “ideal” that did not yet exist. In the second phase from September 1894 to May 1895, he claimed that the universal religion already exists in the form of Vedānta, which he expounded in terms of the “three stages” of Dvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, and Advaita. However, by late 1895, he abandoned his earlier attempt to ground the harmony of religions in the three stages of Vedānta. Instead, he held that every religion corresponds to at least one of the four Yogas, each of which is a direct and independent path to salvation.