The Vocation of Religious Critic

The anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetes (ca. 250-300 CE) insisted that Christian communities offered a radical alternative to the prevailing culture in the late Roman Empire. Essentially, the author argued that Christians made their contribution to the world by living in it, not of it. Little did the author suspect that the position of Christianity in the Empire was about to move from the social, cultural, and political margins to the center.

In The City of God, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 C.E.) developed this argument. For Augustine, Christians "are to the world what the soul of man is to his body. Invisible, and yet scattered throughout the world as a soul is omnipresent to its body, the Christians love the world and quicken it from within; and just as the soul, which loves its body, is hated by its body, so also the Christians love the world, but they are hated by the world" [Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, New York: Random House (1955), 10].

Commenting on the Letter to Diognetes (after conflating it with the Augustinian expansion), Etienne Gilson wrote: "Each and every word of this remarkable text is as true today as it was in the second century after Christ" [Gilson, p. 11].

It is difficult to know what to make of such a remark. Tolstoy would have been appalled by the sheer effrontery of it. The compromises that the church has made with Empire (beginning in the 4th century C.E.) have essentially undermined any credible claim made on its behalf to providing a "radical alternative" to the prevailing culture throughout Christendom.

In the 19th century, the Danish religious critic Soren Kierkegaard (d. 1855--the same year in which Tolstoy confided to his diary his ambition to re-invent Christianity), asserted that "the Christianity of the New Testament rests upon the assumption that the Christian is in a relationship of opposition ... in 'Christendom' [however] we are all Christians--therefore the relationship of opposition drops out." Consequently, in Kierkegaard's view, what passes for Christianity in Christendom is nothing more than a fraud--a case of unabashed "criminality" [Soren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon "Christendom," translated by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1944), 149].

Kierkegaard and Tolstoy discovered their vocation as religious critics when they began to take the Near Eastern prophetic tradition to heart. Apologists like Gilson and even St. Augustine, for all of their learning, piety, sincerity, and devotion to that same tradition, are sources of confusion for so many. Inevitably, ideology trumps history where they are concerned. Worse, it is frequently passed off as history.

The radical alternative to the status quo, if one is to be found, resides not with the religious apologists, but with the religious critics. It is the latter who are as the soul is to the body, and "as the body hates the soul," so are they hated.