The Heretical Imperative

Sometime in the late 1990's--probably around 1998--I re-read (after two decades) Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, and found it as stimulating as when I had first read it as a college freshman. I was moved to write Professor Berger a brief note of appreciation. To my surprise, he wrote back: thanking me for my interest in the book and its subject (succinctly expressed by its subtitle: "Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural"). He confessed that he had always felt a personal affection for the book--despite its relative lack of success with the reading public. He added, significantly (I think), that the only book of his (on that topic) for which he had an even greater regard was The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)--the book he had published in the year I first read Angels. This remark sent me out to the library in order to read and compare the two books. I found myself in agreement with the author and, of the two, it is HI to which I repeatedly return.

In light of the world-wide revival in religiosity that occurred in the closing decades of the 20th century (and that has continued to show unabated vigor in the opening decades of the 21st century), one might consider Berger's Rumor and HI as quaint relics of a bygone era--of the two, Rumor is certainly dated. But the fever of religiosity that has burned in the hearts of men and women over the last forty years may not continue for many generations more. Personally, I find it difficult to imagine that the "post-modern" nostalgia for pre-modern modes of thought and feeling is sustainable over the long term. Platonic "verticality" (i.e., a metaphysical orientation) has indeed made an impressive come-back in our time, but it is unlikely ever to completely displace Peripatetic "horizontalism" (i.e., the pervading naturalism that Aristotle introduced as a counter-weight to his teacher's flights of ontological fancy). Versions of these two discursive vectors intersect whenever human beings attempt to negotiate their perceptions of "what is" in the light of their convictions of "what ought to be." This intersection is a source of that perennial conflict that is also the engine of the human drama of meaning-making. It is the festering wound of human being-in-the-world; it is, likewise, our salvation. The triumphal elimination of one vector would necessarily lead to the collapse of the other. Tolstoy never claimed that implementing the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount would be easy; indeed, he characterized the history and traditions of Christianity as elaborate evasions of Christ's teachings. In the same vein, Camus embraced the myth of Sisyphus: life is struggle--pointless, perhaps, if regarded sub specie aeternatis, but made individually meaningful whenever one chooses to light a candle instead of cursing the dark.

What Peter Berger termed the "heretical imperative" is, likewise, an articulation of our Sisyphusean task: to embrace the "edges" of human religiosity (in Richard Bulliet's sense--see previous post) in the knowledge that it is only in such locations that genuine movement is possible.

Bulliet's metaphor is not simply an accurate depiction of the mechanism of historical change in a religious tradition that has always favored the centrifugal over the centripetal; for it entails, oddly enough, a "mystical" apprehension of reality. In a deeply Tolstoyan revery, Wittgenstein wrote: "The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling" (Tractatus, 6.45). It is to such a feeling that Bulliet's metaphor appeals for its persuasive force. Absent such a feeling, "center" and "edge" lack sense. Bulliet's "mysticism," however, like Wittgenstein's (and Tolstoy's and Camus') is naturalistic--which is to say that it represents a metaphorical ratio that is aspirationally modern: horizontalism is the dominant figure.

This "natural mysticism" (which, in Camus, finds expression also as "nature mysticism") thoroughly informs what I referred to (somewhat mysteriously) in a previous post (April 5, 2012) as Tolstoy and Camus' "tawhidic folk orientation." In the Islamic tradition, tawhid is the assertion that, despite the appearance of multiplicity, Reality is One. I do not mean to suggest by this remark that Tolstoy and Camus necessarily affirmed traditional Muslim metaphysics; indeed, my use of the adjectival form "tawhidic" was intended to preserve a distinction between traditional Islamic thought and the thought of those two moderns. But I did intend to remark their location on the "edge" of Islam--intellectually and geo-culturally (Tolstoy's connection to the Caucasus, Camus' to Algeria).

In such locations, Bulliet's notion of "Islamo-Christian civilization" acquires an interesting salience.