The Spirit of Abrahamic Pluralism

The spirit of Abrahamic Pluralism is a spirit of restless non-conformity: it is a difficult place in which to situate oneself religiously and intellectually and from which to fashion a life-project. But for those of us who find ourselves so made--individuals like that arch-pluralist and aspirant hedgehog Shaykh Tolstoy--there is no real alternative. We will simply never make good sectarians. As the sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger phrased it so elegantly, "the sect is the social form par excellence for huddling" (Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 85). "Huddling" simply isn't in the Abrahamic Pluralist's repertoire. We content ourselves with our citizenship in the invisible world republic of humanistic letters and find solace among the few of those few who are humanists in the expansive and utopian sense of an Alfarabi or an Erasmus and not just the narrow sense of someone who is competent with texts.

We are itinerants of the mind and spirit, if not always of the body. We are the wanderers and strangers of the Gospel of Thomas and Prophetic hadith. We are the ibn-as-sabillah of the Qur'an, and the wandering scholars of medieval Europe. And, occasionally, we are even troubadours.

Abrahamic Pluralism: The "Patriarch"

"The history of the Jewish people begins with the ancient Hebrews, or Habiru, an unruly lot in the judgment of Bronze Age Egyptian officials, who seem to have been disquieted by these wanderers or semi-nomads, perhaps more social caste than an ethnic unity. Soon after the start of the second millennium B.C.E., the Habiru began a movement from Mesopotamia westward, until they approached the Mediterranean" (Harold Bloom, The Book of J, 193).

If, indeed, the Habiru are related to the Jewish people, they must have gradually infiltrated the settlements of the Palestinian hill dwellers (the Canaanites) in the early second millennium, and were peaceably absorbed by them, perhaps through tribal adoption and inter-marriage. Their original Syro-Mesopotamian culture (Syro-Mesopotamia being the land between the Habur and Euphrates rivers, around the city of Haran) was Amorite. Scholars have noted that Amorite culture was also tribal, "including urban, rural, and mobile pastoralist populations. The language was an early form of Northwest Semitic. [The fact that scholars have discerned] a number of cultural traits common to the Amorite tribes and the later Israelite tribes...including social forms and religious customs" would seem to confirm this Amoritic connection (see Ronald Hendel, Remembering Abraham, 52-54).

"One group among them was later headed by a troubled and charismatic seeker, Abram, who as Abraham became the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Bloom, 193).

It is important to recognize that, whether we are speaking of Jews, Christians, or Muslims, as a matter of history, Abraham's "fatherhood" is a marker of symbolic genealogies, and "one's place in [any such] genealogy is a sign of cultural self-definition more than it is a sign of biological descent" (Hendel, 10).

This is myth, not genetics.

"It may have been eighteen centuries before the common era that Abram decided to leave Mesopotamia, for reasons that very likely were as spiritual as the Hebrew Bible asserts them to have been. Scholars agree that the lands ruled by the Old Babylonian Dynasty of Hammurabi and his successors were marvelously civilized, but Abram's discomfort with the religious culture drove him out" (Bloom, 193).

The search for the "historical Abraham" yields little more than scholarly dispute. What is important for the Abrahamic Pluralist are the stories that compose his legacy. He is a character of ancient legendry and, as such, he emerges from mythic memory with a peculiar (and inconsistent) "personality." Even that, as Bloom remarks, "is not as fully developed by the Yahwist [J-writer]...as are those of Jacob and Joseph...and yet his nature is intense and vivid, and permanently known to us. The center of his consciousness is a certain discontent, an impatience with things as they are" (Bloom, 195).

Abram, like the convinced Pluralists who invoke his name and exhibit his characteristic "impatience with things as they are," was a utopian. Utopians are, as the name suggests, wanderers by nature: civilization, in the form they have inherited it, causes them continual discomfort. It makes them perennially restless. Their mode of "spirituality" is forever articulated by St. Augustine's address to his God: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their repose in Thee" (Augustine, Confessions).

In other words, Abraham is "father" to all who share his discontent with the prevailing culture that is their birthright. Abrahamic Pluralist "spirituality" is a restless non-conformity. Only a marginal number of those who claim "descent" from Abraham today exhibit his spirit (or ruh).

"And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham" (preaching attributed to John the Baptizer, St. Matthew 3:9).

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Matthew Arnold's "Rachel"

Arnold's late poem "Rachel" beautifully captures "the strife and mixture in the soul" that is Alfarabian Abrahamic pluralism.

I

In Paris all look'd hot and like to fade.
Sere, in the garden of the Tuileries,
Sere with September, droop'd the chestnut-trees.
'Twas dawn; a brougham roll'd through the streets and made

Halt at the white and silent colonnade
Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,
Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,
Sate in the brougham and those blank walls survey'd.

She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled
To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine;
Why stops she by this empty play-house drear?

Ah, where the spirit its highest life hath led,
All spots, match'd with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel's Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!


II

Unto a lonely villa, in a dell
Above the fragrant warm Provencal shore,
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore
Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,
The rose-crown'd queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia, full on her death-bed.--'Twas well!

The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life's last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate's frowns,

Do for this radiant Greek-soul'd artist cease;
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.


III

Sprung from the blood of Israel's scatter'd race,
At a mean inn in German Aarau born,
To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Trick'd out with a Parisian speech and face,

Imparting life renew'd, old classic grace;
Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place--

Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She had--one power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash'd, contending powers,
Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.

Literary Intelligence Redeems the World, Part Two

In the house of Midrash.

Rest Assured

Literary intelligence redeems the world.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Unbeknownst to most Christians, gospel music is the reason that Christianity was invented.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, baseball is the reason that America was invented.

Reading and Re-reading

For many years, the vast majority of my reading material was composed of books, poems, and articles that I had never read. Only a very few books ever seemed to me to merit re-reading. Besides, I felt always under the pressure of getting to the works that I had not yet managed to read: an impossibly large quantity then as now.

In the last few years, however, my attitude towards reading has changed. Perhaps it is because, with age, I discover that books I thought I knew well are no longer as familiar as they once were. I need, therefore, to re-acquaint myself with them. Perhaps it is because, as a full-time academic, I now have more time to read--at least in the summer months. I have also learned that, as with writing, the "real" or truly effective reading (or writing) seems to come with re-reading (or re-writing). These days, I often return to books that I had once considered taking to a used book shop to sell or trade--thinking that I was finally "finished" with them.

Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is a book that I have never considered parting with; it is a book I have dipped into repeatedly over the years; it is a book I will always cherish. Like Thoreau's Walden, it is a book about reading and writing and living the reading and writing life.

Hemingway wrote Feast at the end of his life--in a period that could have been the beginning of a new phase of his reading and writing life had he not chosen, instead, to end it. It is simple, direct, and honest--or at least the author managed to write in such a way as to convince the reader of his candor. Reading the book, one feels as though the author has taken him or her into his confidence: he is sharing with you the memories of his most immediate impressions of his life in Paris as he had lived it decades before--when he was poor, newly married, and unknown.

When I first read the book, in my late teens or early twenties, I found that the intimacy of Hemingway's tone often made me feel odd or uncomfortable. What he really thought of Gertrude Stein or of her relationship to other writers and artists, of her relationship to Alice B. Toklas, or Hemingway's relationship to other writers or to his wife, often embarrassed me. "This is really none of my business" I would think--and then, fitfully, close the book and set it aside, only to pick it up again and, like a voyeur at a peep-hole, eagerly read on. Re-reading the book now for the umpteenth time, I still feel an occasional twinge as if over-hearing gossip, but I no longer allow that twinge of conscience to interrupt my reading. Time gives us calluses in places we probably ought not to have them, but once we have them, we have them. Some we ought to tear open afresh. This one, I don't regret leaving intact.

There are seasons for feasting as well as for fasting: my instinct that the two are intimately related has always been a good one. But I should never have allowed the one to interfere with my experience or enjoyment of the other. Each has its appointed place in the liturgical calendar. As Pater and Joyce understood--and as Hemingway himself was, perhaps, beginning to make explicit--sense and spirit are dialectically related. If allowed to shift out of balance, only mischief and misery can follow.