Blessed Silence

In the Ihya, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali relates a story of Jesus being asked by his disciples what they must do in order to enter heaven. Jesus replied: "Never speak." "But we cannot do that!" they responded. "Very well, then," he said. "Speak only what is good."

The Yoga of Refusal

To sit in silent meditation with your right hand on your left thigh and your left hand grasping your right wrist (thus forming with your arms the Arabic word "la" or "no") is to assume the posture of the Yoga of Refusal.

It is to respond to the call of Herbert Marcuse to resist the one dimensionality of mass consumer society--to renounce consumerism and the commodification of the self.

There is no rising up without, first, a sitting down.

Silence. Exile. Cunning.

Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

Contemplation in a World of Action

"This discipline of listening and of attention is a very high form of ascetic discipline, a rather difficult one to maintain. In fact, there are lots of people who do not have the strength nor the grace to maintain this kind of discipline for very long. Doubtless when a person is clearly not able to do this, maybe he shouldn't try. Our asceticism will consist in discovering to what extent each one of us can simply remain quiet in passive attention to God and to what extent we do need some activity, some work that does not completely interfere with this but which relaxes us and takes us away from mere concentration. We all need a certain amount of activity that enables us to participate healthily in the life of our community. We need work that keeps us in tune physically and psychologically so that we are able to listen fruitfully instead of just going stale and turning off completely. There is such a thing as overdoing interior prayer and overdoing concentration and overdoing recollection. This can be harmful. It only deadens our capacity to listen and to attend to God."

Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, University of Notre Dame Press [reprint, 1998], 246-247.

Silence As A Discipline

"[Zakariya] said, 'Give me a sign, Lord.' [God] said, 'Your sign is that you will not speak to anyone for three full [days and] nights.' [Zakariya] went out of the sanctuary to his people and signalled to them to praise God morning and evening." Qur'an 19:10-11 [M.A.S. Abdel Haleem translation, slightly modified].





A statement attributed to Jesus by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali in the Ihya: "Devotion has ten degrees: the ninth is silence and the first is flight from people [exile]."

The Creed of Abraham

Heidegger longed for home; in this he was Odyssean. And like Odysseus, he was clever. There is always much to ponder in his writings--and yet, there is even more to set aside. Early in his life, he was hailed as a genius--and believed it--but was never able to fulfill his early promise.

James Joyce, on the other hand, was an authentic genius. And in A Portrait of the Artist he placed on the lips of Stephen Daedalus what may be the most succinct formulation of Abraham's "creed":

"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning" (pp. 246-247, Viking Compass Edition, 1964).

Silence. Exile. Cunning. These three constitute the "practice" of Abraham.

Heidegger's Homeric Struggle

In his recent book, Heidegger and Homecoming, Robert Mugerauer offers an insightful reading of Heidegger's struggle to overcome his Western philosophical addiction to metaphysics and learn to see the world afresh and find his own place within it. Had he been able, he would have become Germany's Homer.

Mugerauer does not say this, but the chief obstacle in Heidegger's path to the poet's laurel was Goethe's Faust. In principle, this would not be an insurmountable obstacle since times had changed, Germany had changed, and the epic form no longer fit the times or the place into which Heidegger had found himself thrown.

The real problem for Heidegger was that, despite overweening ambition, he lacked the gift of song. So he did the best he could with the talent that he had: he adopted an oracular style and offered original readings of modern German poets and ancient Greek philosophers and Tolstoy--let us not forget Tolstoy--who, with War and Peace (his Iliad) and Anna Karenina (his Odyssey) had become the Russian Homer.

In the end, I suspect that Heidegger's work belongs on the shelf next to Bonhoeffer's prison musings on a "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts"--juxtaposed to Thomas Wolfe's posthumously published You Can't Go Home Again.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Breakthrough

I began to read Bonhoeffer when I was in high school: first The Cost of Discipleship and then his Ethics. The former distinguished itself by Bonhoeffer's notion of "cheap grace"; the latter, by the agon with which he attempted to come to terms with Kant and other thinkers. But the one book of Bonhoeffer's that made the deepest impression on me and that I have returned to repeatedly over the years was the posthumously published edition of his Letters and Papers From Prison. For it was Bonhoeffer's reflections in the shadow of the gallows on "man come of age" and the "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts"--ideas that are largely passed over in silence by the recent evangelical embrace of Bonhoeffer as a 20th century Christian warrior-saint--that spoke to me most forcefully of the contemporary possibility of "religious" affirmation.

Bonhoeffer articulated an apparent paradox: to be truly religious in a world "come of age," men and women must embrace secularity. I say this is an apparent paradox because it is artificially created by the confusion that the notion of sui generis religion inevitably generates. The only way to begin to emerge from this confusion is to train oneself to recognize the constructed nature of religion-as-such.

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated 21 July 1944, Bonhoeffer argued that "...it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God..." (LPP, 369-370).

With the final sentence quoted, Bonhoeffer affirmed his theism--as he had every right to do. It is an expression of his personal world-view and to have omitted that from his remarks would have distorted his position. He went on to express his specifically Christian interpretation of theism, which I have omitted because, in a sense, it is irrelevant in this context--though Bonhoeffer himself clearly did not think so. But, in fact, it is: for one need not be a Christian in order to be a theist. Moreover, one need not be "religious" in any traditionally cognizable sense in order to be a theist--and this is the true burden of Bonhoeffer's remarks.

The confusion of faith with adherence to a set of institutionally propagated assertions about metaphysics or history (or the alleged conjunction of the two) is a product of the Christian church's attempt to (1) articulate and (2) enforce a communally unifying ideology (i.e., orthodoxy). As a consequence, Church councils (beginning in the 4th century at the insistence of the Emperor Constantine) entered the business of promulgating creeds. But faith is not a specifically Christian or even theistic attribute of human psychology. All human beings repose faith or confidence in a variety of objects: God, self, the State, other individuals, tools, etc. Faith is trust and, as anyone who has placed faith in another human being knows, that faith may be placed happily or unhappily--the determination of the appropriate adjective will ultimately depend upon subsequent events.

To repose faith (in this ordinary sense of the word) is perfectly natural: it is, effectively, a sine qua non of daily life as a human being. The transformation of such faith into a specifically "religious" activity requires a number of additional steps of attribution and interpretation. Bonhoeffer's breakthrough was to recognize that such steps (or many of them) may create more problems than they solve--especially in a world where positive science and critical historical inquiry have rendered many credal assertions "beyond belief."

In a long letter to Bethge dated 16-18 July 1944, Bonhoeffer had argued that religiosity interfered with a direct connection to God--one that can be established only when, for the sake of intellectual honesty, the "God hypothesis" has been abandoned. It is an odd position for a theist to take, but Bonhoeffer's confidence in the reality of God depended upon personal experience rather than intellectual proofs. He appeared to hold that, by participating in suffering, one encounters Christ. By the same token, one may encounter the Buddha, Muhammad, Husayn ibn 'Ali, al-Hallaj, the many martyrs of Christianity and Judaism, or any number of significant figures in a wide variety of religious traditions.

In this respect, his thinking represents an advance over that of Ernst Troeltsh, whose advocacy of critical history in Biblical studies made Bonhoeffer's thought not only possible but also inevitable. Troeltsch, however, was never quite able to wean himself from a notion of sui generis religion. In archetypal terms, Troeltsch played Moses to Bonhoeffer's Joshua: he was able to see the Promised Land from afar, but was denied entry.

Paul Ricoeur

When the subject of "contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation" is broached, the ghost of Paul Ricoeur inevitably enters the room. And rightly so: Ricoeur's concluding chapter to The Symbolism of Evil famously proposed the concept of a "second naivete" in an attempt to provide aid and comfort to those beleaguered moderns who, despite their embrace of science and the modern critique of religious belief, still cling to the possibility that religion has more to offer than what one former pastor friend of mine likes to call "pop psychology with organ music."

Unfortunately, as is often the case with successful coinages, Ricoeur's use of the phrase "second naivete" has taken on a life of its own--one that has put some distance between itself and the technical sense in which he employed it. Contrary to its more popular usage, the "second naivete" is not naivete at all: it is (emphatically) not a return to pre-critical religious belief--Ricoeur was adamant about that point. It is, instead, a mode of attentiveness to language and the semantic fecundity of symbols. At least, that is the most lucid meaning to be made from Ricoeur's term.

Ricoeur himself seemed to want more than this from his own coinage; at the same time, however, he knew better than to assert directly what he wanted. Instead, he insisted (rightly) that there are no free-floating philosophies without presuppositions. He insisted further (and, again, rightly) that, as a consequence, philosophers need to be honest: they need to make their "presuppositions explicit, state them as beliefs, wager on the beliefs, and try to make the wager pay off in understanding" (SE, 357). To this point, I can find no fault with Ricoeur's procedure. I only wish that he had been more rigorous in following his own recommendation of candor.

One must read and re-read Ricoeur's conclusion to The Symbolism of Evil, paying close attention to what are, in essence, code words, in order to grasp his presuppositions precisely. I do not intend to suggest by this that he was attempting to be deceptive: I sense that, like the rest of us, Ricoeur's presuppositions were so intimately intertwined in his thinking that they were no more obvious to him than the nose on his face. We must therefore look for his self-portrait in the palimpsest. If we do, here is what we find: repeated references to "the sacred" (and an acknowledgment of Mircea Eliade's use of that phrase) and to "being" (used, without acknowledgment, but in a recognizably Heideggerian manner).

In other words, there is, at the base of Ricoeur's musings on language and the symbol, a neo-Romantic/Modernist mysticism.

I do not begrudge him this: we all embrace presuppositions. This kind of mysticism is, however, problematic insofar as it asserts the existence of something that cannot be proved or disproved. By making such an assertion, Ricoeur abandons the "methodological atheism" (or agnosticism) that is the distinguishing characteristic of the modern (i.e., critical) historian. What Ricoeur gave the reader with his right hand (the assurance that one cannot "go home again" to pre-critical religiosity), he appears to have subtly taken back with his left. It is disturbing, this sort of failure of nerve--but perfectly understandable: what William James called the "will-to-believe" is a powerful force within us all; for many, including Paul Ricoeur, it is tantamount to the will-to-live.

My own recommendation--something that I have proposed repeatedly in this blog and its sibloglings--is a more sober (and, perhaps, sobering) alternative: the notion that religion is "spilled poetry," that we must abandon ontological certainties and, instead, learn to content ourselves with "mere" beauty and the hope for better things to come. Both of these possibilities are within our power, as intelligent beings, to effect and realize within the circumstances of our own lives--if we dare to dedicate ourselves to their realization. Pragmatic but utopian futuristics, the Alfarabian turn away from ontological speculation towards rhetoric: in short, the Prophetic tradition that identifies itself with Abrahamic peregrination--the itinerant spirit of the "wandering Aramean."

Ricoeur would probably assent to such a description of religious identity in terms of Abrahamic pilgrimage and strangerhood: but deep down he longed for roots, for stasis, and the prerogatives of certainty--"mellow" (to echo Ernst Troeltsch) as, in his hands, they may have been.

Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation

The problem that all moderns face--whether they are willing to acknowledge it or not--is, as a friend put it to me recently, finding (or inventing) a religion or religious seeking that is credible.

With the development of a modern historical consciousness--i.e., one in which the phrase "and then a miracle occurred" no longer suffices as a credible explanation of an historical event--life has become somewhat difficult for the religiously inclined. Of course, as Bruno Latour sagely observed, "we have never been modern" and, as the 20th century slowly gave way to the 21st, the number of people on the planet who aspired to achieve a modern historical consciousness went into steep decline. In the year 2012, if a thinker of the stature of a Karl Jaspers (above) engaged a thinker of the stature of a Rudolf Bultmann (below) on the meaning of religious myth, how many of the religiously inclined would bother to follow the course of the debate?

These are dark days for the Enlightenment project--at least insofar as that project has been understood since the 18th century. In some respects, of course, this is not all bad. As it turns out, very few human beings can live by rationality alone. Human beings need to hope, to dream, to long for a better world--even if those hopes and dreams and longings turn out to be misplaced or impossible to fulfill. But there needs to be some principle of mediation, of balance; otherwise, the psychopathologies of self-delusion gain the upper hand and witch-hunts and terror ensue. And, as history is our only guide, this is true whether religion or reason carries the day (witness, for example, the witch-hunts and terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution--a paradigmatic case).

In his book, The Heretical Imperative (1978), the sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger faced this issue head on by quoting "Al-Ghazali, the great Muslim thinker who made mysticism acceptable within Islam...'[R]eason is God's scale on earth'" (83). In other words, al-Ghazali (d. 1111) promoted pietistic religiosity but did so always with an eye to preserving rationality. The way that he went about it--attacking the peripatetic philosophers of his community--is admittedly odd. It appears that he felt that the only way to save the village of reason was to burn it--or at least to burn those parts of town that he determined to be extreme. Al-Ghazali seems to have believed that pietism had much to offer those among the religiously inclined who insist upon thinking--and in this he anticipated Kant and Schleiermacher by over half a millennium. But (as Kant knew) pietism is not always amenable to being placed in "God's scale" of reason and, despite the manifest sympathies between their projects, it is unlikely that al-Ghazali would have had much patience with Kant's desire to place "religion within the bounds of reason alone."

Alfarabi (d. 950), on the other hand--a figure that al-Ghazali wished to displace--struck a better balance (in my view). Like al-Ghazali, Alfarabi believed that the religious imagination must be guided by the intellect. Also like al-Ghazali, Alfarabi recognized the insatiability of the intellect--but was not threatened by it. Instead, Alfarabi was able to reconcile himself to the restless non-conformity that characterized the "spirituality" of our "father" Abraham. He agreed with al-Ghazali's "tale of three cities" (Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares) but, unlike the latter, he was unwilling to allow "Benares" to displace "Athens" whenever "Athens" appeared to bar the way to "Jerusalem." Jerusalem, after all, is a pilgrimage destination: not a place in which to permanently dwell.

Those who forget that simple fact forget Abraham--even in the act of "remembering" him.