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.