Remi Brague before Pope Benedict
News.va reports, “the “Ratzinger Prize”, which was established by the “Vatican Foundation: Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI” and is due to be conferred on 20 October.
At the press conference Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the Foundation’s academic committee, announced the names of the prize winners: the French historian Remi Brague and the American scholar of patrology and theology Fr. Brian Edward Daley S.J.
From 1990 to 2010 Remi Brague was professor at La Sorbonne University in Paris, France. He currently holds the “Romano Guardini” chair at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, while continuing to work as visiting professor at a number of American, Spanish and Italian universities. He is a member of the “Institut de France, Academie des sciences morales et politiques”, and holds the “Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Academie Francaise”. His many works include: “Europe, la voie romaine”, “La sagesse du monde. Histoire de l’experience humaine de l’univers”, “Du Dieu des chretiens et d’un ou deux autres” and “Les Ancres dans le Ciel”.
The following is excerpted from Remi Brague’s book “The Legend of the Middle Ages” (used with permission from University of Chicago Press):
Institutionalized Philosofia and Private Falsafa
The major difference between philosophy and falsafa is perhaps social in nature; it resides in the word “institutionalization.” In Islamic lands, falsafa remains a private affair, a matter for individuals in fairly restricted numbers. The great philosophers of Islam were amateurs, and they pursued philosophy during their leisure hours: Farabi was a musician, Avicenna a physician and a vizier, Averroes a judge. Avicenna did philosophy at night, surrounded by his disciples, after a normal workday. And he did not refuse a glass of wine to invigorate him a bit and keep him on his toes. Similarly, among the Jews, Maimonides was a physician and a rabbinic judge, Gersonides was an astronomer (and astrologer), and so on. The great Jewish or Muslim philosophers attained the same summits as the great Christian Scholastics, but they were isolated and had little influence on society.
In medieval Europe, philosophy became a university course of studies and a pursuit that could provide a living. It also supported a mass of untenured, garden-variety “philosophy profs,” few of whom have left their names in the manuals, even though we can exhume their courses, which we discover to be full of surprises. But these were the men who made it possible for philosophy to make a profound impact on the minds of the jurists, physicians, and others they taught, hence for it to become a factor in society.
This had an important effect on the relationship between philosophy and theology. You can be a perfectly competent rabbi or imam without ever having studied philosophy. In contrast, a philosophical background is a necessary part of the basic equipment of the Christian theologian. It has even been obligatory since the Lateran Council of 1215. In Christianity, the tension between philosophy and theology can be said to be vertical, setting apart people who had followed the same course of studies, given that all theologians began by studying philosophy. The two disciplines spoke the same language. In Islam, the tension between Kalām and falsafa was horizontal, distinguishing between specialists in different disciplines, all of whom contested the legitimacy of the other camp’s methods.
Theology is a Christian specialty. To be sure, several religions developed stores of knowledge, at times of an extremely high degree of technicality and subtlety, concerning the adventures of the gods, regulating the cult due to them, and explaining their commandments, when such had been emitted. But “theology” as a rational exploration of the divine (according to Anselm’s program) exists only in Christianity.
The Word and the Book
In the final analysis, this is true because of what permits a theology to exist—that is, because of the logos and its status in the various religions. Here I have to correct an expression in your question. You speak of the “three religions of the book.” The expression has become current, but it is deceptive. First, because people often imagine that it translates the Arabic for “people of the book” (ahl al-kitāb), which is a technical term designating the religions that preceded Islam and whose adherents, because they possessed a holy book, had the right to a “protected” (ahl al-dhimma) juridical status that was recognized by the Muslim community. In that sense, the term excludes Islam itself. If, on the other hand, we take the term in the broader, non-technical, sense, it includes Islam.
But at that point we see that the expression conceals a second trap, symmetrical to the first: it implies that in these three religions, which do, in fact, have a book—as do other religions—the contents of revelation would be that book. As it happens, however, in Judaism that content is the history of God with his people, whom he liberates and guides by giving them his Teaching (torah); In Christianity, it is the person of Christ, who, for Christians, is a concentrate of the previous experience of Israel. The written texts record that history, or, in the case of the Talmud, gather together the discussions of the scholars regarding the interpretation and application of the divine commandments. But in no way do those books constitute the actual message of God to humankind. It is only in Islam that the revealed object is the Book. In the final analysis, the only religion of the book is Islam!
Why does this matter? Because the very way in which the god speaks, the very style of his logos, decides how that logos can be elaborated. If the divine word is a law, it has to be explicated and applied with maximum precision. But that law says nothing about its source. If that divine word is a person—and, inversely, if that person is a word stating who is its emitter—that is one step toward a certain knowledge of God.
Debts?
What is the debt of le christianisme toward islam, the religion? Properly speaking, there is none, because Christian dogma had already crystallized well before the birth of Islam as a religion in the seventh century, and for even greater reason, well before that religion began to philosophize in the ninth century. That crystallization was the work of the series of great ecumenical councils, and it was from Greek philosophy that the Church Fathers borrowed their conceptual tools, while making profound changes in it. But that is another story.
What about the debt of la chrétienté—Christianity as an area of civilization—to Islam as a civilization? Here the debt is a real one, but unfortunately the topic has been overloaded with ideology. Moreover, legends abound. For example, is it true that the role of the Arabic heritage was ever forgotten? Repeating it endlessly seems to echo publicity techniques for pushing a product that claims to refresh the memory of the West. We need to state who (scholars or “intellectuals”) denied the importance of that heritage, when that occurred, and in what contexts. There has been a broad range of opinion on the topic. For example, in the eighteenth century Condillac minimized the role of Islam: “I don’t know that we have any great obligation to the Arabs.” A marginal insert in the same text is even more categorical: “They have hindered the progress of the human mind.” In contrast, a generation later, Condorcet recognized that at least the Arabs had the merit of safeguarding and transmitting the heritage of the ancient world. Having made this admission, however, he adds a teleological representation that was later to flourish among such writers as Ernest Renan: “The work done by the Arabs would have been lost to the human race for ever if they had not done something to prepare the way for the more lasting revival which was brought about in the West.”
After the translations of the twelfth century, Scholasticism owed an enormous debt to Arabic thought. That debt primarily concerned Muslim authors such as Avicenna and Averroes, given that Farabi, the first true and perhaps the greatest Muslim philosopher (and whom the other two used constantly), was translated much less frequently. It also concerned Jewish authors such as Maimonides. Razi (Rhazes), whose radical criticism of prophecy situated him outside of Islam as a religion and outside of all revealed religion, was largely known only as a great physician (which indeed he was). The Scholastics had no trouble separating the philosophical contribution of a Muslim author from his religious affiliation. Duns Scotus, for example, states that Avicenna “mixed his religion, which was that of Muhammad, with the things of philosophy, and he said certain things as philosophical and proven by reason, and others as in conformity with his religion.”
Lack of Knowledge about Islam as a Religion
Islam as a religion remained poorly known in the Latin West. The Byzantine East knew it earlier and better. The Qur’an was translated into Latin only in the mid-twelfth century, at the urging of Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, but the translation had only a limited circulation. The prophetic traditions of the hadiths were almost unknown, except for the story of the Prophet’s “night flight” to paradise, known as “Muhammad’s Ladder” (in Latin, Liber scale Machometi), a work that had an enormous influence as late as Dante, but that represented only an extremely partial aspect of the entire corpus of the Hadith.
As for Muslim “theology,” it left little trace in Christian lands. Kalām was known, above all, through Maimonides’ refutation of it in the first part of his Guide for the Perplexed. Its atomism and its occasionalism exerted an influence that was more philosophical than theological, in counterpoint to Aristotelian continuism. Those intent on demolishing it sought inspiration in Maimonides or in Ghazali, whom they recycled by adapting their ideas. Traces of the occasionalism of the Kalām can be found even in Malebranche and Berkeley.
As for Averroes, his famous—perhaps too famous—Fasl al-maqāl was not printed until the nineteenth century, by a German Orientalist. The “theological” works of Averroes were known by such fifteenth-century Jews as Simon ben Zemah Duran and Elijah ben Moses Abba Delmedigo. Still, if Duran’s Unveiling of Methods of Demonstration Regarding the Principles of Religion (Examen religionis) was translated from Hebrew into Latin in the fifteenth century, no translation of the Fasl al-maqāl seems to have appeared.
Need of the Other
What seems to me to be essential, in any event, is to have done with a stupidly hydraulic representation of “influences” in which knowledge supposedly flows naturally from the summits to the plains. In reality, demand precedes offer. Translations are made because someone feels that a text contains things that people need. And it is that need that we have to explain. In this connection, the real intellectual revolution of Europe began well before the wave of translations in Toledo and elsewhere. This has been shown by the American jurist Harold J. Berman in his important book, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. This work has finally—after twenty years—been translated into French, but unfortunately the major publishing houses (to their shame) have once again failed to rise to the occasion, leaving the book to a university publishing house that is courageous but with insufficient distribution resources and media support. The intellectual revolution this work describes dates from the rediscovery (better, the invention) of Roman law with the so-called “papal revolution” at the time of the investitures controversy in the late eleventh century. Reducing law to system required more refined tools, which meant that the West turned to the East, seeking out Aristotle’s works on logic, along with which they received the rest of the Greek and Arabic heritage.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam
And after then, if the idea is accepted, how was it understood? Did it mean that the Church was to be the true Israel, which supposes that the Jewish people would no longer be so? Or did it mean that the Church is one true Israel, truly Israel, and that it is truly attached to the experience of the God of Israel, because it sees itself, so to speak, as the resuscitated body of a Jew?
Next, the Qur’an does not speak of Muhammad as the key to the prophets, but rather as their seal (33:40). In context, the meaning of that expression is not totally clear, but it was interpreted as signifying that the message of Muhammad sealed the preceding messages, both because it confirms their content and because it brings prophecy to a close. If there is a key, it does not open anything (even in the sense of a hermeneutic key—such as a “key to dreams”); it closes. Behind this thought there is a claim to return to the series of the prophetic revelations of the past and to end it—a claim that Manes (or Mani, from whom we get the term “Manichaeism”) had perhaps already made in the early third century.
Christoph Luxenberg is just beginning to publish works to which I have tried to call the attention of a non-German-speaking public. For the time being, they remain dryly philological. He attempts to show that certain obscure passages of the Qur’an can be explained by the Syriac and involve Christian hymns. According to him, the Qur’an is, at least in part, what its title means in Syriac—a “lectionary,” or collection of biblical texts translated and adapted for liturgical use. I am not a specialist in this field, but this hypothesis seems extremely plausible, and its fertility speaks for it: many a mysterious passage becomes transparent. But we will have to wait for the true connoisseurs to give their opinions.
As for the problem of the basis for coexistence, you have put your finger on a fundamental difficulty. It contains a paradox: what is troublesome is not that any one religion finds another strange, but rather a certain manner of interpreting a real proximity. What exasperates Jews is that Christians claim to understand “their” book better than they do themselves. In similar fashion, what perplexes Christians—and why they often refuse to recognize Islam—is that Islam sees itself as a post-Christianity destined to replace that religion.
Recognizing or Refusing Filiation
For Islam, the survival of the Christian religion is an anachronism. Islam presents itself even as the true Christianity, given that, according to Islamic thought, Christians have disfigured the authentic Gospel, just as the Jews, for their part, have sold out the authentic Torah. Thus it is out of the question to appeal to common Scripture. This means that, from the Muslim point of view, the “Islamo-Christian dialogue” is a dialogue between true Christians (that is, the Muslims themselves) and people who imagine themselves to be true Christians but are not. This is why dialogue interests Christians more than it does Muslims.
The Middle Ages as Part of the Academic Program?
From another point of view, the works that you cite—two dialogues by authors who were contemporaries and could have known one another—are religious just as much as they are philosophical. Thus it is excusable not to put them on the program of studies. By contrast, there are treatises of Avicenna’s (his Psychology, for example) or Abelard’s (the Ethics) that are almost purely philosophical. And an out-and-out theologian like St. Thomas Aquinas includes in his Summa theologica treatises on the virtues, the passions, laws, and more, which are admirable for their philosophical depth and would make marvelous teaching texts.
Averroes has just been placed on the list of authors one of whose works may be presented at the oral examination for the baccalauréat. That fills me with a joy that is not unmixed. For one thing, I fear that Averroes might become the intellectual equivalent of the “nice, serviceable Arab” named by decree and supposed to be representative. But also, for very simple reasons, the text that will be studied can hardly be anything other than the Fasl al-maqāl (in French translation, Discours décisif), a work that is not overly technical and is available in paperback. The problem is that it represents only an infinitely small part of the vast production of Averroes, who wrote, among other things, a commentary on every one of Aristotle’s works, and often two, at times three, commentaries. Paradoxically, it is in those commentaries that Averroes says what he would consider to be the truth. For him, in fact, Aristotle represented the summit of humanity—after Muhammad, of course. What Aristotle said was thus true, period, next paragraph. The Decisive Discourse is a work of circumstance in which Averroes defends the official doctrine of the Almohad sovereigns whom he served. Hence what is going to be taught as a “brief for tolerance” ended up being a call for the repression of his adversaries.
Polytheism?
Those revelations were not even exclusive to what we call “monotheism.” Aristotle gives an astronomical and noetic version of them in book lambda of his Metaphysics. When you come down to it, has there ever been a genuine polytheism? Even Homer supposes a sort of fundamental unity of the divine that permits the gods to identify themselves as gods, even when they dwell far from one another (Odyssey 5.79ff.). What the revelations bring is, rather, the end of a “cosmotheism” that makes no radical distinction between the divine and the physical.
What changes with the monotheisms is not the description of the physical universe and its articulations, but rather the way in which man expresses his sense of his own presence within that universe. In my Wisdom of the World, I began with four ideal-typical models: the “Timaeus” model (broadly speaking, the main current of ancient philosophy from Plato to Proclus, including the Stoics), Epicurus, “Abraham,” and Gnosticism. Building on generally similar descriptions of the world, each of these proposes a different response to the question “What we are doing on this earth?” Are we imitating the beautiful order of the heavenly bodies; comfortably settling in on an island of humanity within an indifferent universe; drawing ourselves closer to the creator of a good world, but obeying his law or following his Son; or, finally, fleeing, not, as Mallarmé invites us, là-bas, but to on high, toward an alien God, escaping an imperfect or prison-like world? The ancient and medieval model, which held firm for a good millennium and a half, emerged out of a compromise between “Timaeus” and “Abraham.” What interests me is not so much its description (even if I have had to pursue a description in some detail), but rather the problem posed by its disappearance with the modern age. It left us alone. Nothing in the physical world responds to man’s ethical demands.
Cosmology as a Postulate
To be sure, for premodern man, the presence of the world, which he felt as a kosmos, was not a model to be imitated in any literal sense. Pretending to believe this to be the case is unfair, as it might be amusing to explain by the use of Kant’s concepts. The role of the cosmic order is analogous to that of the postulates of practical reason. Those postulates—liberty, the existence of a just God, and the immortality of the soul—are of no use as a basis for moral law, which is sufficient unto itself and draws its obligation from an intrinsic authority that it has no need to borrow from elsewhere. Such postulates serve to guarantee the possibility of the supreme Good—that is, the agreement between what the Law demands and the order of the real world. One might say that the kosmos was less a model demanding conformity than an example that shows, from the simple fact that it exists, that ethical conduct is possible. The major difference between the premodern vision of the world and Kant’s morality is that realization of the good is for Kant only postulated. It remains, so to speak, in the domain of faith and hope. For men of ancient and medieval times, on the other hand, the sovereignty of the good was already given in the cosmic harmony. One only need acknowledge it.
The World, God, and Man
If the relationship between the world and God were of this sort, Prometheus (in the Romantic interpretation of that figure) would be right. But how much naïveté does that imply! To begin with, man and God exchange homogeneous goods, in finite quantities, within the same system. One of the first rules of theology, however, is that it is not in the same sense that we attribute properties (justice, power, knowledge, etc.) to God and to man. A bit of Neoplatonic therapy is called for: ideas do not possess the qualities that they confer. As well as a small dose of theology—I mean, theologians’ theology, not the variety knocked together by the profs de philo. Let me offer you two phrases of Thomas Aquinas for your meditation: “To detract from the creature’s perfection is to detract from the perfection of the divine power”; “We do not wrong God unless we wrong our own good.”
The Law of God
Kant belongs within a tradition of the reduction of the law to an imperative that begins with Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, occurs in Marsilius of Padua, then in Suárez and Hobbes. The law of God was understood as an external commandment, not as the internal logic of created things. Andrew Ramsay, a student of Fénelon’s, formulates the concept of law underlying the medieval vision of things thus: “The law in general is nothing else than the Rule which each Being ought to follow, in order to act according to his Nature.”
Rethinking the Idea of Providence
God gives to every creature, according to its own nature, what it needs in order to attain the good. He does not take the place of the creature in making its good. And the higher on the scale from the mineral to the vegetal, the animal, and the human, the more God delegates; the more he grants the creature care of itself. When his providence is granted to man, it becomes, in a conscious play on words, prudence; not the simple fact of watching out for what lies ahead, but all of the practical wisdom that Aristotle called phronesis. This is where the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man come together.
A “City” of Atheists?
Let me recall that the Constitution of the French Republic (the fifth of that name, the one in vigor since 1958) cites the whole of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme of 1789, which states that the French people do all sorts of things “in presence of and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.” The expression is not restricted to the anemic clock-maker God of the Enlightenment, but also designates the Christian God, as in Fénelon, for example. And no one finds that mention of God unacceptable. This means that the rights that are asserted are not fabricated, but acknowledged. The problem that arises for modern democracies is that what someone does can also be undone. What is merely conceded by men—“rights,” a “dignity,” and so on—can one day be taken back by those same men.
Bayle brilliantly transposed and reformulated an old paradox of Plutarch’s: it is better to be atheist than superstitious. But he shifts Plutarch’s psychological question to the political domain: the atheist is a more peaceful citizen than the superstitious man. If we accept Hobbes’s thesis that the city of men is founded on the fear of death, religion is intrinsically dangerous. Nothing can stop the superstitious, who fear hell more than death. This is because, at base, the eighteenth century accepted Hobbes’s premise that superstition invented “fanaticism” as a scarecrow. And it is as “fanatics” that inoffensive nuns were guillotined under the Revolution.
The problem remains pertinent today: on the one hand, just what can a suicide bomber be threatened with? On the other hand, if our most basic virtue, our “tolerance,” can prevent us from killing, it remains to be proven that it suffices to give us a desire to live. I offer for your meditation a passage from Rousseau: “[The] principles [of the allegedly wise man] do not cause men to be killed, but they prevent them from being born by destroying the morals which cause them to multiply, by detaching them from their species, by reducing all their affections to a secret egoism as deadly to population as to virtue. Philosophic indifference resembles the tranquility of the state under despotism. It is the tranquility of death. It is more destructive than war itself.”
Is “Tolerance” Enough?
If the problem is to assure the peaceful coexistence of the members of a given society, or even to make sure that they enjoy the most equitable division of available resources, all we need to do is to negotiate a formula that will allow the maximization of advantages. And in order to do that, we have no need for any sort of transcendence. But this is true only for what we have become accustomed to calling (quite symptomatically) “society,” a term that originated in economics. That society is, at base, the club of the persons present, who dispose of the ability to call in new members or to blackball them. The hitch is that humanity as an animal species is constantly losing individuals, and therefore cannot persist without replacing them by others who can be drawn only from within itself. Man is not only mortal but, as Hannah Arendt put it, “native.” If we know what we are doing, why bring children into the world who clearly did not ask to be born? If life is an affair not worth the cost, as Schopenhauer insisted, all parents are outright criminals. If we bring children into the world so they will support us in our old age, it is even worse: it would be impossible to push the utilization of another as a means to a more radical level. If it is in order to permit others to make a “delightful excursion through reality,” bravo. But it remains to be shown that life—all life—is a good so incommensurable that it can balance the suffering it involves. Suffering that, by definition, cannot be known by someone who has not been born. The only way out of all of this is through a metaphysics.
The Church as a Force for Secularization
Christianity has never ceased negotiating a concrete modus vivendi between these two dimensions. How this has occurred is a paradox: the Church secularized the medieval state by assigning to it a domain of its own, keeping the peace. Which the state was not eager to do, given that, for its part, it dreamed only of sacrality. “Paradoxical as it may be … it is the action of the popes that tended, beginning in the 11th century, to ‘laicize’ the political power by taking away from it all initiative in spiritual matters.” This happened because Christianity, from the beginning, had declared itself independent of the Roman state, which not only already existed, but was persecuting Christians. In Judaism, what political power there was came to be formed by drawing closer around the Torah, erecting a barrier around it to protect the one principle of identity that remained after the disappearance of the Jewish state. This means that the absence of a political dimension is what constitutes Judaism. In the religion of Islam, the birth of a state at Medina and of an empire with the Arab conquest came two full centuries before the Islamic religion became clearly distinct from the other monotheisms. And before the sharia became a counterpower opposed to the political power of the caliphs.
The question that I call “theio-practical” remains unanswered, however. It asks, “Are there commandments coming from God that impose more on us—or something different from—what practical reason commands of all humankind?”
Where Is Irrationalism?
Brague: I have indeed used the expression l’angoisse de la raison as the title of an article. People talk incessantly of the rise of irrationalism. Giving readers a fine case of goose bumps is the stock in trade of many a pen pusher. Such people, what is more, take pains not to ask themselves just why the “rationalism” they defend is so unattractive. In any event, supposing that irrationalism is indeed on the rise, it does not bother me overly much. Let me note that the connection between rationalism and irrationalism is extremely complex, and that the historical representation of a gradual ascension toward the light is simply the result of forgetting the shadows that such a light necessarily projects. Two examples: the high point of magic is not situated in the Middle Ages, but just before and just after. The first high point was late Neoplatonism: Proclus (d. 485) placed magic (or “theurgy”) higher than all human knowledge; the second came in Renaissance Florence of the fifteenth century. Nor should we forget the contents of Newton’s famous trunk. That great thinker was just as interested in an exegesis of the Book of Revelation as he was in celestial mechanics. Magic and science are twin sisters, but one prospered while the other declined.
The real danger lies in the paradox of your formula: “believe in reason.” For the ideology of the Enlightenment, which is still widespread among the intellectual proletariat, it is one thing or the other: either one believes, or one is rational. Reason is expected to destroy belief and replace it with knowledge. That reason itself is the object of a belief is a bit hard to swallow. Still, Nietzsche had already identified in the belief in the truth a final echo of a belief that was first Platonic, then Christian (“Platonism for the people”).
Where Is True Rationalism?
Many of those who think themselves rationalists and even write highly useless screeds against people whom they call irrationalists (who do not read their writings) are, in the final analysis, just as irrational as their targets. They think that reason is simply an epiphenomenon of the irrational—for example, the result of natural selection among a given living species. That species—called Homo sapiens—and life itself being the result of a series of chance happenings during the course of evolution. Let me give the last word on the subject to Father Brown, the priest-detective of Gilbert Chesterton’s novels: “I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason.”
Where Is Irrationalism?
I have indeed used the expression l’angoisse de la raison as the title of an article. People talk incessantly of the rise of irrationalism. Giving readers a fine case of goose bumps is the stock in trade of many a pen pusher. Such people, what is more, take pains not to ask themselves just why the “rationalism” they defend is so unattractive. In any event, supposing that irrationalism is indeed on the rise, it does not bother me overly much. Let me note that the connection between rationalism and irrationalism is extremely complex, and that the historical representation of a gradual ascension toward the light is simply the result of forgetting the shadows that such a light necessarily projects. Two examples: the high point of magic is not situated in the Middle Ages, but just before and just after. The first high point was late Neoplatonism: Proclus (d. 485) placed magic (or “theurgy”) higher than all human knowledge; the second came in Renaissance Florence of the fifteenth century. Nor should we forget the contents of Newton’s famous trunk. That great thinker was just as interested in an exegesis of the Book of Revelation as he was in celestial mechanics. Magic and science are twin sisters, but one prospered while the other declined.
The real danger lies in the paradox of your formula: “believe in reason.” For the ideology of the Enlightenment, which is still widespread among the intellectual proletariat, it is one thing or the other: either one believes, or one is rational. Reason is expected to destroy belief and replace it with knowledge. That reason itself is the object of a belief is a bit hard to swallow. Still, Nietzsche had already identified in the belief in the truth a final echo of a belief that was first Platonic, then Christian (“Platonism for the people”).
Where Is True Rationalism?
Many of those who think themselves rationalists and even write highly useless screeds against people whom they call irrationalists (who do not read their writings) are, in the final analysis, just as irrational as their targets. They think that reason is simply an epiphenomenon of the irrational—for example, the result of natural selection among a given living species. That species—called Homo sapiens—and life itself being the result of a series of chance happenings during the course of evolution. Let me give the last word on the subject to Father Brown, the priest-detective of Gilbert Chesterton’s novels: “I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason.”
Do Religions Deserve Respect?
Can he respect those religions? Properly speaking, no. Not because he is or is not a believer, and not because he adheres to religion A rather than to religion B, but quite simply because he values the meaning of words. Religions are only things, and one can only respect persons. One can no more respect a thing than listen to a painting. I respect no religion, not even my own. I respect those who believe in all religions, not because they are believers, but inasmuch as they are human beings.
More specifically, I have no esteem for belief in and of itself. I detest the recent habit of considering the act of belief as having a value in itself, independent of its content. And I mistrust those who attempt to discover connections between “believers,” even to lump them together, without asking themselves what they believe in. One can believe in flying saucers, after all! There were sincere Nazis and convinced Leninites. And the Carthaginian fathers who had their sons burned alive as a sacrifice to the god Moloch (the scene is narrated by Flaubert, but the facts are true) must have “believed in it” strongly. For me, a belief is as good as its object, neither more nor less.
Can One Hate a Religion?
Since I’m somewhat immoderately fond of provocation, I would go so far as to demand the right to hate a religion. I am thinking of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli of universal interests and erudition who died a few years ago. He declared in an interview, “Je hais le christianisme [I hate Christianity].” The French translator, who is among my friends and to whom I owe the anecdote, told me that when he suggested the verb détester, Leibowitz, who spoke an impeccable French redolent of the eighteenth century, responded, articulating clearly, “Non, ani soneh, je hais.” I hasten to add that Leibowitz was, in practical life, the most inoffensive man imaginable. In politics he was a sort of hyper-dove who demanded the immediate evacuation of occupied territories and compared the government of his own land to that of Nazi Germany! And he bears Christians no hate. Christian as I am, that phrase in no way pleases me. I deplore it; I regret it. I think it based on an error. But I prefer it to the instantaneous fervor of certain professional participants in interreligious “dialogues.”
I’ll give you another example: Ignaz Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew of the early twentieth century (d. 1921), perhaps the greatest student of Islam who has ever lived, and whose articles I have just finished having republished in French. There was a man who was literally disgusted by Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity. If I had had a chance to meet him, I would not have said to him, “How nasty it is to hate!” Even less would I have called him a dirty Christianophobe who wasn’t politically correct. I would have asked him, “What are your reasons? Precisely what do you not like about Christianity?” And I would have tried to point out to him that the things to which he objected do not strike the center of the target or touch the essence of the Christian phenomenon, but are only accidental accretions.
Christians vs. Christianists
To speak of the Christian heritage of Europe bothers me. And for even greater reason, speaking of “Christian civilization.” Christianity was founded by people who could not have cared less about “Christian civilization.” What interested them was Christ, and the reverberations of his coming on the whole of human existence. Christians believed in Christ, not in Christianity itself; they were Christians, not “Christianists.”
It took centuries to translate Christian reality into institutions. Think of the time it took for the Church to reverse inveterate habits and impose the consent of the engaged couple as the sole indispensable condition for marriage. The famous monogamous marriage that we now call “traditional” was in fact a hard-won innovation. What is really traditional is the contract between two families for an exchange of spouses, whose opinion was seldom asked. Until quite late, so-called “Christian” society regarded with a jaundiced eye those who married—before a priest, to be sure—without consulting father, mother, or the social conventions. In one telling example: when the silk-worker Gonzalo de Yepes married Catalina Alvarez, a poor weaver, for love, his family disowned him. Moreover, when Catalina became a widow, she had to make her way alone to raise her son, later known under the name of St. John of the Cross.
Who can say that Christianity has had the time to translate the totality of its contents into institutions? I have the impression that instead we are still at the beginning stages of Christianity.
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Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 1–22 of The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Rémi Brague, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)
Rémi Brague
The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane
©2009, 304 pages
Cloth $35.00 ISBN: 9780226070803
Catholicism Pure & Simple 