Abrahamic Humanism

In 2007, a conference on the "New Humanism" was held at Harvard University. Among the panel discussions presented at the conference was one entitled "Toward an Abrahamic Humanism?" The discussants included Rabbi Sherwin Wine of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, the Rev. Dr. William Murray (a Unitarian Universalist) who presented a "post-Christian" perspective, and Salmon Rushdie, who spoke about secular Islam on the Indian sub-continent.

I did not attend the conference, but what I can gather from reading a published synopsis of the panel discussions, the underlying presumption of the conference participants appears to be one in which religion is "essentialized" for the purpose of distinguishing it from culture, and then ignored for the purpose of privileging culture over this essentialized construction. Robert F. Shedinger has recently given a name to this sort of rhetorical maneuver: he calls it a "discourse of domestication." Among their various uses, discourses of domestication compartmentalize religion and thereby render it "harmless" for the convenience of those who wish human religiosity would, once and for all, just go away (see Chapter Two of Shedinger's Was Jesus Muslim? Questioning Categories in the Study of Religion, Fortress Press, 2009).

Would that it were that easy!

As anyone who has spent any time thinking seriously about religion as a human phenomenon will attest, no clear cut distinctions between religion and culture ever survive the trial of counter-examples. Simply put, the behaviors that we tend to name "religious" are facets of human culture; de-contextualized as "religion," they tend to reduce to theology. But theology is a rarefied product of the interpretation of sacred texts in the light of Greek philosophical concepts. It is, in other words, an aspect of European intellectual history and, specifically, composes the dogmatics of the Christian churches.

It strikes me that a more productive approach to the articulation of a "new humanism" would be one that is informed by the historic role of religious scholarship in the invention of the "old" humanism. And if one is intrigued by the notion of an "Abrahamic Humanism," a good place to start would be George Makdisi's magisterial The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh University Press, 1990).

The downside of informing one's humanism with Makdisi's scholarship is that it not only makes the simplistic distinction between religion and culture untenable, it also reveals the rhetorical distancing of humanism from religiosity to be equally problematic.

Those who wish to call themselves "humanists" while turning their backs upon religiosity have not only cut themselves off from the roots of the humanistic traditions, they have cut themselves off from a characteristic aspect of historical human being. Their vaunted humanism is best described as an a-humanism, if not an anti-humanism.

I suggest that they need to re-think their entire project.

The Bridge of Criticism

Back in 1970, the historian Peter Gay wrote a brilliant little book entitled The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues Among Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire on the Enlightenment. Gay chose these three figures to discuss among themselves the meaning of the Enlightenment because Gibbon had at one time mused that he might write a dialogue (trialogue?) in which these three "mutually acknowledge" the inherent risks involved in thinking critically about religion in public. Gay's book takes up this topic and many others--including the often overlooked Enlightenment roots of Romanticism. At one point in the conversation, Voltaire confesses that "...the more I read the Romantics, the more I find myself in them--certainly in the English Romantics, less so in the French, in the Germans not at all" (p. 113).