The Central Question

The central question of my intellectual life, since I first began to think for myself with any credible degree of sophistication (i.e., when I began to read Kierkegaard around age 16), has been this: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem (and, by the same token, Ctesiphon with Yathrib)?

For Tertullian--who first posed the question (as a rhetorical exercise, more or less)--the presumptive response was negative: Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. And yet, had this been the case, biblical religion would never have evolved much beyond its origins as a priestly cult of sacrifice. The prophetic (i.e., ethical) tradition would have emerged regardless, but the intellectual hunger that eventually gave birth to the natural sciences would have gone unsatisfied. So we would have had a world in which priest-craft promised magic and redemption, moral conviction thundered, and nature was analyzed and, in part, harnessed--without reference to ethics or culture.

This is the world to which we seem to be, at present, reverting.

I find this world to be a dangerous place, because it is filled with certainties that resist all nuance and attempts at mediation and translation across the boundaries that separate priest from prophet, prophet from scientist, and scientist from priest. It is a world without poets and musicians: a world without humanists and the humanities.

Jerusalem without Athens and Yathrib without Ctesiphon are walled cities whose inhabitants are smug, self-satisfied, blind know-it-alls. Such a world is easily divided against itself; it invites conflict and fratricide.

The central question of my intellectual life has been, and remains, how do we avoid creating such a world?

My answer: we must insist on making room for the posing of this question not, as Tertullian did, as a mere exercise in rhetoric with a pre-determined answer, but as humanists have done since the beginnings of Mesopotamian civilization: as a challenge to our creativity, a spur to the imagination, and a call to lives of study and deliberation. Humanism does not provide answers to this question, it is itself an answer to this question.

Tillich's Ontology Re-Visited

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1951, Paul Tillich attempted to demonstrate that "Biblical religion" is not only compatible with ontological speculation, it presumes such speculation. Tillich chose this subject in an effort to answer the charge of his critics that "theology has to restrain itself from using philosophical terms" [see Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, vii].

Such charges are not unique to Christianity, of course, nor are they of recent vintage: Tertullian's rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" has been periodically posed by the Muslim and Jewish critics of their respective philosophical traditions and, in Tillich's hands, Christian theology was always deeply philosophical in method and tenor--so much so that Paul Kurtz chose to include a chapter on Tillich in his 1966 "sourcebook" American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.

What interests me about Tillich's reply to his critics is the indirect light it sheds on certain aspects of the Islamic tradition and, in particular, upon Muslim pietism (i.e. tasawwuf). Indeed, I read Tillich's text as a superb introduction to what tasawwuf became as it moved from the "edge" of the ever-evolving tradition (a social, not geographical, location) to its "center" by the 12th century of the Common Era (for this use of the terms "edge" and "center" see Richard Bulliet's Islam: The View from the Edge).

Tillich began his lectures by defining his terms: the phrase "'biblical religion' stands for two things: divine revelation and human reception" (21). Where the latter aspect is concerned, "biblical religion belongs to the whole history of religion. Everyone who knows something about the historical settings of biblical religion knows how much they were influenced by the surrounding religions and how many analogies can be drawn between biblical and other religions" (ibid). What Tillich appears to be pointing towards here is the socio-historical and cultural contexts from which biblical literature emerged. Marshall Hodgson's notion of an Irano-Semitic civilizational complex relieves Tillich's conception of some of its inherent ambiguity, but more can be done. Biblical literature includes the Bibles that have come down to us from Jews and Christians (inclusive of canonical and extra-canonical materials as well as exegetical works on the same). As artifacts of the history of Ancient to Late Ancient Near Eastern religiosity, these texts are cousin to Mesopotamian locative epic (e.g., Gilgamesh) and Persian utopian prophecy (e.g., the teachings of Zarathustra). But they are more than that: for critical textual analysis has repeatedly demonstrated the "incestual" relations between and among these cousins. "Influence" is too weak a metaphor for the relationships that obtain.

As divine revelation, on the other hand, biblical religion purports to put human beings into an intimate relation with a non-human being and yet does so, as Tillich attests, in an indelibly personal way. The catalytic conflict of Tillich's book arises out of the apparent contradiction between Biblical "personalism" and the impersonal philosophical category of Being that Tillich derives from the Greeks--as substantially mediated (without direct acknowledgment) by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

For Tillich, these two aspects of biblical religion are not, in fact, contradictory but only apparently so; they stand in dialectical relationship to one another:

Wherever the divine is manifest, it is manifest in "flesh," that is, in a concrete, physical, and historical reality, as in the religious receptivity of the biblical writers. This is what biblical religion means. It is itself a highly dialectical concept. (5)

The impersonal philosophical category of Being invites "metaphysical speculation"--a phrase that Tillich dismisses as "black magic" (8). He wants to avoid metaphysical speculation and prefers to speak of "ontological analysis" which, in his usage, has the character of Husserlian phenomenology: "one has to look at things as they are given if one wants to discover the principles, the structures, and the nature of being as it is embodied in everything that is" (ibid).

This locution, however, suggests that "being" is something that is distinct from "everything that is"--a highly contestable claim.

In any event, it would seem that the distinction between "being" and "everything that is" has already been suggested by the title of this series of lectures: Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality--with "ultimate reality" as a synonym for "Being Itself."

Anyone who wishes to study this subject must first reconcile herself to the discomforting fact that it is the search itself that may be studied; "Being Itself," on the other hand, remains, paradoxically, both ready-to-hand as (Heidegger would say) and perennially elusive.

As mentioned above, it is as an unwitting introduction to tasawwuf or "Muslim pietism" that Tillich's book fascinates. I first began to read Tillich in the mid-1970's and often wondered how, or in what sense, he really functioned as a Christian theologian. His continued eccentricity in that role (his "edginess" in Bulliet's terms) is unfortunate in my view. Would that Tillich's evolving understanding of Christianity (and its place among the religions of the world) had become central to Christian thought and practice! But he was a man out of time. One can only speculate what creative course his thinking might have followed had he lived to converse with such University of Chicago luminaries of Islamic Studies as Marshall Hodgson and Fazlur Rahman.

Islam, no less than Christianity and Judaism, is biblical religion. The Qur'an and Hadith literature do not disqualify Islam from being part and parcel of biblical religion any more than the Mishnah and Talmuds disqualify Rabbinic Judaism from that distinction or the New Testament and decrees of Church councils or the writings of the Church Fathers disqualify Christianity.

Tasawwuf or Muslim pietism is the Islamic expression of the "search for Ultimate Reality" and, at the very heart of tasawwuf is tawhid: both the affirmation of the uniqueness and divinity of "Reality" or "Being Itself" and, at the same moment, the confession of one's desire to be made "whole" through some sort of "mystical" union with that unique and divine Reality. Tillich's statement that human beings belong to the power of being from which they are separated (12) sounds remarkably (or, perhaps, unremarkably) like statements one finds throughout the literature of Muslim pietism--from al-Junayd to al-Hallaj, from al-Qushayri to Jalaladdin Rumi, etc.

Indeed, a deep engagement with the literature of tasawwuf might well have enabled Tillich to resolve certain confusions in his thinking. For example, he insisted on the philosophical character of his "ontological analysis," distinguishing it from the "saint, prophet, and poet" by its thorough "cognitive function." At the same time, however, Tillich insisted that his philosophy was "existential"--a disposition he described as a "rare union of passion and rationality" (20). Had he been exposed to the work of the Egyptian philosopher A. R. Badawi (a near contemporary), he might well have reconsidered his position on the matter (see, e.g., Badawi's "Les points de recontre de la mystique musslmane et de l'Existentialisme" 27 Studia Islamica (1967), 55-76). Tillich's existential philosophical theology stands out like a white raven in Christian intellectual circles; among devotees of tasawwuf, however, it would have found both a corresponding tradition and community.

Unversed in the literature of tasawwuf, Tillich gamely attempted to "achieve a synthesis between ontology and biblical religion," i.e., to reinvent the wheel, as it were, and create a Christian version of tasawwuf from scratch (27). In order to accomplish this objective, he recognized that he had to reconcile the anthropomorphic biblical god with his own Hellenized conception of "Being as such." His Protestant pre-commitment to biblical religion, however, limited as it was to the canonical text of the Bible, put him at an immediate disadvantage: for YHWH/El is in many respects a trickster deity--one moment jealous and angry, loving and clement the next (30-31). This may be contrasted with Allah, on the other hand, who is not presented in Muslim sources with quite the same level of emotional volatility. Be that as it may, the "stumbling block" of personalism is present to all varieties of biblical religion: Tillich had his work cut out for him in any case.

The move that Tillich makes is predictable and yet fresh: for it reminds us of the organizing principle behind all theo-logizing: the marriage of the personal biblical god with the Greek notion of the Logos. The Johannine community of the primitive Jesus movement asserted the identity of theos and logos in the symbol of the Christ. Despite the problems that arise when such an assertion is applied to an historical personage (i.e., Rabbi Jesus), Tillich seized the opportunity that the Prologue to John's gospel presented him for creative thinking. The result was a Christology that bears a striking resemblance to Muslim Christologies of 'Isa ibn Maryamah, Kalamat Allahi wa Ruh Allahi wa 'l Masih (see especially the pioneering work of Mahmoud Ayoub and also Tillich, ibid., 38-39).

Indeed, I would argue that the gap between a Christology such as one finds in Paul Tillich (and possibly Hans Kung) and the Muslim Christologies articulated in tasawwuf differ not in kind but in scope. Muslims avoid speaking of "incarnation" (hulul) because of its association with a Christian dogma that, historically, divided Christians from Jews and Christians from one another. One of the goals of Muhammad's movement was to mitigate the effects of Christologically-driven sectarianism (see Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Harvard, 2010). At the same time, Muslim pietists wished to achieve a kind of "incarnationism" (call it "Divine manifestation" in the human being) through emulation of Prophetic example (the life of Muhammad) and "Christ-like" ascetic practices. Where Christian dogma elevates a single individual to Divine status (Rabbi Jesus), tasawwuf democratizes the Divine presence--though not without insisting that this "democratization" of the "franchise" be limited through a combination of meritorious effort and Divine grace.

A few years after delivering his lectures on Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, Tillich preached a sermon in which he argued that the Christian kerygma comes down to this: an invitation to "participate" in what he called "the New Being" which is "manifest" (I think it significant that he did not say "incarnated") in "Jesus who is called the Christ" (see Paul Tillich, The New Being, New York: Scribner's (1955), 18). Reading this sermon in the light of the study of Muslim pietism, one finds it difficult to distinguish Tillich's notion of the Christian kerygma--the possibility of participating in a New Being, an "ontological event" towards which one must direct "passionate and infinite longing" (19)--and the tawhidic teleology of tasawwuf.

At the Tillichian edge of Christian theology, biblical religion can find a balm for some of its self-inflicted wounds.