The Experiential Turn

The hero of Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative is the late 18th/early 19th century German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Berger favors Schleiermacher because of his emphasis upon religious experience (a reflection of his pietistic background) and his insistence that such experience involves a "consciousness of something beyond itself--indeed, so much beyond itself that the human subject feels himself to be utterly dependent on that other reality or being at the center of the experience" (THI, 122). Reading these passages can be frustrating insofar as they often appear to contain Berger's endorsement of what is, in essence, a theological claim, dressed up as scientific "induction." This is not to say, of course, that Schleiermacher ought not to have made this particular claim or that Berger, as a social scientist, is not permitted a theology. But the book is written in such a way that one must be very careful to distinguish Berger the sociologist from Berger the theologian.

On page 128, when Berger admits that inductive reasoning cannot "prove the truth claim of an alleged revelation in the way a natural science proves or validates its hypotheses. In that final sense, religious affirmations always entail faith," the reader breathes a sigh of relief. But the added qualification of "that final sense" suggests that there are other senses, penultimate ones perhaps, in which religious affirmations based upon an "inductive model" somehow escape the criticisms leveled against it by the proponents of what Berger had earlier termed the "reductive possibility" (pp. 87-113). That latter position (represented in THI by Rudolf Bultmann), is resisted in the book because it does not allow religious experience a sui generis ontological validity--a religious sine qua non for Berger. The author's theological pre-commitments in this regard somewhat undermine his credibility--which is a shame--because the reader may become discouraged and neglect to contemplate Berger's most interesting notion: that of a "coming contestation of religions."

I will return to this notion in a future post.

The Worm In Berger's Heretical Apple

Sometime in the late 1990's--probably around 1998--I re-read (after two decades) Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, and found it as stimulating as when I had first read it as a college freshman. I was moved to write Professor Berger a brief note of appreciation. To my surprise, he wrote back: thanking me for my interest in the book and its subject (succinctly expressed by its subtitle: "Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural"). He confessed that he had always felt a personal affection for the book--despite its relative lack of success with the reading public. He added, significantly (I think), that the only book of his (on that topic) for which he had an even greater regard was The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)--the book he had published in the year I first read Angels. This remark sent me out to the library in order to read and compare the two books. I found myself in agreement with the author and, of the two, it is THI to which I repeatedly return.

That said, THI is not without its problems. The deepest and most troubling from my perspective is a persistent inconsistency with Berger's earlier work with Thomas Luckmann on the sociology of knowledge. Their co-authored book, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), presents a compelling case for the proposition contained in its title: that what we take to be the true state of things is not an unmediated given but, rather, the product of tacit (and rarely conscious) agreements with the socio-cultural context in which we are embedded. In other words, "reality" is, in fact, a social construction.

Berger does not exactly abandon this position in THI, but throughout the later book he makes statements such as the following: "...truth is always its own warrant...consequently, that which has imposed itself as truth by its own force will not be voided by subsequent discoveries of truth" (Berger, 170, emphasis added). By endowing "truth" with agency in this manner, Berger implies that human beings are the passive recipients of "truth" and not its active co-authors. Given his Eliadean assertions throughout THI that sui generis religious experience is a coherent category, one can understand why Berger might have wished to distance himself from his earlier social constructivism; but if he did wish to do so, he should have come clean and admitted as much. The implication that we can genuinely experience "the sacred" as a sui generis phenomenon may lend Berger's argument greater persuasive force with some readers, but it is an argument that has very little purchase with anyone today in the academic study of religion. It is the worm in Berger's heretical apple and is probably the most compelling reason that THI is not accorded the prominence that I (for one) think it deserves within the field. I will elaborate on why I think that Berger's book deserves to be regarded as a religious studies classic with "legs" (i.e., with continuing relevance to the academic study of religion) in future posts.

The Heretical Imperative Revisited

Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative, though somewhat dated, remains, for me, an important meditation upon modernity and the effect it has had upon "contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation."

Berger defines the "heretical imperative" as a response to modernity, one of the most salient features of which is the bewildering array of choices (including religious choices) that confront human beings in the post-medieval period:

"In premodern situations there is a world of religious certainty, occasionally ruptured by heretical deviations. By contrast, the modern situation is a world of religious uncertainty, occasionally staved off by more or less precarious constructions of religious affirmation. Indeed, one could put this change even more sharply: For premodern man, heresy is a possibility--usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative" (Berger, THI, 25).

I was more persuaded by this argument when I first read the book over a decade ago than I am now. I think it an accurate depiction of the state of modernity as it existed in the United States in the mid-to-late 1970's when Berger wrote the book. I sense, however, that the window of religious choice that the sociologist of religion found himself confronting has, since then, narrowed considerably.

I don't believe that this narrowing of choice is unique to human religiosity either. Instead, it strikes me that all choices--insofar as they represent genuine alternatives to the existing status quo--have become less and less prevalent. Indeed, I am beginning to think that we inhabit a stage of modernity (some may wish to name it "postmodernity") in which the freedoms enjoyed by previous generations of moderns are being relinquished by a generation that is desperate for security and, as such, desires a world that promises greater certainty. Religious certainty provides a kind of security (illusory, I would argue) that an economy founded upon war-without-end and an environment stressed by massive climactic changes simply cannot deliver. Consequently, religious fundamentalisms prosper and traditionalism (which is not the same as fundamentalism) experiences a resurgence. The big loser in this new religious environment is precisely what Berger had so confidently posited but 35 years ago: "the heretical imperative."

I will have more to say about this subject in future posts.

The Academic Study of Religion as the Fashioning of Counter-Narratives

The evolution of the academic study of religion is a fascinating one for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the manner in which religious studies has developed a genealogy of its own development as a modern intellectual project. In the process, the very notion of "religion" itself has come under intense scrutiny and historical contextualization. The result is that much of the work product of scholars of religion consists in the construction of counter-narratives: to prevailing prejudices, dogmatism (a sophisticated form of prejudice), and what is generally termed "common knowledge" (typically a witches brew of unexamined assumptions, hearsay, intuition, and speculation).

Religion is a subject concerning which most people hold opinions--often very strong opinions--to which they have arrived, however, without having engaged in the kind of thoughtful investigation that they would ordinarily apply to other important aspects of their lives: say, for example, the purchase of a new car or flat-screen T.V.

If scholars of religion can be faulted for anything, it is that we tend to "over-think" our subject--stumbling over minutia that the average, reasonably educated individual either fails to see or fails to find worthy of a moment's consideration. In that way, perhaps, we offer some compensation for the general lack of appropriate attention accorded to our subject. What would be far better, however, is the incorporation of religious studies as an integral part of a "general education"--that it would assume its rightful place among the intellectual tools available to any (and every) citizen of a functioning democracy.

Of course, the first problem in the opening decades of the 21st century has been to locate and identify functioning democracies...

From Marx to Brown to Alfarabi

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Karl Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach never fails to stir the utopian eschatologist in me; at the same time, however, it always leaves something to be desired. I cannot help but wonder what might have happened to the Left, historically, if interpretation had not been so easily dismissed as antithetical to change in this foundational call to Leftist action.

Of course, one may argue that the New Left and its post-modern progeny fell so deeply in love with theory that, for them, a world well-theorized is itself a world turned upside down--so never mind the barricades, they are obsolete. It is one thing to know your Marx and Engels, another thing to live what you know.

Praxis was always supposed to be theoretically informed political action. When praxis fails to deliver the desired results, we ask ourselves: "What went wrong?" What we usually want to know when we ask this question is: "How did we fail to follow the theory?" Occasionally, we ask: "How has the theory failed us?" In both cases, failure prompts us to find a way to assign blame. And blame is assigned, the world turns and, yet, stays the same.

Frustrated by this repetitious state of affairs, Norman O. Brown turned to Freud. It was clear to Brown that we are all mysteries to ourselves and that Freud (perhaps following Nietzsche) knew it. Brown wanted to break out of the cycle of praxis-failure-blame-praxis and he felt that the only way to exit that merry-go-round was to crack the code of the human heart.

It was an ambitious project from the start: one that led Brown on a fascinating odyssey through heterodox varieties of Christian mysticism to Islamic studies and beyond. The tragedy of this quest was that Brown had to pursue it alone. His allies on the Left (including his old friend Herbert Marcuse, for instance) were unwilling to entertain the possibility that Brown might be on to something important.

Brown was on to something important: indeed, in his Islamic studies he had instinctively found his way to the source of an alternative praxis--one that recognizes the critical position of the "heart" (human desire) for politics. Unfortunately for Brown, when he was investigating the history of Muslim thought, Western scholarship on Alfarabi was still trapped in the euro-centric view that falsafah was nothing more than Greek "philosophy" in Arabic dress. Consequently, Brown could not see that Alfarabi, by "liberat[ing] statesmanship from the tutelage of philosophy" and making politics "an autonomous sphere, like medicine," had laid the groundwork for a sense of the political that Brown would try to imagine (roughly 1,000 years later) as "metapolitics" (see Christopher Colmo, Breaking With Athens: Alfarabi As Founder, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (2005), 167-168).

Beginning with Love's Body, Brown attempted to make the move from politics to metapolitics. In this move, he had a potential ally in Kojeve (whom he had read). But without the mediation of Alfarabi, the necessary connections could not be made.

A Neglected Genius

The man who has not experienced the fear of death does not know that the given natural World is hostile to him, that it tends to kill him, to destroy him, and that it is essentially unsuited to satisfy him really. This man, therefore, remains fundamentally bound to the given World. At the most, he will want to "reform" it--that is, to change its details, to make particular transformations without modifying its essential characteristics. This man will act as a "skillful" reformer, or better, a conformer, but never as a true revolutionary. Now, the given World in which he lives belongs to the (human or divine) Master, and in this World he is necessarily Slave. Therefore, it is not reform, but the "dialectical," or better, revolutionary, overcoming of the World that can free him, and--consequently--satisfy him. Now, this revolutionary transformation of the World presupposes the "negation," the non-accepting of the given World in its totality. And the origin of this absolute negation can only be the absolute dread inspired by the given World, or more precisely, by that which, or by him who, dominates this World, by the Master of this World.

Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1980), 29.

The Academic Study of Religion: Laying the Foundation for the Next Great [Political] Awakening

As God's unruly friends are painfully aware, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Of course, the same could be said (and ought to be said) about patriotism and, frankly, any other ideological loyalty.

What distinguishes ideology from mere ideas is its supposed self-evidence. Consequently, one of the primary tasks in the non-sectarian academic study of religion is to revive students from the stupor that overtakes their minds when drinking from religion's ideological waters of Lethe--a form of "refreshment" that many of them consume quite liberally from childhood on. As this "awakening" occurs--what is really a coming to self-consciousness--the basic principle must be established: religion is not so much the problem as is operating in one's daily life on auto-pilot. That is the real enemy. For a person to be "educated," i.e., to have attained an acceptable level of active intelligence, the mind must run on all cylinders. And once the practice of awakening the mind is acquired in the study of religion, the student must learn to extend that practice to other areas of thought and life--not least of which is the political.

It is, in fact, in this way that the academic study of religion contributes to the construction of democratic selves and the aspiration towards democracy that, one hopes, will someday infect the general population of the United States as it appears to have infected populations in other parts of the world (Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Sudan, etc.). But we are a long way from the dawning of that happy day and there is much, much work to be done in the meantime.