What Adolf Grunbaum Taught Me

As an undergraduate Philosophy and Classics major at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1970's-early 1980's, I had the good fortune to take an honors seminar with Adolf Grunbaum on religion and science. Professor Grunbaum taught me many things in that seminar, not the least of which was how to read Freud both critically and appreciatively.

But the lesson that has been the most consistently useful to me in the decades since I took that class is one about the nature of scholarship: that it is a disciplined way of making sense of the world. Discipline involves asceticism--or, resistance to temptation. The scholar is one who resists the temptation to make claims about the world that lack adequate evidentiary warrant.

Of course, such an assertion requires further elaboration, for what constitutes evidentiary warrant for any given claim is subject to scholarly argument and dispute; and even where there is general agreement among scholars as to what constitutes evidence, there is still plenty of room to argue about what constitutes evidentiary adequacy. Grunbaum taught me to be sensitive to all of these vagaries of scholarship and many more besides.

In the end, scholarship involves the cultivation of habits of circumspection and reticence. Circumspection and reticence are the soul of scholarly tact.

The William James Problem

Throughout his writings, William James makes the (irrefutable) observation that faith is an ordinary part of human cognitive function. No one operates in the world on the basis of complete information. Instead, human beings rely heavily upon present sense data, past experience, reason and "common sense," in order to make judgments about how to proceed with their daily lives. Acting on the basis of this amalgam of information and interpretation involves assumptions about the reliability of all of its elements--in a word, "faith." For James, faith is very much a practical matter.

To this point, there is nothing problematic about James's thinking in this regard: he accurately describes ordinary human cognition and its attendant behaviors. An accurate description of cognitive behavior, however, is not the same thing as an epistemological justification of any given proposition. But James may be said to send mixed messages to students of religion who seek to move beyond the description of faith-in-action to a justification of that faith per se. One can always justify a particular instance of faith as an ordinary human response to a given situation--as one possible response among many. But that is a very limited notion of justification. It does not entitle one to conclude that faith as such is necessarily justified--only that it is practical. And yet this is precisely what many readers of James's writings on the psychology of religion claim that his thinking has authorized them to conclude. Is such a claim warranted? The answer may depend on what portion of James's work one reads (e.g., The Will To Believe may support this claim).

It is for this reason that I am often chary about the use of William James in the academic study of religion. I call this subtle slip from description to justification the "William James Problem" and, I am afraid, it is not a problem that we will be rid of any time soon.

Sacred Time, Sacred Space

Despite the fact that human beings often report experiencing "the sacred" or the Divine "break through" mundane time and space, such reports cannot be taken at face value. Human beings make time and space for that which they consider Divine or sacred. And there is no way to distinguish the construction of such time or space from the "event" which is said to occupy it.

The history of religions is the history of human subjectivity and its interpretation. It is through such interpretations that subjective experience is turned "inside out" as it were: made public via performances (verbal, physical). The residuum of these performances, where preserved, become artifacts--evidence of human activity, most certainly, but evidence of extra-human activity? This is something one can neither rule in or out.

The honest historian of religions cannot sing the old hymn "Glory, glory/Somebody touched me/Must have been the finger of the Lord" with any real conviction. She is denied the "first naivete," and Paul Ricoeur's "second naivete" isn't naivete at all: it is a consciously creative act, like midrash.

Religion is spilled poetry. It is a prayer-rug woven with impassioned intelligence, with "heart-sense," and put to daily use.

As the Romantics understood, "supernaturalism" is only natural.

From Spinoza Through Friedrich Schlegel To Wallace Stevens

In his "Talk On Mythology" (1799-1800), Friedrich Schlegel attempted to address the difficulty that the "modern poet" faces now that the scientific imagination has replaced the mythological one of "the ancients." This problem is analogous to that which faces the modern religious imagination: with the miraculous no longer credible, what is one to believe? It is a problem peculiar to Protestantism because of its emphasis upon belief, but all traditions are affected by this problem insofar as they depend upon the inculcated credulity of their adherents.

In response to the modern poet's dilemma, Schlegel proposed the invention of a new mythology developed from "that great phenomenon of our age," idealism. And yet, for Schlegel, it was an idealism that would give birth to "a new and infinite realism," one that "hover[ing] as it were over an idealistic ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the ideal and real."

Interestingly, Schlegel considered Spinoza the great exemplar of this idealistically generated realism--most likely because, in his Tractatus, Spinoza looked to Nature as the ultimate source of the imagination, and he regarded the imagination as the stuff of prophecy.

This kind of Spinozistic/Romantic naturalism would inform the philosophy of George Santayana who would influence, in turn, the 20th century American poet, Wallace Stevens. Stevens would posit a tension between "the imagination" and "reality," and the "whole of Harmonium" that issued from it would, ultimately, fulfill Schlegel's prediction of a "new" [Modernist] mythology. Moreover, with Stevens we encounter an Alfarabian turn from metaphysics to rhetoric and from sui generis religion to spilled poetry.

[Quotations from Schlegel's Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, State College, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press (1968), pp. 81-88].

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, And Our Fathers That Begat Us (Ecclesiasticus 44:1)

"Ethically, the historian is obligated to follow historical subject matter wherever it leads and to appreciate its own inherent values, even if those values clash with the value system of the historian. Historicism means the acceptance of the relativity of human life. It is the insight that humanity lives not at the behest of static being and absolute truth, but rather forges itself in a constant process of becoming in which individuals and institutions struggle over competing truths, each vying for its place in the sun" Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg writing on the legacy to historical studies of Ernst Troeltsch in The Bible in Modern Culture, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1995), 156-157.

Troeltsch was a key figure in the articulation of a modern historical consciousness. We neglect him at our peril.

A Tale of Three Cities (and Possibly Four...)

When elaborating what we might term his "eschatological" hope for a "coming contestation of religions" in chapter 6 of The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger imagines that the key players in this contestation/conversation will be those committed to religious transformation as an exoteric or public and world-historical phenomenon and those committed to religious transformation as an esoteric or private and trans-historical process. He identifies the former contestants with those who adhere to the religious traditions that arose in the ancient to late ancient Near East (the so-called "Abrahamic" triad of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and the latter are identified with those traditions that look to Mother India as their source (Hinduism and varieties of Buddhism). Why he ignored Confucianism and Daoism is not entirely clear, however, it probably had something to do with the impact of Indian religions upon the West in the 18th-20th centuries. In any event, Berger symbolized these two streams of religious thought and experience with reference to two cities:

Jerusalem

and Benares.

Now, the first thing that is to be noticed (and criticized) about this particular dichotomy is that neither of the religious tendencies represented can be adequately characterized as wholly "exoteric" on the one hand or wholly "esoteric" on the other. Berger acknowledges this unfortunate glossing of the evidence and reminds the reader that his intention in constructing these Weberian "types" is, as with all Weberian types, heuristic in nature, not exhaustively descriptive. He also contributes a shrewd historical observation: "...the conflict between the confrontational [exoteric] and the interiorized [esoteric] types of religious experience was carried on in the Islamic context with particular intensity--and also, to the benefit of later students of the matter, with particular sophistication. Indeed, if it was argued earlier in this book that Protestantism constitutes the paradigmatic case of the encounter between religion and modernity, one might argue that Islam constitutes a comparably paradigmatic case of the encounter between Jerusalem and Benares" (pp. 160-161).

It is important to notice here that Berger (quite refreshingly) managed to avoid the temptation to regurgitate the tiresome Western stereotype that pits a monolithic "Islam" against an equally monolithic "modernity." As a sophisticated student of both religion and modernity, Berger recognized that every tradition with pre-modern roots has struggled (and continues to struggle) with the implications of modernity--with Protestant Christianity having had the historical luck (or misfortune) to be positioned most squarely at the front. What Berger does not discuss in his otherwise very fine treatment of this issue is the crucial role of a third "city" in the gradual unfolding of what is, in fact, a world-historical drama:

Athens.

Ancient Athens, ironically. But it must be recalled that it was the "return" (as it were) of ancient Athens to European intellectual life (courtesy of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals) in the late Middle Ages that would spark the revival of humanism in Europe and, with it, the Renaissance as well as the Protestant and scientific revolutions. The first five chapters of The Heretical Imperative presume the critical importance of this third "city" in their treatment of the "contestation with modernity" (p. 160).

And so, it is a tale of three cities that Berger tells in a still thought-provoking book written roughly 35 years ago. Were the book to be written (or re-written) today, it would have to account--at minimum--for the criticisms that I have included in my last several blog posts. In addition, it might be useful to add a fourth city into the mix--if one were to indulge in a little prognostication:

Istanbul.

For it is from the heights of contemporary Istanbul, if anywhere on the planet, that one can take in view all three of Berger's cities. Istanbul, city of Auerbach: where Europe meets Asia, and where modernity and tradition come to dance.

The Coming Contestation of Religions

In his 1978 book The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger made a startling proposal: in light of the increasing level of religious pluralism in Western societies (including popular interest in Asian religions and the resurgence of Islam), Berger argued that the time had arrived for a new kind of religious conversation to begin to take place--one that would move beyond disinterested scholarship or even "the sort of dialogue that could be described as reciprocal antidefamation...Both of these two kinds of attention are certainly valid, even praiseworthy, but they are not contestation" in the sense he intended (Berger, THI, 151-152). Nor did he intend the "missionizing" of the adherents of one sect by another--a mode that he felt was "happily on the wane" in the late 1970's. Instead, for Berger, "Contestation means an open-ended encounter with other religious possibilities on the level of their truth claims. Put differently, one seriously engages another religion if one is open, at least hypothetically, to the proposition that this other religion is true. Put differently again, to enter into interreligious contestation is to be prepared to change one's own view of reality. Anything short of this, however valuable it may be (for scholarship, say, or for joint sociopolitical concerns, or just for an enlargement of cultural horizons), is less than the contestation called for by the present situation. It is this kind of contestation that is as yet in an embryonic phase" (152).

Notice that Berger did not stipulate that those who would engage in this type of conversation would do so prepared to change their religious affiliations or practices--although, I think it reasonable to assume that he would allow for such a possibility. But any such change would be wholly within a given individual's discretion, and would not be the objective of those who participate in the conversation. One can even imagine a scenario where one party, convinced of the "truth" of another party's religious tradition, would announce her decision to leave her own tradition for the other's--only to find herself in the odd position of having the other party attempt to dissuade her from making any such change! Most peculiar, but not out of the realm of possibility.

What Berger appears to have imagined the new religious pluralism in Western societies portended was a new relationship of religious individuals towards truth claims--that, mirabile dictu, religious individuals in the West had reached a new stage of intellectual maturity: one in which they would be willing to entertain the possibility that they embrace religious dogmas uncritically and, therefore, another religious tradition might prove to be more credible with respect to particular truth claims.

It is an interesting idea and one that merits further consideration; but it is also one that ignores the fact that, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine that, three and a half decades on, this kind of "contestation" is anywhere near the "embryonic" phase that Berger believed it to have been in the 1970's--much less a fully developed being waiting to be born.

I will explore these propositions further in future posts.