Christianity versus Religion

Does truth matter?

The relationship of religion to truth is not transparent; we have been working on the question since the beginning of this year. The issue became thematic for many this month, as Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, long a public atheist and fierce critic of her birth religion of Islam, wrote online of her conversion to Christianity. Her explanation was twofold: her respect for liberal traditions as a heritage of historic Christendom, and her sense of a need for meaning in life, partially personal and existential, but largely based on dismay at the nihilism she perceives as the consequence of post-Christian anomie, which for her not only contributes to existential emptiness, but also saps away the will to defend the liberal traditions she sees as a Christian heritage.

As a matter of logic, neither of those positions necessitates or even fully justifies conversion to Christianity, though of course neither precludes such conversion. The responses, however, from religious believers and from atheists alike, have largely revolved around two issues: belief and truth. Whatever other values may have attracted Hirsi Ali, this focus surely is a heritage of historic Christianity. For it is largely due to Christianity that much of everyday modern humanity takes the most basic value of religion to be its truth value, such that doxxing a religion as false should be decisive. This has long been the position of most Christians and virtually every village atheist, even those of the global village – and, of course, we all remain familiar with “truth” as triumphalist self-assertion or the racking up of controversialist trophies, which abides in abundance on all sides of the dispute. The engagement with a deeper sense of truth is less apparent.

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But does religion even have to be about truth? The claims of the psalmist against the gods of the nations, or of the prophets against the Baals, would seem to demand as much. Yet Israel’s God, though indeed the God, was still the God of Israel, and Jewish commentator Zohar Atkins deftly deploys the Book of Ruth in defense of his thesis: Religion is Social – Wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God.

And Socrates (and by extension, Plato) are indeed critical of Greek religion – but its truth value seems less the issue, than its moral disvalue. As for Aristotle, witness the confusion that breaks out when one seeks to discuss his views on religion. He is treated as a conventional Greek polytheist (Étienne Gilson, in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), a respectful adherent of a more enlightened traditional religiosity (Richard Bodéüs, in Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals), a demythologizer whose hope is, through religion, to draw seekers to the true light of philosophy (Mor Segev, in Aristotle on Religion), and even (admittedly at a less scholarly level, and with evident bias) online, by secular humanist organizer Austin Cline, as a proto-atheist.

Although only in passing and with little imputation of import, Segev brings out a critical point, the significance of which extends well beyond Aristotle; he notes, as a difficulty in discussing his theme, that Ancient Greek had no word for religion. And here Aristotle is particularly instructive, for he does both discuss and clearly approve epimeleia ta hiera, “custody of the sacred,” in the sense of a department of the polis, a sort of governmental Ministry of Worship. Segev (like many others over time) wrestles with why Aristotle, who holds the cults (threskaiae) of the gods in disdain, would endorse such an institution; he does not explicitly question (nor does Gilson, who catalogues specific instances) why Aristotle, despite his contempt for the myths of Olympus, participated in them by acts of eusebeia (piety).

Perhaps the matter is simpler than it looks. What if Aristotle’s personal acts of piety, or even Greek piety per se, were not even notionally or hypocritically related to truth, but were (as epimeleia ta hiera seems to imply) acts of citizenship, a participation in the life of the polis? After all, most of us, barring a few obstinate fanatics, continue to pay our taxes even when we disapprove of state policies.

Consider that religion may have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with transcendent truth or spiritual experience, and everything to do with the forces that bind a society together. Given this, someone might find the religion of the polis regrettable, inferior to the religion of another polis or of some foreign kingdom, and yet no more abandon that religion than he would abandon the polis itself. After all, would a citizen abandon the polis on account of its bad soil, mediocre dramatists, or unstable climate?—no more would he abandon the polis over its religion, for his persistence in the latter is nested in his commitment to the former. Conversely, Ruth’s acceptance of the God of Israel is consequent on her abandonment of Moab out of love for Naomi.

The works of Marcus Terentius Varro, the great Roman polymath of the Republican era, to Cicero (as recounted by Augustine) “unquestionably the acutest of all men, and, without any doubt, the most learned,” have largely been lost. We do have, through Augustine, a meaningful summary of his thought on religion, which apparently brought to the fore and made thematic the very issues we are here considering.

Varro considered three forms of religion: the mythical religion of the ignorant, lodged in the theater, superstitious and vulgar, if elevated somewhat by the verse of the poets; the natural or “physical” religion of the philosophers, intellectually interesting and generally morally uplifting but as contentious and esoteric as the philosophers themselves (all three-hundred-odd schools of them, as he notes ruefully, their doctrines replete with “things, which men's ears can more easily hear inside the walls of a school than outside in the Forum”); and finally civic religion, a happy and judicious blend of the two, well suited to dampen the excesses of popular superstition and emotionalism and of philosophical esotericism and contentiousness… and, by the way, highly conducive to support of the state and to the maintenance of public order. Augustine contended that this subservience to the state and public order was, for Varro, the actual point and goal of religion. Though some contemporary scholars dispute this, there is no disputing that the Caesars found it so.

Looking around ourselves, we have reason to believe that the Caesars were on to something – something perhaps deeper than they knew. Left to itself, religion in general tends to gravitate much more toward social and cultural cohesion than toward truth. This may seem odd for, as already noted, the name of truth is cried from the mountaintops in many denominations and traditions. Many earnest secular contemporaries take this seriously, bemoan how conflicts at home and abroad are rooted in religion, and imagine a peaceful world freed of convictions and belief systems; I think this humane impulse a bit like that of the animal lover who wished that the carriage would stop chasing the horse so aggressively and let it rest. In truth, truth is irrelevant to most such truth claims, and even where truth claims are strongest, much of the language (Elijah to the prophets of Baal, most obviously) sounds more like trash talk than theology. After all, belonging (at least among us primates) is a primal instinct, purely estimative, long preceding humanity, truth, reason and the vis cogitativa.

But what of the searching glance into ultimate questions, into the meaning of things, into the transcendent and absolute, which leaves us thirsting, as by it we are drawn and led? Such transcendent-minded religion resembles the “physical religion” of Varro (and, not coincidentally, pure science) in its instantiation of what Max Weber called theoretical rationality, a category indispensable to science which originates in religion. However much or little this rationality is supplemented by supernatural revelation is immaterial, as the designation speaks to the disposition of seeking ultimate reality, rather than the data set upon which we base our seeking. Of course, most of what passes for debate today is argument about first principles, about which data set is worth following – which does not subject itself to theoretical rationality at all well. Yet this kind of transcendent “physical religion,” in common with all practices of theoretical rationality, faces a challenge.

Making religion about transcendent truth (and keeping it about transcendent truth) is hard – it requires a level of discipline, focus, and studiousness which is not to be presumed upon in the believer – even if the believer in question is oneself. And, as Varro noted, such truth is by no means likely to find welcome among the powers that be, nor much uptake in the marketplace. Besides, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in a talk entitled “The Truth of Christianity,” noted, “natural theology’s concern is the ‘nature of the gods’… while the other two theologies address the divina instituta hominum; the divine institutions of men.”—rendering the first speculative, while the latter two are distinctly practical.

Ratzinger then states the decisive point: “[W]ithout the minimum hesitation, Augustine sets Christianity in the sphere of ‘physical theology’,” identifying this impulse with the testimony of Justin Martyr and the 2^nd Century Apologists. He goes on to draw this series of remarkable conclusions:

“Christian faith is not based on poetry and politics, these two great sources of religion, but on knowledge. It venerates the Being at the foundation of everything that exists, the ‘true God’. In Christianity, rationality became religion and was no longer its adversary. For that to happen, for Christianity to see itself as the victory of myth-removal, the victory of knowledge and, with that, of truth, it had to consider itself as universal and be brought to all the peoples, not as a specific religion repressing others by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders the apparent superfluous. And it is that which, despite the wide-ranging tolerance of polytheisms, must have been intolerable, but must have been seen as an enemy of religion, even as ‘atheism’. It was not founded on the relativity and on the convertibility of images. So, above all, it disturbed the political utility of religions and it thus undermined the foundations of the State in which it did not wish to be a religion among the others but the victory of intelligence over that world of religions.”

Writer Annie Dillard sees the same phenomenon, with decidedly mixed feelings: “Christianity and science, which on big issues go hand in hand intellectually as well as historically, everywhere raised the standard of living and cut down on the fun. Everywhere Christianity and science hushed the bushes and gagged the rocks. They razed the sacred groves, killed the priests, and drained the flow of meaning right off the planet. They built schools; they taught people to measure and add, to write, and to pray to an absent God. The direction of recent history is toward desacralization, the unhinging of materials from meaning.”

Of course, Ratzinger sees the hinge connecting materials to meaning as the Incarnation; Dillard (a practicing Catholic, at the time she wrote the above passage) is looking for the materials to acquit themselves, as even the titles of some of her works testify (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm – this latter the name of a “missing link” between matter and spirit postulated by some Gnostic sects). As for meaning itself, Ratzinger, both in his life before the papacy and as Benedict XVI, repeatedly characterized Christianity as the religion of the Logos. Like so much of his oeuvre, this title is easily misappropriated – Christ the Logos, to be sure and in the primary sense, but also the Logos as the word of truth, and thus as the bond to the “natural” religion of the philosophers which Varro disparaged, so long ago.

The application of all this to Ayaan Hirsi Ali – a new Christian, a modern person, and one born into an Islamic culture – is minimal; given the conditions of her life, the formation of her mind, and the newness of her faith (for it would be ungenerous and uncharitable to name it otherwise), her embrace of a civic Christianity is, if a fault at all, among the most excusable. The procession of many public Christians toward a civic Christianity (or, worse, toward a mythic Christianity), which is apparent in some of the published responses to her conversion, is another matter. But that – and the reaction from some of her atheist friends which I would be tempted to call charitable, at the risk of offending their sensibilities – is something to which I will have to return, when I post again.