The trouble with religion

The trouble with religion is that it is many things, that it can be understood in many different ways, so it is very difficult to say anything unequivocal about it. This applies to religion in general, and to specific religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Recently I quoted some unequivocal remarks of a negative nature which Ernest Renan made about Islam (see 'Europe and Islam'). This 19th-century historian of religion and Semitic languages had an unfortunate penchant for rhetorical excess and did not restrict his negative remarks to Islam. He referred to the Pentateuch (the early books of the Old Testament) as "the first code of religious terrorism in history." Though he did praise certain later books of the Hebrew Bible, in which he saw the beginnings of a new, purified religion, I doubt that he had many Jewish friends. (Or any Muslim ones!)

One reason why it is difficult to talk in a sensible way about religion relates to semantics. Any common noun is defined by use - it does not necessarily have a meaning which it is possible to define precisely. I won't go into the intricacies of this idea, which Wittgenstein elaborated in his later writings, because I think it is relatively uncontroversial and really quite simple. We tend to think sometimes that, if there is a word, there should be a precise concept 'behind' that word. But this is not so. Think of the word 'game', and the numerous activities that may be described as games, from football to solitaire. What essential features do they have in common?

Likewise with religion: the traditions we call religions or denominations can be very different from one another and don't necessarily share an essential element. For example, there is a world of difference between someone who identifies as a liberal Protestant and who doesn't commit to any specific doctrines, and an evangelical Christian who believes in the literal truth of the book of Genesis, etc.

Another problem is that religion is intensely personal and bound up with self-image and identity. So an attack on a particular religion or set of beliefs can be (felt as) an attack on a person or people, though it is not meant as such.

The situation here is not dissimilar to that involving strongly held political views, and indeed some ideologies operate in a similar way to religions.

I have a broadly scientific view of the world in that I think the only justified beliefs are those for which there is empirical evidence of some kind. I recognize, however, that we have a propensity - maybe even a need - to believe things which go beyond reason and evidence.

Renan, for instance, valued science and renounced the idea of a personal God and all religious dogmas, but he retained a strong belief in something very like what Christians call providence. In a striking image, he compares us to operators at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, weaving the reverse side of a tapestry we do not see. This belief in the benevolent 'Machiavellianism' of nature leads to a sense of acceptance, a Stoic commitment to conform to nature's purpose. Like Hegel and other idealists, he believed that humanity is moving forward towards perfection through a succession of imperfect forms. Renan was astute enough, however, to see that human progress is no simple, straightforward matter, and spoke of 'oscillations', each advance being followed by a temporary setback.

In my view, Renan was right to reject dogmatic and institutional religion and to value science. But his metaphysical beliefs about nature's purpose, etc., while not incompatible with science and reason, strike me as wishful thinking, a comforting fantasy.

Europe and Islam

I have been reading Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell's account of post-World War 2 immigration and the resurgence of 'political Islam'. Caldwell makes the point that, until the latter part of the 20th century, Europeans had little praise for either Islam or Islamic civilization. The views of Ernest Renan, a philologist and historian of religion, were typical.

On March 29, 1883, Renan gave a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled 'L'Islam et la science'. "Those liberals," he said, "who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror.... But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong."

Of course, Islam has no monopoly on religious terror and hypocrisy, and arguably the Christian churches followed a similar pattern. The difference is that the Christian churches came to a fruitful and abiding accommodation with the rising secular culture in which they were embedded, preventing any "seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal", and allowing a space for notions of privacy and individual freedom.

By contrast, Islam - as it is all too often understood and practised - attempts to control every aspect of life and to bring not only individual and social behavior but also laws and government institutions into line with Koranic precepts.

For various reasons, Western populations generally took a benign view of Islam in the post-World War 2 era. One reason for this was post-imperial and post-fascist guilt; another was what Caldwell refers to as "an accident of history":

" ... In the 1950s, Arab nationalism, of the sort practised by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the Ba'athist leaders of Syria and Iraq, was the main political force coming out of the Muslim world. It was driven largely by people who wanted to break theology's stranglehold on Muslim societies. Even if Arab nationalism was a threat, a young man ready to leave his nation to work in a mill in Belgium was unlikely to embody it. Europe's Arab and other Muslim newcomers could be assumed the most secular and modern of their countrymen, with a vocation to act as Europeans. Indeed, photos of groups of Moroccans and Turks newly arrived on Rotterdam's docks or in Rhineland train stations show clean-shaven men in conservative jackets and ties.

But right around the time immigrants began arriving in Europe en masse, a global resurgence of political Islam was beginning. It is now in full swing."

Those "clean-shaven men in conservative jackets and ties" no doubt felt great respect for European traditions and values. They were not to know that those very traditions and values would soon be under threat, from external forces, certainly, but also - and more importantly - because the Europeans themselves were losing faith in those values. In effect, Europeans had ceased to love and cherish their own civilization.

Jesus the Greek

Ernest Renan... Nassim Taleb (whom I have written about recently) is a fan of his. Friedrich Nietzsche was most decidedly not.

Renan was a seminarian who famously renounced his Roman Catholic faith to become a leading scholar of Semitic languages and a literary celebrity in 19th century France. Much of his fame was due to the spectacular success of his Life of Jesus which rejects the miraculous but which betrays a continuing religious sensibility built around philosophical idealism and a sentimental attachment to the figure of Jesus. For Renan (as one of his biographers put it) religion was expelled from the front door but came in again through the back. Nietzsche saw Renan's perspective as not only religious, but priestly.

Renan had a deep knowledge not only of the languages of the Holy Land but also of its geography and he traveled widely in the region with his beloved sister while researching the Life. What he has to say about the ethnic background of Jesus of Nazareth is interesting, though it probably says more about the (relatively mild?) anti-Semitism of Renan's cultural milieu than about historical reality. There was a great vogue at the time for all things Indo-European, and, though Renan saw the Indo-European and the Semitic peoples as "the two great races which, in one sense, have made humanity [read: European civilization] what it is," he is not altogether even-handed in his treatment of these two traditions. Clearly, Renan is ever-so-slightly uncomfortable with a Jewish Jesus, and the infinite delicacy with which he expresses himself on this matter is nothing short of comical.

He points out that, at the time of Jesus' birth, the population of Galilee was racially diverse and "there were many who were not Jews (Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, and even Greeks)." Since many of these non-Jews converted to Judaism, it is impossible, asserts Renan, to "ascertain what blood flowed through the veins of him who has contributed most to efface the distinctions of blood amongst mankind."