“But although the Logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.”
Heraclitus
Religious violence has been a consistent and pernicious part of our human life in recent years. Two and a half years ago, Catholic priest Jacques Hamel was killed by Islamic extremists in Normandy. Two weeks ago, fifty Muslims in New Zealand were killed by a white supremacist. Fr. Hamel is now on an accelerated course toward canonization. The victims of the Christchurch shooting are rightly remembered as paragons of faith, particularly as minority Muslims in the context of a Christian-slash-post-Christian New Zealand. In the midst of all this violence, many have asked why this latter-day wave of sectarian killing is ours to deal with. Some have entertained the idea that some groups are more or less “advanced” than others. Gary Gutting wrote a piece that blames Islam for being behind the times; his thesis has not aged well in the wake of Christchurch. But what about his presuppositions? To what extent must secular values influence the internal logic of religious groups?
Religion as a singular term is on its way out. Matt Hedstrom points out that “religion” doesn’t work as well as “religions” when your audience is pluralistic or secular. Particularity has sealed the fate of religion; no fair assessment of reality can point to a generic faith to which everyone belongs. Any religious perspective is a religious perspective, not the perspective. Even the Unitarians don’t have an inside position in the Ultimate Reality game. We must speak of religions and not religion.
But this is precisely the self-limiting problem against which Christians, Jews, Muslims, and everyone else must fight. Thickening the walls between faith traditions seems like an academically responsible act. After all, each faith has an integrity native to itself, and can’t be properly understood on the terms of another religious or secular perspective. But the question becomes: who pays for this wall? The tragedy of Fr. Hamel’s death is not tragic only for Catholics (who are rightly recognizing him a saint) nor for the secular champions of la République française. Fr. Hamel is a martyr for Catholicism and all of those who live religiously, who live with fidelity to the transcendent things in and beyond the world. Surely the vast majority of Muslims mourn for Fr. Hamel and all those who die faithful to their beliefs. Surely secular and religious cultures alike condemn violence and revere life.
The presocratic philosopher Heraclitus was on to something. About 2500 years ago, he wrote on the tension between a universal and a particular view of faith. In my tradition, the Logos, a force at once both spiritual and rational, is a universal aspect of human life. Nevertheless, it’s our universal human tendency to particularize the Logos. We don’t let it dwell beyond our understanding where it belongs, but instead compartmentalize it and claim it as our own (not yours).
Yes, Gutting is right that religions are different and interact with modernity in different ways. Yes, Hedstrom is right that religions are particular and can’t authoritatively claim to be the perspective from which other perspectives are judged. But while our modern interlocutors are proximately correct about the limits of religion, Heraclitus is substantively correct about the content of religion: to speak powerfully to the transcendence of life, the universal situation in which we all share. Such content is the point of religion and its unifying factor: in religion we can commonly mourn a death, work for justice, give ourselves completely to the task of compassion. In religions (secular and otherwise) we find our specific community. We live as if we had our own, private understanding of The Real, as if its home were always on our side of a big beautiful wall for which we didn’t pay.