True Ancestor

"Be more stupid and you will feel better."

 
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, 1632-1677

Paul Mendes-Flohr is providing a fascinating look at Jweish memory and Jewish history in his class on the topic. The reading begins (chronologically) with Spinoza, often referred to as "the first modern Jew," and continues through the 20th century, emphasizing the flourishing of Jewish historiography that began with Spinoza's Biblical criticism and flowered with Mendelssohn and the Berlin Haskalah. The idea of the class is to try to gain a better understanding and fuller appreciation of how Jewish memory and Jewish historiography have been shaped by Biblical and prophetic models of memory and progress; how those models contributed to Enlightenment thinking and then circled back to separate Jewish historical consciousness from Jewish religious memory.

Professor Mendes-Flohr has even brought in that great "Jewish" thinker Friederich Nietzsche, who, while often cited as inspiration for the rise of Fascism and Nazism, also warned of the weaknesses of the "monumental" view of history he espoused. In Professor Mendes-Flohr's words (from the lecture notes he freely shares), Nietzsche understood that this view of history could result in "a frenzy of fanaticism, and [encourage] visionary hotheads and plain scoundrels to destroy empires, assassinate princes, ignite wars and revolutions." In Nietzsche's own words (from his essay, On the Uses and Abuses of History), if monumental history -- built around exemplary historical figures and their heroic deeds -- is placed in the hands of "talented egoists and wild crowds of evil rascals, then empires are destroyed, leaders assassinated, wars and revolutions instigated."

Nietzsche, of course, was not Jewish, and is tarred with the brush of being the preferred philosopher of the Nazis. Here, however, is what he said about the Jews in Human, All Too Human:

As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.  In spite of that, I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more neutral, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek.

  

Friederich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

Nietzsche walked the line between brilliance and insanity until he fell off on the wrong side. But that's not my point. My point is that Jewish memory, as enshrined in the Bible and affirmed by the rabbis, kept Jewish memory apart from critical historical consciousness, even as Jews were kept apart from the broad stream of history. This had a remarkably profound and lasting effect on the way Jews remember things, and on what we consider progress to be. For millennia, Jewish memory was pegged to seminal events in Jewish history, and circumscribed the same mnemonic circle over and over again: every calamity was a reminder of the Temple's destruction, every victory was an Exodus.

Even now, today, we see ourselves -- don't we? -- as burdened by an enormous individual and collective responsibility to do well, get it right, be the rising tide that lifts all boats, and to remember and redress injustice. This kind of thinking isn't limited to Jews, but it is, to a very large extent, the result of Biblical imperative and rabbinic law, and the ways in which these informed Christian thought. As Enlightenment thinking pulled philosophy away from religion, "talented egoists" cherry-picked philosophy for ideas that could foment radical change and wholesale destruction.

Which isn't to say that talented egoists didn't or don't exist in the religious sphere. It's to say that our memory and history are inflected with -- messianic hopes! We remember our own and society's failures, and we work to try to help everything and everyone progress toward an Event or Goal that, in the back of our minds if nowhere else, is ultimately redemptive. As the historian Nathan Rotenstreivch said, Jewish history is "a synthesis between meaning and reality."

 
Nathan Rotenstreich, 1914 - 1993. This is the cover of the "Bibliography of the Writer Nathan Rotenstreich"

It's stimulating to read and think about history and memory -- especially when you're old enough to have a little of the former, and to start losing a little of the latter (thereby appreciating it all the more). But I wonder: what good does it do? At the end of the day, what have you got? Perhaps all this cerebrating and remembering overheated poor Nietzsche's brain. After all, he was reportedly counseled to chill out: "Be more stupid," his colleague Immermann told him, "and you will feel better."

I am fascinated to be discovering how deeply Jewish my thinking is, despite my deeply un-Jewish upbringing; amazed to understand how we are all -- even, perhaps especially the most strident atheists -- wired to think like good little messianists: there's an ultimate state at which things should arrive, and we must help get our world to that state.

"Be more stupid and you will feel better." These immortal words should be inscribed at the gates of every university and library, in order to scare away the meek, the dilettantish and the sensible.

But they haven't scared me yet.

--T.A.

The Ivory Tower meets the Security Barrier

One of the benefits of being a student at a leading university is the opportunity, almost any given day of the week, to benefit from the wisdom, even brilliance, of others: to see movies, hear lectures, attend seminars, visit museums and just plain ol' bump into people who can teach you a great deal.

And it's not always purely academic. Such was the case yesterday, when I went to a presentation by Amos Gil, former executive director of Ir Amim (City of Peoples; City of Nations), a nonprofit "civil society" group working for a "sustainable political future for the city of Jerusalem." In its "City of Peoples" aspect, Ir Amim is concerned with the needs of Israelis and Palestinians "on the ground" -- people who need services, decent housing, ingress and egress, and the ability to go to sleep at night in their own beds without fearing for their lives or their homes. In its "City of Nations" aspect, the organization is concerned with the political challenges of Jerusalem as a city comprised of some 250,000 Palestinians (about 30 per cent of the total Jerusalem population), a city in which some live in squalor and some in splendor, and a city in which previously segregated neighboroods are becoming increasingly diverse, which presents challenges of its own (more on that below).

In his presentation, Gil was pragmatic, non-ideological, extremely clear and concise, well informed, and realistic. He gently but firmly deflected questions of an ideological bent, defused emotion and corrected popular misconception.

Most important, he gave a roomful of (mostly) American students a thorough and detailed look at the geographical, cultural and political complexities of the city of Jerusalem as a capitol city -- one he hopes will in the not-too-distant future be the capital of two sovereign states -- as an administrative entity, as an interlocking system of neighborhoods, as a security challenge, a collection of holy sites, and as a profound urban planning challenge.

He began by asking those in attendance how they would define "East Jerusalem." Fortunately, the first person called on gave what Gil said was the best definition he'd ever gotten from an audience: "That portion of Jerusalem that was under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, and which came under Israeli conrol after the 1967 war." What he was after was probably the description we so often hear on news broadcasts: "Arab East Jerusalem." The reality, with East Jerusalem as with the rest of the city, is far more complex. One of the largest complexities is that East Jerusalem is home to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who became permanent residents (possessed of all civil rights of Israel, other than the right to vote, and not obligated to serve in the Israeli army) when, in 1988, King Hussein of Jordan relinquished all his country's historical claims to the city. The Palestinians in East Jerusalem are citizens of the city, but of no nation.

Gil's presentation focused on the geopolitical complexities that arose in the years after the Second Intifada, which began in September of 2000. In four and a half years, more than 1,500 Israelis were killed in suicide attacks, about one third of those in West Jerusalem. In response, the Sharon government launched plans to build what Gil said is best described as "the security barrier." The government insisted the barrier was not a play for land, but a last resort to enhance security and keep civilians from getting killed in terror attacks. By defining the area contained within the barrier as "Greater Jerusalem," Sharon put an undeniable political lens over all future maps of the city.

Gil said, protestations of the government notwithstanding, the barrier's route showed a clear political agenda: in hilly country, it tends to occupy high ground. It extends, in the South, to the edge of the large concentration of Palestinians around Bethlehem, and, in the North, to the edge of Ramallah. In so doing, it carves out a wider area for the expansion of the population of Jerusalem -- especially the Jewish population.

Gil said ir Amim understands the rationale behind these measures. As a "civil society" group, its area of focus is not so much what was done, as how it was done, and the ramifications, for ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, not only now, but for all efforts at urban planning and management, and conflict resolution, going forard. The process for determining that a barrier would be built, and for determining that barrier's route, created harsh divisions and unescapable new realities in which the citizens being affected could not participate. It forced the segregation and isolation of many communities, and made others the subject of fierce competition behind ideologically oriented groups of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Furthermore, the barrier's defensive strength in limiting suicide attacks is also its weakness: the wall creates a barrier from behind which rockets can easily be launched. Perhaps suicide bombings will be less common, but the barrier may have facilitated other, equally terrible kinds of attacks.

The barrier has also helped empower Hamas in the southern (poorer) areas of East Jerusalem. Gil said Palestinian "civil society" groups fear the increasing power of Hamas far more than they chafe under Israeli occupation. They far prefer to remain under Israeli control, although they don't say so "for pragmatic reasons." This, Gil said, was a mistake that began with George W. Bush, who compelled Israel to agree to let Hamas participate in Palestinian elections. In portions of East Jerusalem now, ultra-religious Jews and Muslims are living in close proximity to one another. "Something," Gil said, "is bound to explode."

Gil said whereas a two-state solution was anathema five years ago, it is now widely accepted as the solution that must be pursued. Because of the increasing complexity of Jerusalem, including the complexity that the barrier inadvertently created, one consideration that must be considered is "combining physical unity with symbolic division."

Such a combination of unity and division, as understood by Israelis, is a far cry from the clear ideological and geographical divisions we see form a distance. Most Western media portrays as a "settlement" any neighborhood of Jews beyond the Green Line. Many of these neighborhoods are widely considered by Israelis and Palestinians to be settled Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The areas that Israelis consider "settlements" are those blue areas on the map that the barrier (the blue line" juts out in order to encompass.

What was refreshing about Gil's presentation was the complete absence of shrillness, and the frank distinction between ideology and pragmatism it maintained. Ir Amim strives to make Jerusalem, in the words of its web site, "a city that ensures the dignity and welfare of all its residents and that safeguards their holy places, as well as their historical and cultural heritages – today, as well as in the future." That much was clear.

It is a clear task but an impossible task -- one that Jews and Muslims, Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians, daily confront. Still, Ir-Amim and its Israeli and Palestinian partner organizations are, if Gil is any indication, ideally suited to the impossible: pragmatic, tough, smart, realistic without being pessimistic, positive without being naive.

It is with such people that change really begins.

--T.A.

A note to all readers: I find strident ideological commentary, of any stripe and on any issue, profoundly tiresome, and I will unhesistatingly delete any comment that descends to that level. All other comments are most welcome.

Reflections of an Old Student

Next week, within spitting distance of my 51st birthday, I begin my quest for a PhD in the History of Judaism from the U. Chicago Divinity School. I've decided to use this blog, largely dormant for the past year or more, to write about the experience, because I'm going to need a therapist, but I won't have time for one, so this blog will be it.

In June, I earned my M.A. in Divinity from the D School. A lot of my friends, most of them Jewish, didn't know Divinity was something you studied, much less earned a degree in. I get asked about it a lot: "Divinity? What's that?" The shortest answer is that it's the study of theology. The longer answer is that it's concentrated thought about and study of the (theory of the) divine. It's viewing matters of the spirit from an intellectual and historical perspective.

It's also a kind of fudge, ironically.

The urge to learn has always been with me, as have the need to write and (more recently) the enjoyment of teaching. I hope that combining these interests will yield some kind of quiet satisfaction; that sitting in the reedy silence of Regenstein Library, or in the fusty old classrooms of Swift Hall, will proffer a delightful anonymity, and an intellectual stimulation, that will keep my gray matter from settling into the Barca-Lounger of Senility. At the University, in whose shadow I grew up, I can learn for learning's sake.

Of course, it's rarely that easy. In the business world, competition is on the surface, but in the academy, it's under layers of politesse and intellectual code, creating a cozy viciousness of an almost Kabuki-esque intricacy and intensity. In the business world, you execute. In the academy, you debate and deliberate.  And then there are the more practical considerations: how do I still get my job done? How do I devote enough time and energy to the PhD? How do I get all this done, without cheating my family?

And most important: Why am I doing this?

I thought and I prayed and I analyzed and investigated. I studied, I read, I thought. I talked to people, I meditated, I did an accounting of my "internal books." Then I took the Graduate Record Exams, my first standardized test in almost 30 years; and I applied to two graduate admissions programs, and got admitted to the Divinity School, which so far has surpassed my wildest expectations.

In this space, I'll explore the experience of the older student, not just for myself, but for everyone who's curious about it. I'll explore Jewish philosophy and theology, and life in the academy, and I'll ponder how it affects life at home (without violating the privacy of the One True Wife, or of Gabe, who does not want to be written about).

I think going back to school, if you can afford it, beats the hell out of buying a Porsche or having an affair (not that I've tried either of those, mind you). It's both challenging (like a Porsche) and liberating (like a Porsche), but it costs less.

Also, it's not some shadow existence or some prestigious and presumptuous physical asset. It's a gift. As an older student, I'll care less about what my professors think of me. I'll be more directed, hungrier, more willing to take risks (I hope). And as someone involved in business, I'll be able to watch how a major university and its departments run, how they compete internally and externally, and how they are facing up to the massive changes with which colleges and universities are about to be faced.

And of course, I'll also write about the stuff I'm thinking about: meditation, syncretism, post-Holocaust Jewish theology; Jewish memory and Jewish history; and life as a man who loves his family and is nonetheless doing something terribly self-indulgent.

Read along and comment, if you like. Wish me luck, if you would. And, perhaps, think about what you would do to make a new path open for you.

More soon.

--T.A.

Open Letter to Pat Robertson: For the Love of God -- Shut Up

Dear Pat:

As you have at other times in the past, you took the opportunity to announce that a cataclysm -- this one natural, not man made -- was a manifestation of the will of God. Specifically, you said, and I quote:

"You know ... something happened a long time ago in Haiti. … They got together and swore a pact to the Devil," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club" Wednesday.

"They said, 'We will serve you if you get us free from the French.' True story."

This is not odd or aberrant behavior -- at least, not for you. You attributed Ariel Sharon's stroke to the fact that he ceded Gaza to the Palestinians. You suggested that the September 11 attacks were God's retribution for loose morals. And Hurricane Katrina, according to your finely tuned theology, was due to anger over abortion.

There are only two possible conclusions that can be reached:

• Yours is a God in urgent need of professional help; or
• You have placed yourself and your pronouncements above any genuine sense of the Divine; you have, in effect, become either an idol worshiper -- and you are the idol you worship -- or you are one of the wicked who prosper on the misfortunes of others; one of the ones the prophets warned about before destruction came.

Let us consider the first option first.

If God is angry over the division of His holy land, then that land should be a Matrix-like ward of individuals on life support. Ariel Sharon is hardly alone in crafting compromise with the Palestinians (one, it should be added, that also had the goal of extending Israel's life as a Jewish state). Every soldier who helped evacuate Gaza, every statesman and diplomat who helped negotiate Oslo -- even the hawkish Netanyahu himself should be lined up on gurneys outside the overflowing ICUs of every Israeli hospital.

Why does your God prefer pinpoint strikes in some instances, and wholesale slaughter of innocents in others? Read Voltaire's poem on the massive 1755 earthquake in Lisbon; you might begin to understand that any God that communicates through mass murder is a God that virtually guarantees alienation from witnesses and survivors. Such a God must not want followers and adherents. Voltaire joins me in my plea for your silence:

Will ye reply: "You do but illustrate
The Iron laws that chain the will of God"?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

If your God is the Creator of All, then certainly that God will do as He sees fit with His creation. Perhaps we cannot know the will of such a God -- but how can we faithfully serve one Whose will is incomprehensible? Whose punishments are so, well -- sloppy and fratricidal? Whose vengeance is visited upon the "guilty" either weeks or centuries after the crime, without clarity or precision instruction, with only after-the-fact prophetic pronouncement? 

When earth its horrid jaws half open shows,
My plaint is innocent, my cries are just.

We can only conclude, under the first option proposed above, that the Reason we have been granted, the order of our will, the clarity of our intentions, are greater than those of your Creator. That it is not we who are fallen, but your Creator: He is deranged.

Will you accuse me of heresy? The cries of the crushed innocent answer you. Can they drag their mangled limbs from the wreckage to undo the "pact to the Devil" that you allege? Will such suffering drive more into the arms of your bloodthirsty Destroyer? Have they done so in the past?

Are ye so sure the great eternal cause,
That knows all things, and for itself creates,
Could not have placed us in this dreary clime
Without volcanoes seething ‘neath our feet?
Set you this limit to the power supreme?
Would you forbid it use its clemency?
Are not the means of the great artisan
Unlimited for shaping his designs?
The master I would not offend, yet wish
This gulf of fire and sulphur had outpoured
Its baleful flood amid the desert wastes.

Of course, the first option -- the derangement of God -- is untenable. We must then consider the second option: that you are among the wicked of whom you speak.

When the Prophet Jeremiah foretold the destruction of Israel and Judah, his prophecies contained special wrath for those who had grown prosperous on the misfortunes of others:

For among my people are found wicked men: they watch, as fowlers lie in wait; they set a trap, they catch men. 5:27 As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxed rich. 5:28 They are waxed fat, they shine: yea, they overpass in deeds of wickedness; they plead not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, that they may prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge.

Are you pleading the Haitians' cause, Mr. Robertson? Or are you enriching yourself with retrospective prophecy of the sort that is designed to enhance your donor base?

the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means;

Mr. Robertson, every penny of donated money you keep, after remarks of the kind you made about Haiti, is a penny falsely earned, because it is earned through blasphemy. Even your brethren say so: 

Dr. Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas said, "It is absolute arrogance to try to interpret any of God's actions as a judgment against this person or that person. … Our duty as Christians is to try to help these people pray for these people and to help them."

To retrospectively interpret such heartbreaking suffering as a 200-year-old quid pro quo is to prophesy falsely.

Then Jehovah said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name; I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake I unto them: they prophesy unto you a lying vision, and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their own heart.

How else are we to interpret your comments, other than by the two options above?

Perhaps only with the words of Voltaire:

Would it console the sad inhabitants
Of these aflame and desolated shores
To say to them: "Lay down your lives in peace;
For the world’s good your homes are sacrificed;
Your ruined palaces shall others build,
For other peoples shall your walls arise;
The North grows rich on your unhappy loss;
Your ills are but a link In general law;
To God you are as those low creeping worms
That wait for you in your predestined tombs"?
What speech to hold to victims of such ruth!
Add not, such cruel outrage to their pain.

Wouldn't it be more useful merely to lend a hand? Wouldn't it be more honest, Mr. Robertson, to freely confess that we cannot know why such things happen, and to whom they happen? 

But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!

Voltaire beseeches you, in the name of all who are grateful for life, to beware of mocking God, and to extend to the suffering, not retroactive omniscience, but something far more valuable:

A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
"To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
What thou dost lack in thy immensity—
Evil and ignorance, distress and sin."
He might have added one thing further — hope."

--T.A.

2010: Make a Big Difference in a Small Way

Andrew Sullivan quotes Reinhold Niebuhr:

"There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it...

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; there we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; there we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

What this means -- to me, right now, on the eve of another Gregorian decade -- is that we ascribe too much importance to our own existence and not enough to the consequences of our actions.

And because we ascribe too much importance to ourselves and too little to our actions, we miss the fragmentary,  inherently asymmetrical and unsatisfactory nature of life itself. If we could just make peace with that, we wouldn't take everything else so personally.

I doubt if anyone other than a religious thinker could have come up with a statement like Niebuhr's; on the other hand, none but a religious thinker could create its evil twin, either. Consider this quote from a Youth for Christ rally by Josh McDowell in 1994:

Tolerance is the worst roar of all, including tolerance for homosexuals, feminists, and religions that don't follow Christ.

The intolerance of all believers -- regardless of what they believe in -- is the Inquisition, born over and over again in systems and sects that cannot stand a world not made in their image. As Einstein said:

The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.

It isn't as funny as it used to be.

Religious tolerance requires religions that are tolerant. It requires religious adherents that are tolerant. Individuals that are forgiving. Societies that do not incubate narcissism and fratricide. Religious tolerance requires steady, principled dissent from tenets of intolerance, even as it requires forgiveness for the intolerant.

The only way to evolve -- spiritually or otherwise -- is to first attempt the impossible. The impossible task for the decade ahead is to try to understand how inconsequential and utterly indispensable you are. Ironically, your meaningless acts reverberate endlessly -- so you're indispensable but not inconsequential. That means you have to ratchet it down a notch -- all of it. You must make suffering your business, but without making your suffering into your profession.

Only a religion that insists on its own unimportance can contribute something important to the world. Only a nation that addresses its own flaws can demand the same of others. And that individual who grasps how incomplete and unsatisfactory his or her efforts will always be -- only that individual can persist in a way that will, in time, make a difference.

Happy New Year.

--T.A.

The End of a Great Column on Religion

True Ancestor has been brought out of its slumber by the prospect of the end of Peter Steinfels' excellent, searching column on religion in the New York Times.

In the thorny thicket of academe that has become my intellectual (if not my spiritual) home, I am constantly undone by how many great thinkers pace the halls. These are not merely great thinkers but great teachers, too. That they think about religion -- both passionately and dispassionately -- just makes them that much greater, in my mind.

Steinfels' column has always shed new light on old ideas; it's one of those regular pieces of writing that gives voice and erudition to ideas that deserve more attention. I can't help but admire this second-to-last of his columns, in which he notes he did "not tramp repeatedly over the same territory."

Steinfels distills years of writing to a few signal themes, including the idea that divide between the religious and the secular has led to an oversimplification of the idea of religion itself:

First, the great world religions are complex and multilayered; they are rich in inner tensions and ambiguities that allow beliefs and practices to evolve over time as the faith is tested by new circumstances and insights. The great religions cannot be equated with the diminished and frozen fundamentalisms that they periodically spawn.

This conviction was captured by Jaroslav Pelikan, the scholar of Christianity, in his well-known distinction between tradition and traditionalism: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”

Steinfels also notes that because religious thinking is complex, and because religions change, people should constantly reapproach issues of faith, belief and worship:

Intelligence and critical reasoning are essential to adult approaches to faith. In short, theology matters. It is curious that so many otherwise thoughtful people imagine that what they learned about religion by age 13, or perhaps 18, will suffice for the rest of their lives. They would never make the same assumption about science, economics, art, sex or love.

People who do constantly reapproach those issues produce some great thinking and writing -- much of which is marginalized, precisely because it is about religion.

A contemporary abundance of serious thought and scholarship about religion is marginalized. Thinkers and scholars who should have a presence in the intellectual and cultural landscape — whose books, for example, might well be noted in the annual “holiday” listings — are instead known almost entirely in their own religious circles or academic specialties. That is a loss this column has tried to counter.

Steinfels always strove to include issues of conscience as a theme of his writing -- he understood that the right to not believe, and to not be coerced into behaving as if one does believe, is a critical issue in a country founded on freedom of conscience.

From its Protestant and Enlightenment origins, American society has tended to honor the personal conscience of the dissenting individual — at least in principle, although, as any atheist running for public office can testify, not necessarily in practice.

But what is applauded in individuals can seem intolerable in groups. Faced with religious bodies that resist prevailing opinion and hold to beliefs that either the majority Christian population or influential cultural elites consider retrograde, the nation has often balked. . .The presupposition here has been that freedom of conscience for individuals cannot be detached from freedom of conscience for communities of belief.

While it's sad, and significant, that such a column is being retired, I'm glad that it even existed long enough to bring these ideas to print, thoughtfully and with an even-handed grace that itself appears close to retirement.

--T.A.

The Mother of All Desert Island Stories

is Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Ibn Tufayl was a 12th century Muslim philosopher, mystic, physician and court official. (In many respects, Maimonides is his Jewish counterpart, except that Maimonides was no mystic.)

It's the story of a man who is either spontaneously generated on a deserted island, or who washes up there in a sealed cask -- of course, no one knows. Raised by a gazelle, he progresses, by rational inquiry and deductive reasoning, to understanding that there is a Creator. Hayy sees his task in life as serving and getting as close to that creator as possible.

Ibn Tufayl's text made it to England in the 1600s, where it was translated and where it received favorable reception. It's very likely that Daniel Defoe was influenced by it in his writing of Robinson Crusoe.

There are many beautiful things about the story, and the story behind the story. The most intriguing aspect is that, when Hayy finally comes into contact with civilization and its organized religions, they are a huge disappointment to him. In the end, he returns -- with one disciple -- to his island, to live out his days in the unmediated closeness to God that he had come to realize through a lifetime of study, thought, meditation and experiment.

Best read of the 12th century, for sure.

--T.A.

Religion in the Academy

Religion in the academy is a trunk in the attic -- full of quaint commodities rendered valuable by the mere passage of time.

Religion in the academy is the science of the study of human loneliness.

It is speculation on a rumor about a phantom.

It is the methodical examination of molecules comprising the incomprehensible.

Religion in the academy is the hub of a dangerous wheel. It is to be probed, but not moved. Spun without traction. Studied, but not lived.

Religion in the academy is a cadaver. It is the cancerous backbone of empire, mummified.

It is less than all this, too: a discipline and a calling, a quest and a career.

Religion in the academy is political, but not in the electoral sense. It is political because the academy is political, and it is political because it is as ancient as our deepest enmities and oldest negotiations.

The academy had its beginnings as a religious institution; religion began its life as a way of organizing people around a moment risen to myth. In the academy we study those myth-moments in ever-greater detail.

The academy and the monastery are a double helix.

Religion in the academy is a strand of intellectual DNA, threaded through the genome of history, wired into the genetics of myth, bound into books. Silent in repose. Waiting.

--T.A.

"The heart has two eyes: reason and imagination."

So said Ibn Arabi (full name: Abû ‘Abdallâh Muhammad ibn ‘Alî ibn al-‘Arabî al-Tâ’î al-Hâtimî), the greatest of all Islamic philosophers. 

When a mere lad of 15 (in 1180 CE), he was taken by his father to meet the great Aristotelian Islamic philosopher (and friend of his father) Averroes. Ibn Arabi explained to the great man the limits of rational perception -- an event taken by at least one philosopher as one symbolic of the philosophical parting of the ways between Islam and the West. 

Furthermore -- so sayeth the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy --

"In his view, ‘aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as ‘iqâl, fetter, can only delimit, define, and analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps the divine transcendence and incomparability. In contrast, properly disciplined imagination has the capacity to perceive God's self-disclosure in all Three Books. The symbolic and mythic language of scripture, like the constantly shifting and never-repeated self-disclosures that are cosmos and soul, cannot be interpreted away with reason's strictures. What Corbin calls “creative imagination” (a term that does not have an exact equivalent in Ibn ‘Arabî's vocabulary) must complement rational perception."

Ibn Arabi's thinking braided profound imaginative and mystical insight with impeccable reason. Hence, as with the visionary wisdom of the Torah, he saw the Arabic alphabet (which has 28 letters) as comprising the building blocks of reality, which had no distinct reality apart from God. God speaks reality into being and renews it with every breath. Therefore, all things undergo constant change, except for the Necessary Being, the Prime Mover, the Divine Being of Ibn Arabi's thought.

"The heart, which in itself is unitary consciousness, must become attuned to its own fluctuation, at one beat seeing God's incomparability with the eye of reason, at the next seeing his similarity with the eye of imagination. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ân, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, 'that which differentiates.'"

So, Ibn Arabi is saying, our heart is the bivalvular organ that constantly renews and challenges our two-dimensional perspective -- now rational, now imaginative. Our job -- and the job of Scripture -- is to both elucidate and differentiate between the rational and the imaginative, so that we, too, can see the world through both these apertures.

I'm seeing the headwaters of all Western religious thought running through the great minds of Islam and Judaism. They're all talking about the same thing. The best of them are frighteningly clear thinkers who think with, or through, their heart, their mind, their heart . . .

I suppose we'll get to Christianity, eventually.

--T.A.

Tom's Square

I spent the better part of this afternoon in Southwest Florida looking at potential acquisitions, driving between towns and counties in this humid, deserted vacation spot, touring beaten-down apartment properties awaiting rescue (or something like it).

The maintenance supervisor from my Naples property came along and led me, after our work was done, on a tour of Ave Maria, aka "Tom's Square," the holy apostolic, virgin-birthed university/town, brainchild of Tom Monaghan, he of Domino's Pizza and Detroit and "Theological Renewal," in no particular order.

The town itself is nearly deserted, especially at this time of year. Recent reports attest to the troubles the university has endured, and when you see how hard it is to get to, and to fathom, you understand why.

As we drove down Pope John Paul II Boulevard and circled the mitre-shaped cathedral, my trusted employee and guide said, "Kinda gives ya the creeps, don't it?"

"You have no idea," I said. "Quick, give me your hat, so I can hide my horns."

One can almost taste Monahan's grand vision: a renewal of traditional Catholicism, born out of splendid isolation, in a place where devotion could set down deep roots, where God State University and the University of God could develop a chivalrous yet fierce rivalry, and where everyone was just as devoted, as fervent, as dogged and rooted in dogma as everyone else.

"Of course," I said to my traveling companion, "we Jews are to blame for all this. After all, who do you think the first Catholics were?"

And in a way, Ave Maria is a 21st-century shtetl, devoted to its own path and yet dependent, in some small way, on its distant neighbors.

My maintenance supervisor and I have determined that I will get a costume of Chasidic garb, and that he will take a picture of me, smiling and waving, at the entrance to John Paul II Avenue.

God willing.

--T.A.