Religion v. Enlightenment

 Starting in the Enlightenment it became possible to oppose religion by revealing the historicity of actual religions and religious doctrines. One can show convincingly that the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul comes to the faith through a complex web that includes the “contamination” of Jewish thought by Greek philosophy and literature. To put it much too simply, Plato’s realm of the “ideas” creates Heaven. Homer’s underworld where Odysseus goes to consult with Achilles creates hell. If so, the argument runs, Christianity is not a revealed religion. Nor is it exclusively Jewish in its origin (and nor is Judaism Jewish entirely in its origin, a faith that has been “contaminated” or “hybridized” not only by Hellenism but also by Christianity!)

It’s a tangled historical mess. Islam fairs no better; indeed its appearance at a time and place wherein history were more carefully chronicled (often presented as a positive claim for it, the first truly “historical” religion), is very easily turned to question it. One need only invoke the episode of The Satanic Verses as evidence, the backlash to which reveals the sensitivity that faith has to even literary-historical investigation.

Advocates of this line of reasoning present all faith traditions as false for having claim revelation for what is clearly historical in origin.

The response of religions to this line of reasoning has been disappointing. That response only proves the critics’ point. Religions are institutions with this-world concerns for preserving their status and maintaining their existence. Whether religions ignore their critics or oppose them with real or promised violence, they only flash their underwear and their underwear is dirty.

A true engagement with this line of thinking—which amounts to nothing more than a misguided Enlightenment prejudice—requires the sincere person of faith to acknowledge that enormous debt of history to the lineaments of his or her faith. There’s no gainsaying this. The expression of anyone’s faith requires embodying that faith in a structure which is based on signs. Some of these will be directly linguistic—scriptures and creeds etc. Some will be ritualized, literally sacramentalized. The impulse is analogous to putting any experience in signs, of, for example, walking in the woods and then writing a poem about it or painting a landscape. In religious terms, what is behind the impulse of faith is something that is not purely historical. We can put aside the question of whether the impulse is “revealed.” The impulse is real and nearly universal and hardly questioned before the onslaught of the Enlightenment prejudice for Reason above and to the virtual exclusion of other forms of knowledge. (And even when, before this, that questioning of faith was raised, it was raised on essentially the same principles, as in Longinus.)  

A post-Enlightenment has to take seriously both the Enlightenment critique of revelation and the more profound impulse and perception (indeed the logical likelihood so profound it is probably a logical necessity) that the material world, the world accessible to the senses and that which can be discovered by machines and math and reason, are not the whole of being, and that what cannot be accessed this these ways deserves the word “spiritual.” This is what religions worthy of being called religions celebrate and respond to and explore. Are their actual doctrines “true”?—that Jesus is the literal Son of God, the Muhammad is God’s Prophet that the path to spiritual enlightenment is renunciation? 

That depends on how you understand true.