Dear Katha,
Maybe it’s like an ear for music. Some people seem to possess a natural instinct for religious belief, and some don’t. You and I, by chance–and this absolutely was happenstance, not some atheistic conspiracy on the part of Slate’s pinko editors–both seem to lack it, despite which we’ve been assigned to review these two books by two very devout Christians. I don’t believe our religious incapacity has hurt our discussion since we’ve primarily restricted ourselves to issues raised by the books themselves, eschewing more general questions of faith. But it’s obvious that many of our readers don’t agree.
Still, a random sampling of “The Fray” has been sobering. Not so much because the Fraygrants have tended to disagree with us, or even because they’ve frequently done so in gratuitously personal and abusive terms. That’s pretty much par for the course in this flame culture we’re working in, dislike it though we may. No, what I’ve found interesting and disturbing is that, surrounding the small handful of serious and thoughtful letters, there have been large numbers from correspondents who seem cockily convinced they are in sole possession of the absolute truth. This confidence would be humbling except that so many of them disagree with each other, and disagree vehemently, about what that truth consists of. Since they can’t all be right–they flatly contradict each other at almost every turn–most of them, by simple logic, must be mistaken even while issuing their ukases and anathemas. Any perusal of The Fray this week would suggest 1) this country no longer values civility or good manners and 2) there are a great variety of ways to be Catholic, or Christian, or even generically religious (would that be Unitarian?), despite which many people who so regard themselves seem willing to appoint themselves arbiters in matters of faith, virtual Grand Inquisitors.
One of the things I admire so much about both these books under review is the way their authors refuse to make any such claims or even evince tendencies in that direction. Neither discusses the taproot of his own faith–an unfortunate omission, to my mind–but both accept, implicitly and explicitly, that there can be many different routes to God and that no route is necessarily the right one or the best one. Both are on open-ended quests. Both demonstrate a certain humility before the immensity of the mysteries they are contemplating and before the majesty of the church to which they both still belong. Indeed, if one wished to propose a single error under which all the errors they separately enumerate are subsumed, it might be precisely this: The Catholic Church–or rather, some of those who have historically wielded authority within the Catholic Church–has shown insufficient humility, has manifested an arrogance about matters that are, at bottom, not so amenable to human understanding.
I don’t mean to single out the Catholic Church, incidentally. These books are both written by Catholics and are both about Catholicism, so of course you and I have been concentrating on that faith in these discussions. It’s not a result of anti-Catholic bias–contrary to what some Fraygrants have suggested–it’s out of journalistic diligence. All religions that have successfully allied themselves with temporal power have been guilty of abuses in the name of dogma at one time or another. The Inquisition’s burning of heretics at the stake is a useful trope because it’s so vivid and because it’s such a central image in the history of Western civilization, but jihads of various types and sustained by various faiths seem to be a fact of human nature and a constant in human history.
Nor, by the way, am I exempting Judaism as (predictably) many Fraygrants have darkly suggested. Of course, in one sense, the whole analogy is false; most of those writers, when adverting to Judaism, aren’t really discussing the religion at all–they are talking about an ethnic group or in some cases the state of Israel. Where our comments about Catholicism have largely addressed matters of doctrine, what these correspondents have to say rarely concerns the Old Testament or Talmudic law, and it’s not my impression that their observations are meant to apply to Sammy Davis Jr., say, or Elizabeth Taylor. Nevertheless, to the extent that this is a genuine concern for some readers, I’m happy to concede that the notion of a Chosen People is offensive and anachronistic and does everyone, Jew and gentile alike, a disservice.
I am reminded of Mel Brooks in his persona as the 2,000-year-old man recalling the world’s very first national anthem. It went, “Let them all go to hell, except Cave 76.” The same spirit that inspires xenophobia in the denizens of Cave 76 also animates riots among fans of rival soccer teams in England and South America and can also lead to exclusionary claims and triumphalist violence among religious sectarians.
And yet what’s at issue in such disputes and rivalries is so fundamentally abstract and even chimerical that they defy common sense. Because, finally, we are confronted with conundrums too vast and too encompassing–and because the scale of the mystery is so beyond the human, so not us–anything that goes farther than mere awe represents an immense leap of faith, an act of pious speculation. Which, if I may return to my opening sentence today, is the reason why an ear for music may not, in fact, be a useful comparison. After all, not even the stone tone-deaf question whether the music is actually there.
This has been a fascinating exercise, but I wonder if you feel, as I do, that we might be ready for a less controversial topic next time.
All my best,
Erik
