Speaking truth and seeking justice.

The contemporary apophatic namings of God name God as Incomprehensible.
Apocalyptic also desires to name God in terms of the Impossible but not
merely to render that naming in language and thought but more
importantly to render it in time and in history where the Impossible
becomes a matter of justice, justice which, to be sure, seems entirely
impossible given the present world's reign, is promised and threatened
as the Hidden-Incomprehensible God's own possibility for us.
--David Tracy (1)

In 1943, in the wake of yet another bombing in London, Dylan Thomas wrote, "All the stones remember and sing the cathedral of each blitzed dead body," evoking a whole civilization. (2) Since first I heard that line and later read it, it has resonated in my body raising up the mystery of monotheistic religion. The expression contains images of beauty, power and greatness as well as ugliness, brokenness, and tragedy. Over these years it has spoken to me of Jews, Christians, and Muslims gathering one day each week to listen and respond to God's word. It generates images of the Torah being opened and honored, the readings of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Muslim call to prayer, the ablutions, the prostrations, the magnificent buildings, the art, the music, the crusades, the catapults, the cannons, the horrific bombs. Christians call Jesus the Prince of Peace, James Hillman says "Religion is war." "The cathedral of each blitzed dead body" is religious language of the highest order.

We are so accustomed in the United States to consider religion a matter of true or false beliefs (mine are true, yours false) that even a scholars like Hillman (3) and Daniel Dennett (4) think that is what religion is all about--beliefs. Yet there is in the traditions of the three major monotheistic religions the contrary understanding that religion is a matter of what Quakers call "Faith and Practice." Faith is what we set our hearts upon, (5) and put into practice, while right practice deepens and expands the experience of our hearts. What we believe to be true may support faith and practice, but it also may distort it. That is why religious language is so important, yet so problematic.

Hillman may be correct, and judging current claims and actions taken by fundamentalists and militants in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he has reason to believe he is. However, it must be realized that language matters, and the persons who control and manipulate religious language do not necessarily represent the people who follow faith and practice. Their language can enlighten. It can also inflame. Silence please! Let us have an hour of stillness.

One way of understanding the religious troubles of our time begins with the realization that none of us knows where the human race came from nor where it is heading. We are learning more and more from fossil records and genetic discoveries about the mechanisms of evolution. Geology and cosmology provide us almost daily updates on our understanding of the earth and the universe, of negative energy, and the possibility of other universes. But Bernard Lonergan's treatment of what he calls "conditioning causality" also teaches us that all phenomena are conditioned upon the existence of other phenomena, and understanding the network of all phenomena lies beyond our grasp. (6) Religion is born of this awareness--primitive or sophisticated--that we lack knowledge of the meaning of it all. We huddle together, speak and listen, try to figure it out, and the language we use makes it more or less likely that our various huddles will open up to the other huddles to enlarge faith and practice and raise it up to higher importance than mere belief or unbelief.

In our various huddles we tell stories, use gestures and signs, and establish traditions which form us into communities of discourse, worship, and compassion. These community activities work together to provide for us a sense of our own limits, a sense of wonder, awe, and reverence central to what we name religion. Monotheistic religion points to or refers to the beyond, the ground of being, God. It is upon this God, this totally other being beyond us yet mysteriously also within and among us that we set our hearts.

A Quaker meeting may exemplify an important point here. Quakers sit in silent stillness attending to the spirit of God that they believe is always flowing like a river through our lives. (7) Some dip their foot into the water, others plunge right in, but all are in communion with God. Ten minutes passes. No one speaks. Twenty minutes. Still no one speaks, but all attend to the spirit. Perhaps the hour of worship (Sweet Hour of Prayer John Greenleaf Whittier called it) passes and no one speaks. More likely someone will feel moved to speak, and a few others also. The messages may cohere with each other; they may not. They may be opaque or clear, anxious or serene, articulate or inarticulate, long or short. They maybe in song, or more rarely, in dance; stories or expositions. The messages are fragments of our experience of God who is beyond our experience as well as within it. As individuals we know so little of God, yet in community we pick up fragments of faith, expressions of feeling: heart speaks to heart. The language is spare, unpretentious, undogmatic, and open to mystery, speaking of a God who is utterly beyond understanding, yet who draws us to greater openness, to more consistent compassion, to, in the words of Jean Vanier "Becoming Human." (8)

The image of the Quaker Meeting may provide some clues for understanding the uses and abuses of religious language. It is not the only such image, but its careful and simple language set in the context of silence has much to recommend itself in a time of religious racket so favorable to abuse. Considering religious language to come out of silent stillness enables one to stop and reflect on the impossibility of understanding God. (9) The apophatic tradition, common in Orthodox Christianity, more rarely found in the Western Christian tradition, centers less on propositional statements about God than on God's being beyond words yet mysteriously moving hearts. The apocalyptic tradition centers more on the tragedy of man's inhumanity to man, more on the theology of the cross, as in Bonhoeffer, (10) and the hope of the future coming of Christ and justice.

In his treatment of two symbolic systems for religious language, Eric Voegelin names one set of symbols the beginning and another set of symbols the beyond. (11) The beginning comprises the story of creation, and includes the natural and social sciences and speaks of God the creator, and in great detail about God's creation. The language is propositional and discursive. The beyond comprises the invitation made to humans by God to live injustice, compassion and love, which cannot be inferred from creation, but only experienced in the human heart. The language is symbolic and expressive rather than discursive and communicative, and is found in hymns and gestures, poetry and ritual. Mistakes in religious language occur when the language of the beginning and the beyond are confounded and confused. For example, the propositional language of authoritative dogma confounds the symbols of The beyond, which is ineffable, and renders them in the language of The beginning. Thus dogmas and fatwas uttered by extreme muftis, televangelists, or right-wing disciples of Meir Kahane, become impositions of belief or commands for action rather than symbols of human response to the invitation of God to joyously seek justice and compassion. Conversely, using symbols of The beginning to explain the reality of The beyond renders the relativity of the created universe into an absolute, as when Marx and Engels claimed that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," (12) or when more recently Daniel Dennett renders natural selection into the absolute explanation of religion. (13) Both moves are akin to the classic phenomenon of idolatry: the rendering of an intra-mundane reality into an absolute. Far more appropriate is the saying of Meister Eckhart, "The brightness of the divine nature is beyond words." (14)

What is it about Eckhart's statement that makes it truthful and good religious language? What is it about Dylan Thomas' "Cathedral of each blitzed dead body" truthful and good? This question can be dealt with through an analysis similar to that given by Susanne Langer of art as symbolic form. (15) Religious language is not marked by analytical reasoning, it is not, to use Langer's term, discursive; rather, religious language is primarily expressive of insights into patterns of human feeling, or to use Langer's term religious language is presentational. Langer did not address religious language, and was decidedly not a religious thinker, but I think her analytical technique can add much to our understanding of religious language. When one considers religious symbolism and religious language as primarily expressive of insights into patterns of human feeling, one can move forward to making reasonable judgments about the worth of specific religious symbols or utterances. One can examine effectively the uses and abuses of religious language.

Following Langer, two components of religious language are necessary to make it true. First, the language must be grounded in authentic insights into patterns of religious experience. Second, the language must be spoken or written in such a way as to reflect lucidly and logically the relevant insight. To these two, I would add a third: religious language must be reverent, that is, is must be seated in awe and respect and contain a sense of its possible fallibility. (16) An authentic insight into patterns of religious experience is a personal achievement, not a received truth. It arises in one's central nervous system, one's whole feeling and thinking apparatus, (17) and is not unduly influenced or controlled by others; nor is it faked or fraudulent--made up to impress oneself or others, or to sell a book, or to back a political candidate, or to demean other persons. It is real. When that insight is spoken or written so that it is lucidly and logically presented to a listener or reader it is truthful. When the insight is received or inauthentic it may be called untruthful. When the insight is presented in a manner that is not lucid or logically connected to the underlying insight it may be called bad or inept. Untruthful, bad, or inept religious language is not necessarily immoral, though it can be, as when a profit-oriented-preacher calls for the assassination of a foreign leader.

Authentic insight into patterns of religious experience is often experienced as a divine gift, which is not what is meant by the term received truth. A received truth would be an inauthentic insight in the sense that a person would feel pressured or obliged to claim a specific feeling or experience by some authority or some collective. Television commercials promote such received truths, as do some forms of revivalism or authoritarianism. It should be apparent that untruthful religious language is far more problematic than bad or inept religious language. Inept religious language can, in fact, invite a reader or listener to a deeper, more empathic mode of listening and serve to build deeper bonds between people, and empathic listening is as integral to language as is speaking. The work of Jean Vanier is filled with stories of such listening. (18)

The question then arises, what criteria can be used to make judgments about one's own religious language and that of others? Several things must be said in response to this question.

First, language can be understood as a set of signs and symbols that are spoken, listened to, written, and read for the purpose of making sense of the world and of the place of oneself and others in that world and in support of decisions and actions taken in that world. Each activity--speaking, listening, writing, and reading--is integral to language as it is actually experienced. The signs and symbols that make up language sometimes aim at communication, sometimes at mere expression, but are always fraught with ambiguity.

Second, religious language is found in worship, in song, in prayer, in symbols, in rituals, in conversations among congregants, in conversations between members of different congregations, and in conversations between congregants and people who belong to no congregation at all. Speaking, listening, writing and reading are found in all these spaces of religious language.

Third, religious language is primarily expressive of insights into patterns of religious experience. It is language of the here and now or the then and there, and not propositional language as scientific language is.

Fourth, as described above, religious language can be truthful, false, good, or inept, and its proper aim is to be truthful and good. Fights, which aim at destroying (sometimes really, sometimes figuratively) those with whom one disagrees are not truthful; nor are games, which aim at increasing one's skill or one's perceived or real advantage over another. (19)

Fifth, to judge whether or not one's own or someone else's religious language is true and good one needs to ask the following: Is the language grounded in reverence? Is it compassionate? Is it aware of its fallibility? Is it aimed at justice?

It is now time to move beyond the Quaker meeting, and consider some other uses of religious language that may exemplify those five criteria. Normally, one can assume that the liturgy, ritual, and official words of public worship are grounded in reverence, and compassion, and that they seek justice. However, awareness of one's limits and fallibility is from time to time a problem. For centuries, the Holy Week Liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church prayed for "the perfidious Jews", and was only changed after many years of protest. One could argue that the prayer was not only resistant to fallibility, but also lacked reverence, compassion and justice, but it would be unfair to take that one statement of the rich, elaborate and lengthy Holy Week liturgy and claim the whole thing was irreverent, callous, and unjust. But clearly, to maintain the phrase for such a long period against all criticism was a mistake defended under a claim of infallibility (not in the strict Roman Catholic definition of the term, but in its ordinary usage).

The criteria also seem to be met in the formal worship of Orthodox Christians, Protestant Christians, Jews and Muslims. However, when any minister or official of a gathering for worship uses the time for a sermon or homily or other verbal message to advocate a specific political candidate or course of action, or demand that the congregation all agree to a specific proposition or course of action, then the language is irreverent, unjust, and pretends to be infallible. To demand that congregants support the occupation of a foreign land is to fight. To demand that they vote for only anti-choice is to engage in a game. To refuse the sacraments to congregants who oppose specific political views of church authorities is to pretend infallibility.

Outside the practice of worship there are myriad examples of religious language, some true and good, some false or inept, and some, indeed, immoral. I shall present here, some examples of each, and demonstrate how to examine them.

In his book Between Man and Man, (20) Martin Buber tells the story of a conversation he had with a friend in 1914. The friend was a part of a movement to prevent war by bringing together a congress of people from each nation to negotiate over national differences. The friend cautioned that this would require careful attention to avoid the possibility of a disproportionate number of Jews in the international congress. Buber protested that Jews shared Jewishness with Jesus and understood him in a way that Christians cannot. At that moment, Buber's friend stood up, paused, and eventually said, "It is gone." The two men hugged each other in a kiss of peace.

Buber defended this manner of dialogue by saying that both he and his friend understood that they each had but a glimpse of the truth, the whole of which was inaccessible to them. They did not need to engage in further explication of each other's views. What was central was that they sought justice and practiced compassion. The five criteria mentioned above were certainly operating in this event. Conversion is not the aim of religious conversation.

Josef Pieper in Guide to Thomas Aquinas (21) describes the moves Thomas Aquinas made in teaching at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. Today we might call these moves active listening, and listening, as has been said, is an integral part of religious language.

Aquinas' lectures would all be governed by a question. The question provided focus and direction to the conversation between him and his students. Once the question was clearly stated and generally understood, individual students would provide their positions on the question, make claims regarding it, and present arguments for their claims. Aquinas would then repeat each student's position along with his arguments until the student was assured that he had been properly understood. It was only after claimants had made their cases, and that Aquinas had shown he fully understood each of them, that Aquinas stated his position on the question. Having made his position clear, Aquinas then presented his arguments for his claims. Students were then free to ask questions, which Aquinas did his best to answer.

Truth and justice both lie beyond the participants and in the future in Aquinas' handling of the medieval disputation, yet they operate within the discourse, as does the empathic listening. The dialogue is more intellectual than Buber's, yet it seems clear that Aquinas realized the conversation illuminated but a fragment of the truth. Neither the master nor the students pretended infallibility, and the desire to convert the other is entirely absent. There was no fight, no game.

The Persian Sufi Farid al-Din 'Attar provides a brilliant illustration of true and good religious language in his poem The Conference of the Birds. The long allegorical poem tells the story of a gathering of a great variety of birds under the leadership of a hoopoe. The hoopoe, a stand-in for the poet, tells the birds, which are stand-ins for the listeners and readers, how to fulfill their desire to see their king, called Simorgh (meaning thirty-birds). There are seven valleys they must pass through successfully in order to meet their King, and each of the valleys represents a discipline which leads to the gradual detachment from oneself and the material world until the thirty remaining birds came to the insight that

  Their souls rose free of all they'd been before
  The past and all its actions were no more,
  Their life came from that close insistent sun
  And in its vivid rays they shone as one
  There in the Simorgh's face they saw
  Themselves, the Simorgh of the world--with awe
  They gazed and dared at last to comprehend
  They were the Simorgh and the journey's end. (22)

The thirty birds realized they saw themselves and each other in the radiant light of God as in a mirror.

Lines 2990-3040 illustrate the dialogical power of the poem. A bird asks the hoopoe how he can sustain his commitment to the journey in the midst of fear and loneliness, and after telling the bird to trust God, the hoopoe tells him two stories, one of a drunkard who berates another man for being a drunkard, and the other of a lover who only notices his loved one's deficiencies when his love has ceased. 'Attar is telling the listeners and readers to look into themselves and see their own deficiencies. Introspection gives one the strength to understand oneself and others, leading to the practice of both courage and justice.

As I write this, the protests erupting throughout the Muslim world at the cartoons of the prophet Mohammad in Denmark have served to illustrate the importance of an ethics of religious speech. Likud extremists, supported by groups like the American Israeli Political Action Committee, justify the occupation of Palestine with religious language. Christian extremists, supported by preachers like Pat Robertson, call for the conquest of Palestine by Israel with religious language. Muslim extremists, supported by agents of Middle Eastern governments, call for the beheading of a Danish cartoonist in the midst of riotous life-ending demonstrations. Thinkers like Daniel Dennett (23) and Sam Harris, (24) beholding this wreckage, call for the end of faith. All of these people, with the possible exception of Dennett, have one thing in common: certitude, i.e. certainty with attitude. They have an uncommon disbelief in their own fallibility, a dismissiveness and lack of respect for those who do not share their views.

It is on this point that people of faith need to act honestly, assertively, and courageously. People like Dennett and Harris have challenged us to live up to our responsibility to speak openly and honestly against all forms of untruthful religious language--language that seeks a competitive edge, that is itching for a fight, that is not grounded in authentic experience, that considers itself infallible, that refuses to be reverent, empathic or compassionate or to seek justice. We need to imitate Buber and realize that faith is a matter of the whole body, and arguing every point of doctrine logically gets in the way of compassion and justice. We need to imitate Aquinas, and listen to others, letting them know how fully we have understood them, yet straightforwardly stating where we stand as well. We need to follow the advice of 'Attar, and realize our limitations responding to the good we find in each other as reflections of God.

Coming as I do from the Christian tradition, I find the classic place of ethical speech in the apocalyptic wisdom literature of the Epistle of James. This is probably the earliest document of what later became the Christian Scriptures; the author of James was the head of the Jerusalem community that followed Jesus. He wrote under the belief that the Master, Jesus, was due to arrive any minute. He also longed for justice and compassion, which he saw as integrally related to speech, which he understood must always be directly related to experience and action. The style of writing closely resembled the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures. James wanted his readers to treat everyone equally, with compassion and justice. He wanted them to mind their tongues, using them to bless God and not curse--to confess their sins to each other, to be serious, yet resist the temptation of self-importance.

The models of ethical speaking and listening given us by Buber, Aquinas, 'Attar, and James the brother of Jesus exemplify the criteria set out in this article. They stand on their own and are not to be judged merely in terms of their consequences. We need to ask the speaker and the listener: Is your speech and your listening expressive of authentic experience? Is it grounded in reverence? Is it compassionate? Is it aware of its fallibility? Is it aimed at justice?

Notes

1. David Tracy, 1999 Palmer Lecture at Center of Theological Inquiry, Form and Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God (Princeton, New Jersey: www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_3/tracy.htm).

2. Dylan Thomas, "Our Country," in Quite Early One Morning 89ff. (New York: New Directions Books, 1954).

3. James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War (New York: Penguin, 2004).

4. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Viking, 2006).

5. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in The History of Belief (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985) shows that the distinction between faith and belief is founded upon an important difference. Credo, the Latin word for "I believe," says Smith, is more akin to Cor, the Latin word for "heart" than it is to "belief," the English word for accepting a proposition as true. Smith thinks English never developed a proper verb corresponding to the noun "faith." I am using Smith's attempt at such a verb, "I set my heart on."

6. Bernard Lonergan, Insight, a Study of Human Understanding (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

7. William Taber, Four Doors to Meeting for Worship (Philadelphia: Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 1992).

8. Jean Vanier, Becoming Human (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1998).

9. David Tracy, op. cit.

10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

11. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974).

12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

13. Daniel Dennett, op. cit.

14. Meister Eckhart, Selections from His Essential Writings (sermon 53) (New York: Harper Collins, 2005).

15. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner's, 1953).

16. Paul Woodruff has written most insightfully on reverence in his book Reverence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

17. An apt description of insight as a whole-body experience can be found in Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error (New York: Avon, 1995).

18. Jean Vanier, op. cit. Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, a movement whose members live in community with persons who are intellectually deficient.

19. See Anatole Rapaport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).

20. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1975).

21. Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).

22. Farid ud-Din 'Attar, The Conference of the Birds (London: Penguin, 1984).

23. Daniel Dennett, op. cit.

24. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: Norton, 2005).