Andrew Gow (Prof. University of Alberta)
Response to Dominique Avon, “Le fait religieux et
l’instance critique de l’historien en climat libéral”
Cold Frogs vs. Warm-Blooded Theists
If were we able to disengage our historical and critical
assessments of religious phenomena from our own religious
(or anti-religious) engagements, we would attain the form of
scholarly distance Dominique Avon suggests as a remedy for
confessional and other partisan forms of the history of
religion. We ought to be able, he suggests, to describe,
analyze and critique religious phenomena in the same way
whether they belong to our own religious tradition or not,
whether or not we are atheists, whether or not we might
have an interest of any kind in the outcome of such critiques
and analyses. Or at least he implies the latter, as he does
not admit directly or explore the sort of interests we might
bring as scholars to the analysis of a religious phenomenon.
Avon’s ideas build on and refine the best of the strong
tradition of French laïcité and lay scholarship. He admits that
secular scholarship on religion can evolve into atheist
condemnation of religion, or can be strongly coloured by it.
He warns us as much against a scholarship that seeks to
discredit religion or to explain it away (as extrinsic to a given
problem, or as ‘merely superstructural,’ etc.) as he warns us
about the dangers of a confessionally partisan approach. In
a lay secular humanist’s ideal world, in an intellectual life
lived exclusively according to the dictates of universalist
(secular) rationalism à la française, it might indeed be
possible to attain the status of the ‘cold frog’ Avon constructs
as the ideal scholarly observer of religion. I will admit up
front that I respect and like the idea, I might even desire it as
a goal, and yet I find that there is a great deal about it that I
think does not work. Perhaps some version of it could be
made to work for those of us who study religion and have
strong religious commitments of our own, but such a position
would be both less neutral and more conscious of religious
factors. Especially for those of us who are not Christians and
therefore whose ‘religion’ might work very differently from the
christonormative model of religion posited by Enlightenment
laïcité, a different position that does not try to attain complete
neutrality but nonetheless provides the same benefits as the
position Avon sketches seems to me a better solution.
If we were to change those things that need changing
(i.e., *mutandis* mutandis) in order to be able to apply
Avon’s ideas to scholars of religion in cultures other than that
of liberal rationalism (e.g., the intellectual, personal and faith
engagements of scholars in other, less secular scholarly
cultures), I think we would find that his scholarly ideal would
appear both unnatural and impossible from a number of
important perspectives. I want, in fact, in some ways at least,
to desire it, but I find it impossible to imagine attaining the
perspective Avon proposes--at least as it is stated in the
article.
In many western academic cultures, one’s confessional
engagements are worn (even proudly) on one’s sleeve, and
in some, those scholars charged primarily with the study of
religion have positions in Faculties of Theology (Germany,
the Netherlands, but also Anglo-American ‘divinity schools’)
with direct and powerful ties to particular churches or
confessions -- and not in secular university departments or
chairs. Already the institutional frame contributes to a
predetermined set of possibilities for the study of religion by
such ‘theologians’ (German Theologen), as they often call
themselves as a disciplinary designation. The personal
history, culture and convictions of such scholars and their
loyalties both religious and professional actually exclude
them a priori from the cool delights of ‘cold frogdom’. Rather,
they tend to see themselves as warm-blooded theists and
ordained ministers (as they often are) of their religious
community, whose scholarship is designed and mandated to
subtend, enrich, refine and expand the theological culture of
their fellow Christians (Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists,
Presbyterians, etc.) as well as to make broader scholarly
contributions to a broader scholarly community and set of
discussions. For many of these ‘official theologians’ -- whose
positions are often guaranteed by the State via a concordate
with the relevant church, as in Germany --, there is and
should be no distinction between faith-based scholarship
and scholarship that addresses the larger scholarly
community -- since both are undertaken ad maioram gloriam
D-i, though in different modes and according to different
rules.
While Avon is interested less in ‘what is’ than in ‘what
should be’, I find it impossible to limit my critique to an ideal
when there are so many interesting actual examples to study
and consider in practice -- and I submit that only by doing so
might one perhaps arrive at a way of critiquing Avon’s ideal
that does not also assume that many existing institutional
arrangements are inadequate or worse. They might indeed
be those things, but I would like at least in this instance to
try to be the kind of ‘cold frog’ Avon praises. Continental
scholarship outside France about religion not only has a long
tradition, it has a number of important pedigrees that
themselves provide alternatives to Avon’s rationalist,
universalist suspension of judgement. Both Hegelian and
Kantian philosophical trajectories come to mind, along with
the ideas of a number of early modern French theists. That
none of these will suffice for a contemporary historian is
probably a moot point. But they provide an intellectual
context that also allows, even encourages a certain distance
from the religious phenomena one might be observing
without insisting that the historian entirely suspend
judgement or preference a priori.
As much as I dislike the charged partisan approach of
both
nineteenth-century
polemicists
and
certain
contemporary ‘church historians’ such as Thomas Kaufmann
(the Professor for early modern Church History at
Göttingen), I also like the self-critical but avowedly
confessional approach of Volker Leppin (Professor of
Reformation History in the Lutheran Faculty of Theology at
Jena), an ordained Lutheran minister but in no way a narrow
‘Luther-booster’ -- on the contrary. Neither one could under
any circumstances be accused of being ‘cold frogs’ -- and I
think scholarship benefits from their passion and
engagement for the greater glory of G-d and the enrichment
of their own church. The agon in which these two superb
scholars of ‘evangelical religion’ (Lutheranism) are engaged
could not possible exist in the mode Avon projects as the
ideal approach to the history of religion. His approach would
actually be detrimental to the vibrant scholarly and
ecclesiastical debates about the history of Lutheranism,
Protestantism and Christianity in which such scholars are
engaged.
The problem is that as much as Avon might like us to be
able to inhabit, if only intellectually, a thoroughly secular and
‘lay’ space (personally and intellectually), that space is both
inaccessible and inhospitable to a large number of the
people who might ideally inhabit it. Neither do individuals live
in such spaces -- secular Frenchmen and North Americans
live just as surely in the long christonormative hangover of
Christianity as evangelical Americans live in *both* the
Christian present *and* in its aching hangover in secular
society. Avon suggests a kind of methodological atheism. But
all attempts to arrive at that type of bloodless atheism betray
the fixity and power of the fundamentally theological
framework in which we, as members of western cultures and
as western scholars of religion, remain trapped. In her
preface to Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005), Saba
Mahmood writes: “I have come to question our conviction,
however well-intentioned, that other forms of human
flourishing and life worlds are necessarily inferior to the
solutions we have devised under the banner of ‘secular-left’
politics—as if there is a singularity of vision that unites us
under this banner, or as if the politics we so proudly claim
has not itself produced some spectacular human disasters.
This self-questioning does not mean that I have stopped
struggling or fighting against the injustices…that currently
compound my social existence. (…) [Rather,] we can no
longer arrogantly assume that [our] formulations necessarily
exhaust ways of living meaningfully and richly in this world”
(xi-xii). If we change the phrase “‘secular-left’ politics” to
“secular cold-frog methodological atheism” and “life-worlds”
to “scholarship”, we can approach a critique of Avon’s ideal
that is rooted in both real experience and actual personal
engagements and commitments. Mahmood identifies (here
implicitly) ‘secular-left politics’ with universalist claims to
cultural and social superiority based on the instrumental and
utilitarian civic logic of Enlightenment political philosophy.
‘Methodological
atheism’
presupposes,
just
as
Enlightenment political philosophy does, that no religious
*engagements* have a place in a public sphere constructed
according to the dictates of rational discourse. I think one
need call only on Kant to suggest the opposite, and I submit
that the entire enterprise of the scholarly study of religion
from the vantage point of a religiously committed member of
a religious community--in a Catholic or Lutheran or even
Jewish professorship--is in fact a Kantian undertaking that
relies as much on rationality as any methodologically
atheistic ( i.e., epistemologically skeptical) approach can do.
Rationality, understood in a Kantian manner, is not merely an
inorganic logic machine, but the function of a thinking soul-and here is where the cold frogs might find the kitchen too
hot. Indeed, the presupposition that we ought to function as
cold frogs suggests that the kitchen from which we come, as
scholars -- the partisan or at least engaged study of theology
-- was too hot for methodologically respectable scholarship
and that we had, therefore, to leave the seminary and the
cloister to become responsible citizens of a secular republic
of letters. This is a specifically French Enlightenment vision
of scholarship about religion, of the institutional changes
needed to shake off the supposed obscurantism and
irrationality of the Old Regime church. Neither Lutheran nor
Anglican nor Jewish institutions got in the way, in the 19th
century, of a rational approach to scholarship -- historicalcritical Biblical scholarship and the Wissenschaft des
Judentums (scholarly Jewish studies) did not grow up in a
secular environment, but in Faculties of Theology and
divinity schools/institutions for training clergy; and many
Catholic scholars and institutions of the 19th century made
signal contributions to the development of modern Biblical
and religious studies. Neither can these developments in
scholarship be attributed directly to the French Revolution,
as they were already well underway in the 18th century as
elements of alternative forms of ‘Enlightenment’, whether
German idealism and empiricism, Anglo-Scottish liberalism,
or the Jewish Haskalah. In all these forms of
‘Enlightenment’, as among many French thinkers of that age,
theism, even a very warm engagement for theist solutions to
‘mechanical’ problems, was dominant. But unlike in France,
that theism and the confessional engagements of individual
scholars remained central to scholarship on religion
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries -- often with mediocre
and quite self-satisfied results, admittedly. ‘Religious studies’
as a project of recuperation, with its roots in Chicago and the
work of such scholars as Eliade, was not so much a
repudiation of theism as a sidelining of the issue: the
contemporary discipline of religious studies assumes that
theists and atheists, as well as confessionally bound and
unbound scholars can work on religious topics with equal
rights and legitimacy -- so long as their engagements are
clear.
To return to Avon, one might speak here of suspending
not disbelief, as readers of fiction must do, but of temporarily
suspending belief -- in an absolutely contingent way and for
heuristic purposes only, without assuming a foreign subjectposition that requires a decoupling of one’s lived
commitments from one’s scholarly persona and approach.
Perhaps I have arrived at a position not very far from Avon’s,
yet the difference seems important to me: I wear a kippa in
the archive and the library and the classroom; I do not work
or attend meetings or give papers on the sabbath or on
Jewish holidays. I cannot entirely disengage those
commitments from my readings and my interpretations -though as a scholar I feel I must not allow that perspective to
pre-determine my conclusions, to block my vision, or to
disallow particular avenues of research, even if they might
be distasteful or annoying to me. A modest and rather postmodern form of ‘full disclosure’ (à la Hayden White) and a
deliberately artificial ‘suspension of belief’ seem to me a
better path than a universalizing call for methodological
atheism, even as a temporary state.