maanantai 22. tammikuuta 2018

Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais: Essay on indifference in matters of religion, volume III

Lamennais’ argument for taking Christianity as the true religion was based on four characteristics the true religion should have: unity, universality, perpetuity and sanctity. I talked about Lamennais’ case for the unity of (Catholic) Christianity, which meant essentially just that Christianity did not tolerate any other religions. Even if we accepted such intolerance as a characteristic of the supposed one true religion, the problem is that many other religions share the same characteristic.

Lamennais’ case for the universality of Christianity is based on an almost opposite justification, namely, on the supposed similarity of aspects of other religions with some dogmas of Christianity. Lamennais goes to great lengths in quoting authorities on other religions to show that e.g. belief in one divine creator and an idea about an upcoming savior are accepted throughout the world. Lamennais wants to say that other religions are mere modifications of Christianity and its dogmas. The obvious problem with this line of attack is that one might think Christianity itself is just a modification of the true religion, which might be one of the other religions having these supposedly universal characteristics. This problem is augmented by the fact that some distinctly Christian dogmas, such as trinity or incarnation, are not as universally accepted.

If by universality Lamennais tried to emphasise that Christian dogmas could be found all around the globe, by persistence he meant to say that Christianity, in one of its forms, could be found at all times. This characteristic tied in with Lamennais’ insistence on a chain of authority running through the Catholic tradition, all the way to the supposed creation of humankind. In fact, Lamennais even stated that such a chain could be found in other traditions and noted that many religious thinkers and philosophers emphasised the ancient religious customs as the purest and most suitable for worship of divine. In case of these other traditions, this chain just had at some point broken, by idolatry and materialistic philosophy.

Lamennais’ case for the perseverance of Christianity is, of course, based strongly on the assumption that Bible is a reliable history. We obviously cannot expect that Lamennais would have had any idea of the future findings of archaeology, which make it rather clear that many Bible stories cannot be literally true - e.g. there probably was no great migration of Hebrew nation from Egypt. Even so, many of his arguments for the reliability of Bible are quite full of holes. For instance, Lamennais finds it unconvincing that Jewish nation would have suddenly forgotten its history, when it had been handed from parents to children in an unbroken succession. The obvious problem here is that even if this line would be unbroken, the message might well change, like in a game of Chinese whispers. Indeed, Lamennais notes this possibility in case of e.g. Indian traditions, which shows a clear double standard on his part.

Just as unconvincing as Lamennais’ defence of the reliability of Bible is his defense of Biblical prophecies, especially of those that have concerned events which are now past - because these prophecies came to be true, Lamennais thinks that we can trust that the other prophecies will also. The clear problem is that Lamennais takes it as granted that these prophecies derive from the era of the supposed author of the texts, for instance, that the prophecies of Daniel concerning the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms were reported at a period before these risings and falling had occurred. Yet, one might well make the assumption that such prophecies were actually written after the events mentioned, and in fact, in case of Daniel’s prophecies, it seems clear that their author knows much more about this future history than about the time when Daniel was supposed to live.

The unreliability of Bible in general and prophecies in particular affects also Lamennais’ case for the fourth characteristic of the true religion or sanctity - that is, if Bible and prophecies are full of falsities, it makes it questionable that they and Christianity as a whole would be divinely inspired. We shall return in more detail to the case of the sanctity of Christianity in the next and final post on Lamennais’ work.

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