The recent murder is confirming France in its laïcité, some say (and so The Economist reports). Yet theology is where we work out which formulations of dogma make sense. More, not less theology is the answer to beliefs which will not go away.
Chrêtien de Chergé, whom Islamists slew in Algeria (and about whom the film Of Gods And Men was made), wrote that God is unlike “all the others”, “autrement que tous les autres”. Even if you define “being” in such a way that God is “the perfect being”, God is not on a continuum with creatures. He is the wholly other, “le Tout-autre”.
Most theology works by words which indicate things, but God is unlike anything. Chergé suggests that we may find God in our disagreements, still more than our identity statements. When he was a child, he had asked his mother who some people were whom they passed and what they were doing. She did not say, “They are Muslims”; she said, “they are praying”. “Ils sont priants.” This made the young Chrêtien want to become “priant parmi les priants”, “a pray-er among pray-ers”.
His mother might so easily have said, “Ils sont Musulmans”. The boy might so naturally have concluded, “Oh well – we are not.” These are the forces that make people dogmatic. Genuinely prayerful theology is always passing on from what it says because no one statement is quite enough to signify God. It constantly qualifies dogmatism, even as it tries to understand dogma. But as Br Adrien Candiard has written in La Croix, “Je ne suis pas propriétaire de Dieu.” “We” – whoever we think we are – do not own Him. As a Sikh prayer says, “I pray to God, who has no need of help.”
Of course there are dangers in this approach, because there are uncertainties. Yet that is the point. It is an approach. It sees words as signs, not as things. Only part of their significance is the meaning they point back towards: the rest of the point of words is that they point the way, and in Chergé”s theology it is a dialogue of differences, in which all parties see the ways in which they have missed the way, which can show the way through. If this sounds rather mystical, well: it is the work of a Trappist. Words are for the process of prayer, they are not for commodification and entrenchment. We should not make a fetish of words: to do so actually is not faithful.
It needs thinking about. Two immediate conclusions, however, could be suggested. First, secularism or laïcité is not our way forward; neither contempt for religions or secular people can be that way. Second, teaching Religious Studies as lists of contents and debating positions which must be memorised and regurgitated exactly does no service to religion. Neither the secularists nor the religious schools have got this one right. They are calling this murder, “medieval”, but there was more freedom of religious thought in the thirteenth century than the schools of this society, while the first beheadings in French Algeria were executed by the French invader.
No approach; no rapprochement. A ban on theology will mean no end of dogmatism.
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