Religious Quest

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

T he terrorists who crashed those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon saw themselves as religious martyrs. We have proof of that in the literature left behind by one of them in a car that he took to the airport, urging him to think of the paradise that awaited him and to not be afraid of death. But rather than face it as such, all kinds of ways were found to avoid the issue. It was said that the terrorists were not authentically religious; that they were using religion to justify their hatred, or that they were just completely insane.
Religious people went out of the way to insist that this kind of behavior is absolutely incompatible with any authentic religion, even more so of Islam, to which the terrorists appealed to justify their acts. But that is not the question. The question is not why religion was being used to justify the hatred behind such acts; the question is about the religious nature of the hatred itself. This is what many had trouble facing. Instead, the deepest level of understanding sought was, as usual, the psychological, or maybe even the “philosophical”–in particular, the conflict between views about freedom and human rights.

There is absolutely nothing that anyone did at any time that justifies the death of a single innocent person, not to mention over 6,000. Such a suggestion is obscene. We must also reject the simplistic view that God allowed what happened on September 11th to awaken us to our culture's offenses against life and human nature. I don't know how we can say things like that and not see ourselves in the company of those theologians and religious friends of Job who tried to explain to him the reason for his sufferings. God, remember, rejected their arguments and offered Job no explanation for what had happened. Instead, he asked him questions that led Job to recognize that his true need was to know that God had not rejected him, that He had not broken His covenant with His people. Anything else was beyond his power of understanding, and he was happy to recognize that God would always be a Mystery beyond human comprehension. What mattered was to know that this Mystery was not his enemy. In the New Testament, Jesus also rejected a direct connection between tragedy (for example, the fall of the Tower of Shiloh) and the sins of the people. The link between suffering and sin lies in the wound inflicted on the human religious quest by original sin.

The journalist Andrew Sullivan also recognized the religious nature of the terrorist attack in an article in The New York Times Magazine. Sullivan recognizes that there is something inherent to the religious quest that is profoundly dangerous. He sees the problem as the quest for an ultimate–and, therefore, absolute–truth, the search for an “all-explaining” reality. The danger comes from thinking that one has found it, that one has grasped the Mystery. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are particularly prone to this danger because each one of them believes that the Mystery has somehow become tied to a reality in this world: to a people and the Law in Judaism, to a Church and/or the Bible for Christians, and to the Islamic State and the Koran in Islam. Of these three, Sullivan considers Islam as more prone to this danger because it has not gone through the evolution of modernity, namely, the secularist appeal to reasonable consensus as the test of the legitimate exercise of power. Those who fail this test are “fundamentalists,” and Islamic fundamentalism is no different from that of Christians and Jews. The real war that we are facing, he says, is not between religion and unbelief, but between religious fundamentalism and a faith that has embraced the tolerance required by reason. The United States, precisely as the most religious country in the world, is thus the very embodiment of religious tolerance that fundamentalists see as the enemy of God's authority over humankind.
The problem with this view is that reason has not been able to eliminate intolerance in modernity; indeed, many of its horrors have been performed in the name of a reason that became ideology.
We cannot speak for Judaism and Islam, but in the Christian faith, there is only one way to avoid this danger, and it is to make sure that only the person of Jesus Christ crucified and risen be the object of our faith, that our faith be the acknowledgment of his Presence as the incarnation of the Mystery sought by the quest for the Absolute. For this to happen, however, the encounter with Christ must be recognized to be the fruit of grace and mercy and not of any merit or effort on our part. When faith is seen as a gift of grace, no one will be considered an “enemy of God,” since grace does not depend on anything we can do. Like St Augustine, we will see each one in the City of Man as unworthy of grace as we are, looking at them as potential brothers and sisters in Christ (cf. De Civitate Dei, I, 35-36), appreciating with sympathy and understanding their efforts to find the happiness that their hearts desire, hoping and praying that they be embraced by God's grace in Christ, confident that sin is not what defines humanity.

Instead, we are defined by Christ's death and resurrection. This event, present in human history through the ministry of the Church, is the rock against which all human violence–in the name of goodness, justice, and religion–will crash.