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2018 Common Knowledge
Marginality in philosophy can be active or reactive. Marginality is reactive when it is a reaction to domination, imposed by force, and resented. Reactive marginality chases the legitimacy of the center. It would happily reconstitute as a tolerated specialization. Active marginality flees normalization. When a paradigm approaches, it moves elsewhere. Active marginality colonizes the margins, which for it are a position of strength or at least creativity. The author suggests that philosophers disabuse themselves of the notion that there is a special work of theirs where knowledge is difficult but of inestimable value. Our best work is on the margins of sense. This conclusion is elaborated with a look at recent work in “philosophical anthropology” and “anthropological philosophy” associated with the so-called ontological turn in anthropology.
2018 Common Knowledge
In 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took the occasion of his last homily before election as Pope Benedict XVI to assault what he termed the “dictatorship of relativism,” and Common Knowledge responded in 2007 with a double issue (vol. 13, nos. 2–3) in defense of relativism. Yaakov Mascetti’s guest column revisits that controversy through a historical and theological reading of the ecclesiological conceptions of Ratzinger and his successor Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis). Ratzinger’s Platonism and his idealist, Christocentric ecclesiology is posed against Bergoglio’s Aristotelianism and his pneumatological realism about the church under postmodern conditions of rapid change and radical diversity. While Ratzinger fears that nonfoundational thought will result in the dictatorial imposition of successively less defensible and lasting sorts of order, for Bergoglio the problem is trivialization: a “kind of thought that banalizes everything.” For Bergoglio, both the rapid change that relativistic thinking can occasion and the fear of such change are banal, given that the church and the world are in the hands of the Holy Spirit, whose intent is to multiply diversity, so that the fullness of God’s infinite creativity is realized, and to draw out of that fullness a kind of unity that only the Spirit can devise. In contrast to the fixity of Ratzinger’s Platonic ideal of the church as Eucharistic body of Christ, the model that Bergoglio proposes is purposively unstable in pursuit of a unity that human effort is unable to envision and provide.
2018 Common Knowledge
In his introduction to the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia (vol. 24, no. 1), the journal’s editor, Jeffrey M. Perl, writes about exopraxis and xenophilia, giving as an example of their convergence a Muslim student’s practice of confessing to a Catholic priest in Akko, Israel. Here, in the fourth symposium installment, Benoît Fliche joins Perl in a dialogue about the nature of Muslim exopractical experience in the Mediterranean area. Fliche suggests that one should speak, when dealing with exopraxis, not of the love of difference but of an indifference to it and supports his argument by demonstrating—based on his study of 2,600 Muslim votive messages left at the Church of Saint Anthony of Padua in Istanbul—that the logic of exopraxis depends not on hospitality, affection, syncretism, or tolerance, but on a capacity to benefit from difference without acknowledging its presence. Perl responds that, if indifference is defined as not noticing or not caring about differences, then indifference should rank higher than xenophilia in a hierarchy of irenic affects. A Muslim’s liking for Christianity could lead to conversion, and conversion presupposes that Islam and Christianity are at odds; the convert would be changing sides in an ongoing conflict. Indifference, on the other hand, presupposes that the differences between the two religions traditions are insignificant.
2018 Common Knowledge
Five illustrations of exceptional instances of Muslim philo-Semitism are presented in this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia. The first appears in a responsum of the fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi Isaac Ben Sheshet dealing with the Muslim admission of Jewish refugees into Algiers, thanks to intervention of the local qadi. The second concerns instructions given by the sixteenth-century Egyptian Sufi master al-Sha’rani to his disciples never to harm a dhimmi (that is, a Jew or Christian, especially one who is observant of his own religion). The third instance, a text on “the nobility of the Israelites,” was written by an Islamic scholar from Fez, Mahammad Ibn Zikri (c. 1665 – 1731). Ahmad al-Tijani (eighteenth century), another Sufi master, explains in a fourth text how all non-Muslims and even idol worshippers are embraced by God’s all-inclusive love. An afterword narrates how the grand mufti of Rhodes saved the local Jewish community’s Torah scrolls from the Nazis.
2018 Common Knowledge
Some of the nineteenth century’s foremost scholars of the Qur’an and hadiths were German and Hungarian Jews. For many of them, their scholarly interest in Islam was entangled with their contemporary concerns about movements of reform and emancipation in European Jewry and about the history of Jews’ relations with Christians and Muslims. Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of the reform movement, which sought to modernize Judaism by simplifying its ritual and making it more amenable to European society, was also a scholar of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Geiger presented Muhammad as a brilliant reformer who had learned his monotheism from Talmudic scholars and subsequently adapted it to his Arab audience. Geiger’s Muhammad was in essence a Jewish reformer: not strictly a Jew, to be sure, but nonetheless a better Jew than Geiger’s Orthodox Jewish critics. Other Jewish scholars (in particular, Gustav Weil and Ignác Goldziher) embraced and refined this image of the Muslim prophet as a model for Jewish reform.
2018 Common Knowledge
William Wallace (1863–1922) came to India as an Evangelical Anglican missionary, worked in the Calcutta region from 1889 to 1896, and quickly became disillusioned about the missionary approach and the fruits of missionary activity. After his initial stay of seven years in India, he returned to England, then moved back to Ireland where he had been born, and, after much discernment, converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Jesuit. He returned to India as a Jesuit missionary in 1901. In his remarkable though neglected autobiography, From Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East (1923), he recounts his journey to Catholicism, showing how it was driven by an ever-deepening appreciation for Hinduism, which, by his teaching and his largely unpublished writings, shaped the history of Western Jesuits in India in the twentieth century. We see a complicated xenophilia at work in this man who loves the religion of the other (Hinduism) in proportion to his disillusionment with his own religion (Anglicanism), leading not to a (for him impossible) conversion to Hinduism, but rather to a different form of Christianity (Roman Catholicism).
2018 Common Knowledge
Partly autobiographical, partly comparative, partly theoretical, this essay uses the idea of the footprint to explore the concept of xenophilia. The author first describes how the field of European medieval history has changed since the 1960s, when the period 500–1500 in Western Europe seemed to graduate students to represent a kind of “other.” Recently the European Middle Ages has come to seem familiar, and medievalists, still in search of the unfamiliar, have reached beyond the borders of Western Europe and the type of documents traditionally studied to research new regions and to study objects as well as texts. This curiosity has led the author herself to draw comparisons between Indian culture, especially Hinduism, and European Christianity, thereby raising questions about what constitutes good comparative study. Interrogating the nature of comparison, especially through an exploration of religious objects, Bynum explores recent work on the devotional significance of the footprint, using as her detailed example the footprint of Christ supposedly left on the Mount of Olives and revered by Christians and Muslims. She discusses how the power of this footprint was transported to Europe both in relics acquired from the site and in measurements of its length. The footprint, which is both part and whole, both the presence and the absence of the one who leaves it, provides insight into and elaboration of what trace or vestige means to cultural theorists. It therefore sums up the acute awareness of presence and absence that xenophilia requires.