I have often made the assertion that liberalism and militant
Islam share certain philosophical premises, making them both different
manifestations at opposite extremes of a dark theology. Such an assertion is greeted with bemused
looks, amusement and confusion. Here is
one more attempt to say what I mean.
Liberal reductionism
On the face of it, liberalism and militant Islam could not
be more different. The former represents
individualistic freedom, the latter oppression of the individual by a
patriarchal theocracy. Nonetheless, the
strange fact about these two ideologies is their common ontological root. Both operate in an amoral universe, where in
effect might is right. The difference is
not so much in their ontology as in where they place authority.
Of course militant Islam usually emerges in more tribal and
traditionalist societies. Nonetheless,
as we saw in Timbuctoo or indeed with the Buddhist sculptures in Afghanistan,
tradition and history are not safe in the hands of the radical Islamist. He is a revolutionary and he is such because
he has no sense of participation in a telos of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. There is not the emphasis in Islam and
especially not in militant Islam on Man as being made in the image of God with
the potential for participation in the Divine.
This of course has implications not only for iconography, but how we treat
humans as the ultimate icons of the Divine.
It deprives us of the foresight to recognise that Man’s telos is to participate
in the Divine. Rather than a dynamic
participation in divine love we find in both systems a legalistic framework – at
each end of the spectrum, one focusing on rights, the other on restrictions:
but legalism as the answer in both cases.
It must at the outset be acknowledged that while liberalism
has a brutal and dark side with regard to abortion, euthanasia and suicide, most
people in liberal societies are not living under a regime that will exercise
power with such brutality as the Taliban or Islamic State. The purpose here is not to relativise all
perspectives, but point to some common roots that explain why liberalism is not
enough in itself to resist militant Islam.
Enlightenment values will not do; it is a rediscovery of real Christian
values that will protect the West.
Indeed in the liberal respect for the individual there is a hint of
Christian sanctity of life, but the idea of the human being has been hideously
distorted and reduced by the philosophical twists and turns of Western thought.
Despite a chasm in policy differences with Islam, fundamentally,
liberalism, with its roots in English Puritanism, like militant Islam, has an
amoral and reductive view of humanity.
Despots are the Hobbesian alternative to the sovereign individual. Individuals are all potential despots who
have no telos of participation in the divine; they are simply permitted to be
despots or caliphs, so to speak, in the realm of their own private domain. The ontology of power and sovereignty is
addressed in a different way from Islam, but it still boils down to power and
sovereignty. Liberalism is a political
way to manage a world that is just about will and power, with no higher
purpose. Militant Islam makes a religion
of will and power.
This tendency in liberalism is in part likely due to the dim
view that Puritans took of human nature, with an over-emphasis on original
sin. People had to be managed in a
punitive way for a functioning society it was assumed. The liberal perspective is also due to other broader
religious influences, in particular that of the Franciscan theologians of the Thirteenth
and Fourteenth Centuries in Britain – men such as Dun Scotus and William of Ockham.
The Franciscan School and Islamic Influence
The Scottish Dun Scotus is responsible for the theory of
univocity of Being, failing as with all Roman Catholic theologians to
distinguish between essence and energy.
For Dun Scotus God was not fundamentally different ontologically, but
the ultimate form of Being. This differs
from Thomism with its analogy to the unknowable God and also Orthodoxy where
God is knowable in His energies, not His essence. As Anglican theologian John Milbank has
pointed out, in this view, men in God’s image were able to become omnipotent
rulers in their own domain, like the omnipotent Godhead. Individuals free to dispose of their property
and even their bodies as they wished.
We cannot rely on Milbank very far, as being a Thomist he
too fails to distinguish between energy and essence. Instead he hides God away entirely as an
unreachable and unknowable Being – the mistake that Saint Gregory of Palamas once pointed out would lead the West to atheism.
Combined with the Scottish -Franciscan Duns Scotus’s idea of
univocity of Being and haecceity of things (all being particular and
individually complete) we have the English-Franciscan William of Ockham. With his rejection of universals there was
nothing at the metaphysical level to participate in. He denied the reality of generals and
universals, reducing them to mere names or constructs. Thus Man in the image of God was denied his
telos to be spiritually transformed.
It is no accident that this stripping Man of his reflecting
the Divine glory and denying him the possibility of true theosis is similar to
an Islamic view. Undoubtedly Islam has strong neoplatonic tendencies, with the Monad, the geometrical art and yet the interactoin between West and East led to a loss of understanding of participation. Thinkers such as Duns
Scotus and William of Ockham were heavily reliant upon the interpretation of
Aristotle by Islamic theologian Averroes, who had rejected any neo-Platonic
leanings of participation in Forms in Islamic teaching in favour instead of an
entirely reductive and nominalist perspective.
Here then European Man in his denuded and materialistic form is very
similar to the Islamic Man, who probably was not even made in the image of God
and has no telos of theosis, because Allah is far beyond us.
Arbitrary Voluntarism
In effect this means that both Europeans and Moslems are
living in an arbitrary world where their purpose is exercise of power – either on
behalf of themselves or a despotic God.
The difference is where power lies.
For the Europeans it is found to reside in the individual and laws
protect that individual unit. For
Muslims it lies with an arbitrary and unknowable divine power and Shariah law
enforces that Divine Will.
There is another factor here common to both Islamic and
secular Western thought – voluntarism, from the Latin for will. It is the sovereign exercise of the
will. Now Islam and liberalism differ in
who exercises the will – the individual or Allah, but still will is the source
of Right.
The atomistic individual of the West and the Monad of Islam
have a key characteristic in common: their non-relational aspect. The God of Islam is an Ultimate Individual –
self-contained, sovereign and arbitrary in his exercise of power. He is the Monad. The Western individual has
complete sovereignty over his acts and is not a part of an organic whole, like
many, many monads. Neither of them can
relate to God in a transformative way, participating in the energy of God. He is unknowable and beyond us.
The Christian Answer of Freedom in Love
Contrast this with Eastern Christian theology. As theologian Christos Yannaras has pointed
out, in a reflection of the Trinity as inter-relational hypostases, human beings
are human through relating, through love.
We relate both to God and to our neighbours. We are not atomistic individuals, but
relational personalities. This is where
Orthodox Christianity differs fundamentally from both liberalism and Islam. Man remains the relational image of God
imbued with the possibility through love of transformation. A latent telos though is not compatible with
voluntarist sovereignty, whether that sovereignty simply be over oneself or
over others. To be one’s own master as
with the liberal is to deny any higher purpose for which one exists. Meanwhile, the Muslim is unable to
participate in a God because of an ontological chasm between Himself and His creation. Both the liberal and the Muslim live in a
sort of random space, made secure through enforced laws.
Participation in the Good requires there to be more than
mere will and power. Liberalism’s alternative
to the despotic God of Islam is to turn each of us into individual despots,
within our own boundaries. This is not a
positive alternative to militant and political Islam. It has already conceded the ontological field
of Being to a random exercise of will through power. Many in the West contrast our culture with
Islamic extremism and the surface differences are very apparent. Nonetheless, we will not be able to resist
their powerful and militant aggression without a fundamentally positive
assertion that human beings have a meaning and telos beyond subjugation. Freedom used merely to exercise sovereignty
over my own domain is no real freedom of possibilities. To reassert a positive view of humanity
requires rediscovery of a positive theology that regards the human being as a
relational personality – a sacred icon of the Divine. The icon has the potential and the
possibility to reflect its Creator through Goodness and Love. Neither liberalism nor Islam has this
positive view of the human being.
Liberalism will not defeat militant Islam, because it is atomised
negativity in the face of collective negativity.
Political Implications
The key difference between liberalism and militant Islam is
how liberalism diffuses the exercise of power to the atom of society, the individual. That same power is exercised at a collective
level in the militant Islamic society, making it more effective in a clash of
wills. Individualism, with more
spontaneity and innovation, produces more wealth and technology, but not the
fanatical fighting spirit of the collective will. Neither option gives human beings true
freedom – the freedom to be a whole person through love rather than domination.
The answer for both the West and the East is indeed the freedom to realise our telos, the
participation in the Divine through the God-Man. This cannot be forced upon people or sold to
people like a product. It has to be
lived as the Body of Christ in community.
In terms of politics what does this mean? It means an openness in political systems to
that freedom. This question asked of
those political systems that suppress the possibility of theosis whether by
political correctness and secularist institutions or violent oppression in a
theocracy does not change the Church, which has often grown through the blood of
martyrs or in the catacombs. It is
rather a question asked of Political Islam and Liberalism - whether they have yet
participated in supporting such a freedom to be truly human, or instead striven,
kicking against the pricks, to hinder and remove this freedom. In effect this would mean treating every human
being as an icon of God. There is the same onus upon liberal and Islamist to
honour the real freedom, the freedom that matters.
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