Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason

Notes

1. Monotheism, Tolerance, and Pluralism 1. I employ the term ‘Other’ to denote a person who is different from oneself in regard to culture and especially religion, such that an encounter with her merits a response involving toleration and/or pluralism. It is important to be clear that by such phrases as ‘the otherness of the Other’ I primarily mean religious difference, which should be distinguished from the notion of alterity as it is commonly understood in current discussions in Continental philosophy—not that such notions are unrelated, but the two conceptions of ‘the Other’ are not interchangeable. 2. As will become evident, I follow Martin Jaffee’s argument in “One God, One Revelation, One People: On the symbolic Structure of Elective Monotheism,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 69, no. 4 (December 2001): 753–775, that “Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are equally rich, historical embodiments of a single structure of discourse that underlies the historically developed symbol systems specific to each community” (757). This will be discussed in more detail in the section on monotheism below. 3. As will become apparent shortly, while the term ‘intolerance’ maintains a negative valence in common parlance, I use it here in a very specific sense that is intended to be free of any pejorative resonance. Indeed, I deliberately use this term as a way of calling attention to certain assumptions in the discourse surrounding tolerance and pluralism, which I will illuminate shortly. 4. For an important account of the ideological assumptions of early German biblical criticism and theology see Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For a recent account of early Christianity that explodes such universalist presumptions, see Denise Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 5. While some scholars such as Nick Fotion and Gerard Elfstrom, in their book Toleration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), subtly differentiate between ‘tolerance’ and ‘toleration’ (10), it is also common to use these terms interchangeably, as is the case in the collection edited by David Heyd, Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 17 n. 1. In the present work, I will use the terms interchangeably. And I should clarify that when I speak of a certain blindness or uncritical character of the discourse surrounding tolerance and pluralism, I certainly do not include the philosophers I am discussing in this section. If anything they help us to see what these principles entail. Rather, my critique is aimed more squarely at liberal and secularist discussions (inside and outside the academy) which champion these principles without giving careful consideration to their costs. 6. There is a ubiquitous trope in the scholarly literatures on tolerance termed ‘the paradox of toleration.’ This phrase refers to the paradoxical nature of tolerance when it is viewed as a moral good. If viewed as a moral virtue, tolerance is that virtue which can only be practiced by suppressing other moral virtues, i.e., notes 184   |   Notes to Pages 7–10 those which would entail expressing disapproval of what one considers to be nonvirtuous behavior in the Other. For a clear account of the ‘paradox of toleration,’ see Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), 19. 7. To be sure, I am talking about what philosophers would call cases of ‘strong’ tolerance, where moral disapproval is involved, as opposed to cases of ‘weak’ tolerance , where the concerns involve matters of cultural etiquette or subjective preference rather than issues possessing moral overtones. However, the distinction between what constitutes a situation requiring ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ tolerance is not always easy to assess, given that cultural and religious norms possess moral overtones . I will simply skirt this murky issue by asserting that only cases of strong tolerance are relevant for this project. Therefore whenever I say ‘tolerance,’ strong tolerance is implied. 8. Thomas Scanlon, “The Difficulty of Tolerance,” in Tolerance: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd, 226. 9. See Jay Newman, Foundations of Religious Tolerance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 8–9; Fotion and Elfstrom, Toleration, 61. 10. Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6. 11. To be sure, Zagorin answers this question in the form of an in-depth historical reconstruction of the emergence of the idea of religious freedom/tolerance (the two are inextricably bound up for him) from the...