On the God of the Christians: And on One or Two Others by Rémi Brague (review)

Rémi Brague holds professorial positions at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is perhaps best described as a philosophical theologian and historian of ideas, and has published widely and deeply in these fields, writing mostly in French. A good portion of his work has, during the last two decades, been translated into English, and there are now half-a-dozen books and many essays by him available in that language. The book here under review was published in French in 2009.

The book’s title aptly indicates one of its main themes, which is the deep and distinctive difference between the God of the Christians and other gods, especially the God of Islam. Brague does not like—and wishes to place under the ban—ways of characterizing Christianity and Islam that suggest or imply that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and that they are each monotheistic, Abrahamic, and a people of the Book. Furthermore, he advocates such a ban, sometimes in excitable language, because of deep differences in Christian and Muslim ways of understanding, depicting, and analyzing God.

Brague seems to think that difference in predicatively identifying, describing, and responding to something requires, if it reaches a certain level, the conclusion that what is being identified, described, and responded to is not the same thing. Such difference makes, for example, shared reference impossible. If the predicate list I supply for something I wish to talk about is sufficiently different from the predicate list you supply for something you wish to talk about, the conclusion Brague prefers is that we are not talking about the same thing—that we are not referring to the same thing.

But there are problems here. Imagine the following case. I speak of someone who is female, sixty-eight years old, lives in Bangalore, writes in English, and has published seventy-four essays and thirteen books. You speak of someone who is male, seventy-three years old, lives in Montréal, writes in French, and has published thirty-nine books and more than one hundred essays. The predicates have little in common. It might seem reasonable to say that we are and must be referring to different people because no one person could share this predicate list: the list contains noncompossibles. But a little discussion shows that we each understand ourselves to be speaking about the most eminent living philosopher; that is a description each of us applies to the person thus predicatively identified.

What to say about this? Perhaps that each of us is speaking of (referring to) the most eminent living philosopher, but that one (or both) of us has identified that person wrongly. On this understanding—not one, I think, that Brague would prefer—there is no failure of reference. Rather, there is error, more or less widespread, in specifying the properties belonging to the individual to whom the overarching predicate (‘most eminent living philosopher’) applies. Alternatively, one might say that only one—or perhaps neither—of us is speaking about the most eminent living philosopher, and that failure to do so is guaranteed by a sufficient number of mistakes in the predicate list. That is the line Brague would prefer.

But it is easy enough to see that such an interpretation is not necessary and may be confused. We might, after all, be in substantial agreement as to what it would take to be the most eminent living philosopher. We might, that is, give largely the same sense to that expression, even if we disagree massively as to the particulars of the person who meets the case. And if so, the proper conclusion is not that neither of us is talking about the most eminent living philosopher; it is rather that we are talking about just that person...