Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition

Chapter 2. Submissiveness, Emotion, and Knowledge

2. Submissiveness, Emotion, and Knowledge If the perennial orientation toward Beauty and Sanctity, as the expression of the human aspiration to survival and happiness, is translated into modern terms, it is inseparable from the idea of nation as the consciousness of social affiliation. With this consciousness, individual aspiration, expressed in a specific language, simply means that the Divine Unicity is reduced to being in and with the nation. Alterity, particularly the alterity with which such a nation is in direct contact, must then be experienced , understood and interpreted as lesser and weaker in principle, in consequence of its being separated from the true God. To see how that perennial loss of contact with Transcendence and the consequent understanding of ‘‘one’s own nation’’ as a higher value are expressed through the Bosnian experience, we must focus on how the modern antiBosnian ventures have been articulated. The programs of both Serbian and Croatian nation-states were established over the last two centuries and developed within the framework of two multinational empires—the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. The question of demarcation and separation from the Other became central to both programs, the first of which is fundamentally connected with Eastern Orthodox and the second with Roman Catholic Christianity . Both of them attempt to demarcate and separate people on this basis, and both find in Bosnia elements of the population that can be claimed for inclusion in their presumed ethnoreligious entities. For its part, Bosnia’s population is mixed—it is formed not only of members of these two ethnic groups but also includes a Muslim population. 28 / Learning from Bosnia This mixed structure existed in premodern times as a society marked by the consciousness of interrelatedness, friendship, and confidence, bases for tolerance that, as we have seen, are grounded in the individual sacred traditions. They operate within and from the interiority, exclusivity , and completeness of each individual sacred tradition, but find justification for the existence of the Other and the different in the Unicity of God, Who manifests Himself in these different forms of the tradition . These very elements of social cohesion were identified by the proponents of the respective ethnonational programs as essential obstacles to the attainment of their set goals. Mixed societies based on friendship, confidence, and trust stand in the way of the demarcation of ethnoreligious territories. In this context, the call for liberation from imperial rule became associated with the struggle for ethnonational recognition, in which, in line with the differentiation and antagonism between the traditional and the modern worldview, there is a denial, directly or indirectly , of the human individual’s awareness of itself and the world as the manifestation of the Divine Word. In this mental world, reason acquires a different role, by which the diverse potentials of human existence are seen solely as erroneous beliefs to be surmounted in the course of ‘‘historical development.’’ In this struggle, the elemental ‘‘Other’’ becomes those who are closest to the adopted ethnoreligious identity, those who are only slightly different. If religious traditions, however, remain true to the openness of the human individual to eternity and infinity, they will resist the reduction of difference to an ideologized ethnonational program, whose aim is demarcation, a redrawing of borders. In an authentic traditional outlook, denial and exclusion of the Other are impossible without simultaneously relinquishing the openness of the self to the Absolute. Any revolt against others who define their relationship with God in a different way is at the same time a revolt against God. The fact that human salvation from disease and death lies beyond the quantifiable world demands speech and commandments from humankind that bear witness to its openness to Infinity and Eternity. To regard or treat life in an irresponsible manner is grehota, which extends to both the Beginning and the End. Whenever there is the desire to remake God into ‘‘Our God,’’ with the concomitant denial that He is also the God of the Other, of all others, God is Himself repudiated, and turned into an idol. This idol then demands the exclusion of everyone in the secular order, Submissiveness, Emotion, and Knowledge / 29 of which the false god itself is the measure, who does not accept this equation and interpretation of the truth; this is what happens whenever religion is co-opted as a means in a national ideology. Then the testimony...