Kołakowski on the Unity of Religions
I came across Leszek Kołakowski’s Metaphysical Horror (1988) on Five Books where Dr Andrew Brower Latz, the head of philosophy at Manchester Grammar School recommended it as a good book on philosophy for teens. I had read a couple of the other books recommended and thought it might be a relatively easy read, but it’s a pretty dense, albeit short, book. Its fundamental argument is that, at the heart of all reality is nothing, and Kołakowski argues the point in academic language sprinkled with some dry humour. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to teens, but I did find his passing comment on the notion of religions being one well put, so I’m going to quote it at length:
When the romantics and many of their followers in our century - whether religious sages or scholars - repeated, in various versions, William Blake’s saying ‘all religions are one’, they had in mind one of two possible tenets and sometimes were guilty of not distinguishing them clearly from each other.
‘All religions are one’ might mean that there is a stock, however limited, of identifiable and expressible important beliefs which are common to all religions and in which all worshippers recognise themselves. This view, whether right or wrong, implies that religion is a collection of statements of which some really do matter and some do not and that those which matter are included in all the known ‘systems of beliefs’.
The same saying might mean, on the other hand, that all religions are culture-bound expressions of fundamentally the same human experience which, however, can never be uttered in its uncontaminated, original quality, but is disguised in a variety of rites, myths, dogmas, taboos and norms, none of which may aspire to enjoy exclusive validity. The core of religious life is indeed the same, but it is not a core consisting of doctrinal assertions which could be distilled from the countless forms of worship as their unifying principle; once dressed in words this core cannot but belong to a particular civilisation; people from various epochs and various cultural territories may share the same experience but every time they try to give it the proper ‘theoretical’ shape they fail: people from other civilisations do not recognise themselves in this reconstruction.
The first of the two versions is almost certainly wrong. It is most unlikely that one could find a universal dogma of all religions, effectively recognised in all of them, unless it be a vague generality, bordering on meaninglessness, or an uncontroversial platitude. The second version is much more plausible, if not as an empirically or historically provable theory, then as a fertile hermeneutic rule. At any rate it helps us look for and find a community of meaning in disparate and unconnected religious life forms, without pretending that the common meaning, thus discovered, could replace the actual, historically shaped worship. It does not even exclude the prospect, however unlikely and remote, of a universally human religious community which has found a common language of worship; even then, however, the expression of religious experience would still be symbolic and historically relative, for the gap between the actual experience and all our symbolic forms, no matter how rich and widely spread, remains unbridgeable.
I hadn’t come across Kołakowski before, but on the basis of this argument alone, he merits some further investigation.