460 - Searching in the Syntax of Things: Experiments in the Study of Religion

Searching in the Syntax of Things:
Experiments in the Study of Religion
Essays by Maurice Friedman, T. Patrick Burke, and Samuel Laeuchli
with an introduction by Franklin H. Littell
Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1972. 144 pp. $3.75.

The three members of the Department of Religion at Temple University who have contributed to this volume demonstrate in its pages their understanding of religious study as a genuinely collegial enterprise. Each represents a different religious tradition and a different scholarly orientation. They do not address one another directly; yet they make visible the lively interfaces between their work. The book is a superb expression of a teaching which develops imaginative wonder and reflective self-awareness. The strikingly phrased title with its allusions to exploration, to the verbal, to a phenomenal realm transcending subjectivity, serves to suggest the ambience within which all three essays appear.

Maurice Friedman's essay, "Touchstones of Reality: Toward a Philosophy and Methodology of Religion," is the definitive reworking of a motif that has long been important in his thought. His image of a "touchstone," a concrete event experienced and remembered as talisman of the real, may recall Martin Buber's image of "the Thou," but Friedman's image is his own, forged not only out of his encounter with Buber but also out of his wrestling with many another "nameless messenger." A touchstone is neither simply objective fact nor subjective experience but an actively appropriated event which transforms us and our accustomed way of being in the world. It is an insight which cannot be abstracted from the concretely revealing moment in which it emerged without losing its power. Friedman believes that though many people may live without formal religion or even a defined comprehensive Weltanschauung, none can live without some sort of "touchstone of reality." Each year I wonder how to begin with my introductory students; I alternate between selections from Buber, Tillich, and Eliade. This spring I shall use Maurice Friedman's "Touchstones of Reality."

T. Patrick Burke's essay carefully develops the thesis implicit in his title, "Theology as Part of the Study of the Phenomena of Religion." He proposes that though there are many ways of defining theology, the most useful now is to see its task as that of exploring the vision of life implicit in the central assertions of a

461 - Searching in the Syntax of Things: Experiments in the Study of Religion

particular religious tradition. A statement has religious force only as it functions "importatively" (or, as I would say, transformatively) for an individual believer. Burke has developed a conceptual schema for comparing the life-views implicit in theological assertions. He inquires how a religious tradition defines the principal problem man faces in life, what it proposes as the ideal solution to that problem, and what it has to say about the availability of resources required for that resolution. I find Burke's essay more abstract, less compelling, than Friedman's; be seems too ready to move away from the concrete "touchstones," to see a "factual statement" (a statement about concrete events) as having primarily a "representative character," as standing for "the whole spectrum of possibilities which could have the same meaning" (p. 62).

"The Drama of Replay" is Samuel Laeuchli's account of how he goes about analyzing a document from the past, with the focus on the particular case of seven letters written by Ignatius of Antioch. Laeuchli does not simply talk about the hermeneutical dilemma; we are pulled into experiencing with him the "extraordinary precariousness"-and excitement---"in one individual's or one group's attempts to encounter and understand one another" (p. 72). We feel how deeply our imagination must be engaged in the attempt to recapture the past, acknowledging that the gap cannot wholly be bridged and yet that "there are moments/sometimes/there is magic" (p. 81). As Laeuchli sets forth the methodology involved in trying to reenact the interplay between Ignatius' words and actions, as be demonstrates the ambiguity of all verbal revelation, we discover how truly such replay is itself event. As he moves modestly and carefully first to become self-conscious of his own starting point (culturally, intellectually, personally) and then of Ignatius' multidimensional context, as he examines the confusedly composite heritage of Ignatius' vocabulary, as he looks closely at the texts and the events which we infer as underlying them and also at what happens afterwards, he recalls us to the drama of scholarly inquiry. For me there was magic here, a magic which renewed my enthusiasm for the work I share with all three authors, the study of religion. In recent years much has been written about theology and play. Here, in this essay, we have theology as play, incarnate. As Laeuchli himself tells us, "The historian at his best is homo ludens, man enjoying himself in the exercise of his creativity. I cannot define 'play,' I can only play it. The encounter with Ignatius is play because it invokes and nourishes my imagination; because it leads me into a mimetic attempt at the artistic recreation of human emotions and actions; because it tries to recapture the drama in

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the life experiences, both tragic and comic, of human beings who lived in times and places remote from ours. It is play because it is unpredictable. It is play because I love to do it" (pp. 124f.).

Christine Downing
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey