Psychologies Magazine, May 2001 —
The visit that John Paul II is scheduled to make on May 5, barefoot, to the Great Mosque of Damascus is a historic event. After having already visited the Great Synagogue of Rome at the beginning of his pontificate, this move by the Pope represents a further step in the rapprochement between religions. Whether one is a believer or not, one can only applaud. After centuries of war and contempt, religions are finally learning to know one another and to dialogue.
This change in attitude is fairly recent. My grandmother, a devout Catholic, confided in me that she was taught as a child that all unbaptized people were doomed to the flames of hell. The advent of the global village and the intermingling of cultures have obviously rendered this kind of narrow belief obsolete for most people. Moreover, no institution holds such a view anymore, and interfaith meetings are on the rise.
Does this mean that religions, at least in the West, have become tolerant? In the political sense of the term, yes. In our pluralist democracies, no religious community is tempted to impose a kind of "sharia" and all tolerate the presence of competing religions. But as Kant pointed out, the political legitimacy of tolerance can be separated from the moral commitment to tolerance. In other words, is it enough to be politically tolerant to be morally tolerant?
Taken to its logical conclusion, tolerance is an ethical virtue that combines the strength of convictions with respect for others. It is no longer simply a matter of stating one's truths with indifference or contempt for the beliefs of others, but of arguing with others in the shared concern to seek what is good and what is true. Let us be clear. It is natural for every believer to adhere to what seems most true to him. This is the definition of faith. No one would dream of criticizing a Jew for being convinced of the necessity of observing the Torah, a Muslim for the five pillars of Islam, or a Buddhist for meditation. But we are seeing a profound divide emerging between believers who believe they possess a complete and universal truth and those who recognize that every truth, even their own, is relative.
For the former, dialogue is a purely formal act, since the other, who adheres to "an inferior truth," cannot enrich them in any way. The latter admit, on the contrary, that what is best for them is not necessarily so for others. They therefore conceive of religious dialogue as "an exchange of treasures." This divide runs through all religious communities. Some Catholic theologians, for example, advocate a pluralist theology of religions. They are in Rome's sights. For while reaching out to other religions through strong symbolic gestures, John Paul II, like his predecessors, addresses the world as the holder of a universal, eternal, and immutable truth, and hierarchizes human beliefs and values by proposing to educate them. "One cannot dialogue with Catholics because they know," said Merleau-Ponty.
Among Buddhists, the trend is rather the opposite. While there are small groups that advocate the absolute superiority of "dharma" over other spiritual currents, the Dalai Lama clearly states: "In this world, there is no universal truth. The same truth can take on different faces. It depends on the decodings made through our intellectual, philosophical, cultural, and religious prisms." This conception echoes that of the Jewish Kabbalists, for whom all religions carry a spark of truth. None possesses it in its entirety because God, in this world, has a thousand faces.
“Rabbi, rabbi, why are all men different?” the child asks.
“Because they are all made in the image of God.”
May 2001