The Philosophical Itinerary of Roger Garaudy

8/3/2019 The Philosophical Itinerary of Roger Garaudy

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The philosophical itinerary of Roger Garaudy

FROM MARXISM TO ISLAM: THE PHILOSOPHICAL ITINERARY OF ROGERGARAUDY

By:Neal Robinson

Yahde 'llahu li-nuri-hi man yasha, "Allah guides to his light whomsoever he wills"(Qur'an 24:35). At

the level of secondary causes, however, there are many reasons why a Western intellectual might

embrace Islam. In the case of the French Marxist philosopher Roger Garaudy, who was born in 1914and converted in 1982 when he was 68 years old, the key factors were arguably his conviction that

Western society is based on a false understanding of man, and his own life-long quest for

transcendence. That is the view which will be taken in the present paper. Nevertheless, other factors

undoubtedly played a part. Some of them will be reviewed briefly by way of introduction.

Factors which played a part in Garaudy's conversion

During the Second World War, Garaudy was interned with other Communists and spent nearly threeyears in prison camps in North Africa. On one occasion, when he was in a camp in Djelfa in southern

Algeria, he and his fellow prisoners were saved from summary execution because the Arab guards

defied orders to shoot them. He subsequently learned that they owed their lives to the fact that the

guards were Ibadi Muslims whose religion forbade them to fire at unarmed men. Their unconditional

obedience to a higher authority than their French commandant deeply impressed him and prepared theground for his conversion over forty years later.

In Garaudy's earliest account of the above-mentioned incident, however, his discovery of the

transcendent values of Islam is overshadowed by his recollection of the feeling of elation caused by the

group solidarity of the prisoners and their fraternal relations with the guards. He actually describes the

whole affair as his first experience of militant action. This leads me to mention a second important

factor in his conversion, namely his commitment to revolution. Garaudy returned from the war firedwith revolutionary ardour. In 1948, he led the sixty-day miners' strike in Carmaux. In 1962, he visited

Cuba at the invitation of President Castro. In 1968, he was vocal in support of the student uprisings in

Paris. Inevitably, Islam's power to mobilise the masses in the Iranian revolution of 1979 fascinated and

attracted him.Ayatollah Khomeini dubbed America 'the Great Satan' and was equally outspoken in his opposition to

Israel. Garaudy's own intense dislike of the USA dates back to 1966, if not further. In that year he wentto Missouri to give a lecture, and the American Legion organised a campaign against him declaring

that his presence was 'an insult to God, the flag and our troops in Vietnam. ' I have been unable to find

early evidence of his anti-Zionism, but this may be taken as read, because the official line of the

Communist Party has always been that the founding of the modern state of Israel was an exercise in

Western neo-colonialism. In 1982, together with Fr. Lelong and Pastor Matthiot, Garaudy paid to havea full-page article in the French daily newspaperLe Monde. In the article, which appeared on 17 June,

the authors argued that the recent massacres in the Lebanon, far from being an unfortunate mistake,

were consistent with the internal logic of political Zionism. As a result of this, Garaudy received

several anonymous death threats and was widely ostracised. A fortnight later, he converted to Islam.

Although he had been contemplating doing so for some time, we may surmise that the support that he

received from Muslims who endorsed his criticism of Israel gave him additional impetus.Garaudy's fellow contributors toLe Monde were a Catholic priest and a Protestant clergyman. In the

1960s, when he was still a member of the Communist party, he had been active in Marxist-Christian

dialogue. After his expulsion from the Party in 1970, for stating that Russia was no longer a socialist

country, he was increasingly drawn to Christianity, and by 1975 he openly claimed that he was a

Christian. However, he was never particularly at ease in that capacity. There were three reasons for

this. First, ever since his Communist days, he had held that the Roman Emperor Constantine hadadopted Christianity for political ends and that throughout history the high ideals of Christianity had

frequently been used by those in power to manipulate the down-trodden and oppressed and keep them

in their place. Second, he was highly critical of the Church's attempt to define the person of Christ

using the static terminology of Greek philosophy. He argued that the formula adopted by the Council

of Nicea in 325, which stated that Christ was 'of one substance with the Father', had been unintelligible

to the masses at the time and had given rise to a whole series of 'heresies' whose adherents were

brutally persecuted. Third, he realised that although individual Christians might still strive to live outtheir faith for the good of humanity, institutionalised Christianity was a spent force which had ceased

long ago to influence Western economic and social life and relations with the Third World. He was
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attracted to Islam because it seemed still to have the moral influence which Christianity had lost.

Moreover, there was no need for him to revise his opinion of the deleterious effect of the Romanisation

of the Church and the hellenisation of its doctrine; for such views have a respectable Muslim pedigreereaching back to Abd al-Jabbar, the eleventh-century cadi of Raiy.

This brings me to the final point which I wish to mention in connection with Garaudy's conversion: his

conviction that Western civilisation has reached an impasse from which neither Communism norChristianity can provide an escape route. The suicidal myth of Western-style progress and Western-

style growth has led to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the ever-increasing gulfbetween rich and poor; and the ruthless exploitation of the world's mineral resources. In 1979, Garaudy

wroteAppel au vivants ('Summons to the Living') in which he argued that there was still time to find a

solution to these problems by listening to the age-old wisdom of non-Europeans and how they

perceived their relationship with nature, other people and God. This was followed in 1981 byL'Islam

habite notre avenir('Islam inhabits our future'), in which he argued persuasively that Islam is a living

force with a vital contribution to make to tomorrow's world. He identified that contribution as'transcendence and community', two essential dimensions which Western man has lost because of the

exaltation of individualism. Four years later, inBiographie du XXme sicle ('Biography of the 20th

Century'), he defined transcendence as recognition of man's dependence in relation to God the creator,

and thus of absolute values.

The philosophical itinerary which led him to this belief, and the meaning which he attached to thewords 'God the creator' are the subject of the rest of the paper.

The West's false view of man and its consequences

Garaudy maintains that the root cause of the present global crisis is a false view of man which has

dominated Western thought since the sixteenth century, and which may in part be traced back even

further. The seeds were sown in ancient Greece when Plato instituted a radical dualism between body

and soul, and the sensory and the intelligible. However, a decisive threshold was crossed with Galileo.In Galileo's conception of the world, mathematics constituted the veritable 'being in itself' of nature. As

a result, the relation between the sensory and the rational became a mystery, for the mathematical

model of the world is in fact an impoverished one produced by eliminating both the sensory qualities of

the known object and the initiative of the knowing subject. Slightly later, in France, Descartes

formulated his celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum - 'I think therefore I am'. Garaudy maintains that

Descartes's highly individualistic philosophy underlies modern Western culture and has led to man'sprogressive alienation from nature and to the fragmentation of society.

Garaudy does not, of course, deny the legitimacy of man's scientific and technological quest. He holds

that Galileo and Descartes were right to stress the importance of observation and analysis, and to break

with the tradition of explaining everything in terms of divine intentions. However, it was a short step

from this to something even worse than individualism, namely positivism: the dogmatic a prioriexclusion of transcendence. As a result science and technology have become ends in themselves rather

than means to an end, and man and his environment have become subservient to their autonomous

development. It is as if our civilisation were based on the implicit postulate that everything which is

technically and scientifically possible is necessary and desirable.

Garaudy holds that the influence of positivism is even more insidious in the realm of economics. In theeighteenth century the links between economics and ethics were severed, and in the nineteenth it came

to be regarded as a pure science like mechanics or physics. Hence the relationships between humanbeings and societies were assimilated to those between things, and were held like them to be governed

by necessity. This resulted in economic growth coming to be viewed as an end in itself divorced from

all reflection on the meaning and purpose of life.

Individualism and positivism are not the only causes of the global crisis; what Garaudy calls'Eurocentrism' has also played a major part, although the world is now dominated more by the USA,

Europe's offspring, than by Europe itself. The scientific Renaissance of the sixteenth century saw the

birth not only of capitalism but also of colonialism. Fired by the Eurocentrist myth - the belief that the

Renaissance built directly on the foundations laid by the ancient Greeks, and that Europe was the sole

centre of historical initiative and the sole creator of values - Europeans colonised the world in the

conviction that they possessed the only true culture, the only universal religion, and the only model ofdevelopment; and they destroyed other peoples and their cultures in the process.

Garaudy's critique of Descartes


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If, as Garaudy alleges, modern individualism, positivism and Eurocentrism are all descendants of

Cartesian rationalism, it is vitally important to expose the error in Descartes's position. While he was

still a schoolboy, Garaudy drafted an initial response The first certainty is not cogito, I think, butamamus, we love.

Later, as a Communist, he lamented that in fulfilment of Descartes's wish, man had become the 'master

and possessor of nature', to such a degree that he was now able to destroy every trace of life on earth.

For Garaudy's full-blown critique of Descartes, however, we have to wait until the mid-seventies. Itruns as follows. In the first place, he points out that the ego is not present at the beginning of a human

life, but only gradually distinguishes itself from a confused mass of people and things. Or, as he laterput it Man is not born Robinson Crusoe. He has a father and a mother. He lives in a community, in

osmosis with it. The idea of a self-sufficient individual ego is an abstraction.

Regarding the primacy which Descarte gives to thought, Garaudy traces it back to Plato for whom what

could not be translated into concepts did not exist. He holds that Descartes pushed this notion to

extremes, thereby eliminating love, aesthetic creation and all activity other than technology. As for theword 'therefore', Garaudy asks

What 'logic' can this 'conclusion' call on? What distance is there between my thought and me? Between

my love and me? Between my action and me? And if it existed, what thought process could cross it?

How can the pieces of this dismembered man be stuck back together: here the soul, there the body;

here me, there the others?Finally, he demands to know what this mysterious human essence or nature which is implied by the

words 'I am' actually consists of, and whether we can grasp it like an exterior object and describe it

independently of its activity as if it were a machine.

Garaudy's early metaphysical materialism

As a member of the Communist Party, Garaudy was confident that Communism alone would create thereal conditions of a society where love will cease to be a hope or a moral law to become the objective

law of society in its entirety.

Thus he had found, or thought he had found, 'community'. Nevertheless, his philosophical position

initially left far less scope for 'transcendence' than Cartesian rationalism had done. His Paris doctoral

thesis on the materialist theory of knowledge was published in 1953. When he wrote it, he was a

thorough-going metaphysical materialist. He defended the claim of Lysenko, the Soviet botanist, that

acquired characteristics may be inherited; he explained the emergence of consciousness in terms ofPavlovian reflexes; and he toed the orthodox Soviet line that knowledge is a reflection of reality, or in

other words, as Lenin put it, that the objective laws of nature are translated more or less exactly into

man's head.

From this perspective, religious belief is also a reflection of reality, albeit a distorted one. Garaudy

quotes Engels as stating that the first gods were personifications of the forces of nature, and that asreligions developed these gods took on a form which was more and more supernatural, until finally, by

a process of abstraction or distillation, the number of gods was restricted and the concept of the

exclusive God of the monotheistic religions was born. He endorses Engels's theory, modifying it

slightly to include the personification of the forces of society in an epoch when man was powerless in

relation to the forces which were opposed to him and dominated him, these forces wereincomprehensible to him and he lent them a supernatural character.

These forces were first of all those of nature.

Then the forces of society were added to them.Religious representations are the fantastic and deformed reflection of these forces in the life of men.

There is thus no room for a transcendent Deity who is above the universe and independent of it, for on

this reckoning belief in such a being is a delusion, a product of human alienation.Even in this early stage of his career, however, Garaudy was careful to distinguish Marx's view of

alienation from Feuerbach's. According to Feuerbach, men created the gods in their own image and

then became subjected to these projections of themselves. For Marx, on the other hand, religious

alienation is only one specific example of man's alienation, which begins as soon as he is divested of

the fruits of his labour. Transcendence, in the secondary or attenuated sense of surpassing or rising

above the human situation, was therefore already of crucial importance for Garaudy, even though he

seems not to have employed the word itself in his thesis. He believed that under socialism all forms of

alienation would be abolished because, instructed in dialectical materialism and its theory of

knowledge, human beings would become conscious of the laws of nature and the laws of social life

which have dominated them for millenia. They would thus be able for the first time in human history to


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make use of these laws in the interests of society. In short, knowledge of necessity brings with it the

only freedom which is humanly available, the freedom to transform the world.

Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, and Marxist-Christian dialogue

Garaudy subsequently adopted a more positive attitude towards religion when he became aware of the

subtlety of Marx's thought. He discovered that Marx himself, unlike many of his superficial disciples,

had never espoused metaphysical materialism. What Marx had advocated was not materialism asopposed to idealism but rather a philosophy of praxis as opposed to a philosophy of being. In the

Theses on Feuerbach, Marx criticised earlier materialists for treating the world as an object of intuitionrather than as something to be grasped subjectively by concrete human activity. His starting point was

man's creative act, the specifically human activity of work which is characterised by the fact that

consciousness anticipates reality. Starting with the conditions in which it is born and in accordance

with them, it projects its own ends, its projects.

As an advocate of Marxist-Christian dialogue, Garaudy recognised that religion, like every ideology, is

a project a means of tearing oneself away from the given situation, of transcending it, of anticipatingreality, either to justify the existing order or to protest against it and attempt to transform it.

Hence, there could be no question of rejecting religion as an error pure and simple, as pre -Marxist

materialists had done and as he had done, at least implicitly, in his thesis.

On the contrary, Garaudy now argued that Marxist humanism is interested in the questions which men

ask about the meaning of their life, death, origins and purpose. Religion's greatness is its need toanswer these questions, but its weakness lies in its claim to give definitive and dogmatic answers when

they are in fact provisional.

The answers which religions bring to the questions which men pose, by the very fact that they purport

to be definitive, that is dogmas, have the character of myth, that is to say knowledge which purports to

be timeless whereas it is always linked to historical and social conditions.

Religion is thus a human project but a mystified one, because those who participate in it are unaware ofthe material conditions out of which it arises. Like Christianity, Marxism seeks to transform the world

not merely by re-organising society but by a spiritual metamorphosis which will liberate man. Thus

although Marxist criticism rejects the illusory answers of religion, it does not reject the real aspirations

to which they are a response. Marxism poses the same questions as Christianity but, because it is a

critical philosophy, it does not consider itself authorised to transform the questions into an answer. It

does not give in to the temptation to affirm behind the act a being who is its source. The religious

project no more proves the existence of God than a person's thirst proves the existence of a spring.Whereas, for the Christian, the infinite is a promise and a presence, for the Marxist it remains an

absence and a demand.

Because of the high premium which Garaudy set on transcendence in the sense of surpassing or rising

above the human situation, he was already in his Communist days an inveterate opponent of all thosebrands of materialist philosophy which tend to deny human creativity and subjectivity. For example,

although he recognised the legitimacy of structuralism as a scientific method for analysing various

aspects of human and social reality, he rejected the claims of Althusser and Foucault that it was a

philosophy which could give an exhaustive account of both.

By the same token, he was sympathetic to the attempts of French Catholic thinkers to reintroducetranscendence by implanting it in existence, in history and social life, or in science. Indeed he was a

critical admirer of two such thinkers, Maurice Blondel and Teilhard de Chardin, whose works were

banned by the Church. Blondel was an emeritus professor at Aix during Garaudy's student days. Hiskey idea, first expressed in Action written in 1893, was that man can only fulfil himself by moving

beyond himself, and that God alone can fill the void that man finds within himself and around him. He

held that each of man's acts implies a greater project and that we thus arrive eventually at an ultimateproject which defines our attitude to the world. Whereas Blondel tried to reintroduce transcendence via

existence, the Jesuit palaeontologist De Chardin tried to reintroduce it via science. He maintained that

all phenomena including inorganic matter, plants, animals and human beings, are interrelated, and that

the universe is evolving towards an 'Omega point' of supreme consciousness at which the Universal

and the Personal will culminate simultaneously in each other.

Blondel's thought appealed to Garaudy because, like Marxism, it was a philosophy of praxis rather than

a philosophy of being. However, he found De Chardin's ideas even more attractive because De

Chardin's holistic view of the universe resembled Engels 's, and his 'Omega point' closely corresponded

to Marx's definition of Communism as the overcoming of alienation and the creation of a social order

where man would be defined by what he was rather than by what he possessed. In Garaudy's opinion,


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De Chardin's only serious shortcoming was that he dealt with social, economic and political problems

as a biologist and failed to analyse them in terms of alienation and the class struggle.

Of course, Blondel and De Chardin ostensibly believed in God, whereas Garaudy spoke of himself asan atheist. However, we should note that one of the reasons why Blondel and De Chardin fell foul of

the ecclesiastical authorities was that they were suspected of immanentism, denial that there is a God

who is above and independent of the universe. For Christian immanentists, transcendence as a divine

attribute and transcendence as a human dimension are closely related because man encounters God byinvolving himself in the world rather than by renouncing it. Some of them, like the Anglican bishop

John Robinson, whose best-seller Honest to God Garaudy read with approval, wrote as iftranscendence was no longer an attribute of God

but a dimension of man, a dimension of our experience and our acts, that which there is of the

specifically human in man in contrast to that in him which is animal and which is alienated.

It is arguable that Robinson in effect abolished the notion of transcendence as a divine attribute and

retained the word 'God' as a convenient label for what he perceived, in the last analysis, to be a purely

human phenomenon.Despite Garaudy's empathy for radical Christian thinkers and activists, and his whole-hearted

commitment to Marxist-Christian dialogue, during his Communist days he held that art and poetry

offered man a surer means of rising above the human situation than religion. In his work on Marxist

aesthetics, he combated the narrowness of 'socialist realism', seeking the point where the act of artistic

creation, the act of faith in a socialist future, and political action, coincided. He acknowledged that allworks of art are realist in the sense that they refer to a reality exterior to themselves and independent of

them, for it is not consciousness which determines life but life which determines consciousness.

Nevertheless, in his view, to be a realist is not to imitate the image of the real, but to imitate its activity;

it is not to give an exact copy or duplicate of things, events or men, but to participate in the creative act

of a world which is in the process of maturing, to discover its inner rhythm.

Thus great works of art, such as Saint-John Perse's poems and Picasso's paintings, help us perceive new

dimensions of reality. In each epoch, the work of art functions as a myth. That is to say it is the

personalised and concrete expression of the consciousness of what is lacking and what remains to be

done. It is not the reflection of an already existing world but the project of a possible order. Hence the

artist does not merely interpret the world; he participates in its transformation.

Garaudy's Christian phase: a lapse into Hegelianism?

In 1965, in his classic work on Marxist-Christian dialogue, Garaudy wrote that recent research set the

historical Jesus in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets for whom God's transcendence was thought of

as a permanent future, a summons and a demand. Jesus continued their eschatological message, but

went beyond their protest against Jewish legalism and announced that the times are fulfilled

and that the present is the time of decision. From now on to believe is to be entirely open to the future.Man no longer thinks of himself as a fragment of the city, and beyond that of the cosmic whole: he no

longer defines himself as logos but as power of choice, as the ability to be responsible for answering or

not answering God's summons by tearing himself away from his past.

In 1968, two years before he was expelled from the Communist Party, he was interviewed by a catholic

priest who asked him what significance he attached to Jesus. Garaudy replied that he thought Jesusmust have lived in such a way that his whole life signified that every one of us can at each instant begin

a new future. The evangelists expressed this good news in the imagery of simple folk who dream thateverything is possible: the blind man begins to see, the lame to walk, the hungry are satisfied.

Following this through to its logical conclusion, they depicted him announcing by his own resurrection

that all limitations had been overcome, even the supreme limitation of death. In view of what was said

earlier about Garaudy's approach to aesthetics, we may infer from these two statements that as aCommunist he viewed Jesus, and the Christian myths to which he gave rise, as having the same sort of

transforming power as great works of art.

Six years earlier, in 1962, Garaudy had published a detailed study of Hegel under the titleDieu est

mort('God is dead'). When he eventually embraced Christianity in 1975, he arguably did so as a

Hegelian. In Parole d'homme ('Man's Word'), published in that year, he quoted with approval Hegel's

description of Christ as the man in whom the unity of God and man has appeared, who has shown byhis death and his history in general the eternal history of the Spirit. He stated that the resurrection is to

be grasped by faith: it is neither a historical event nor a scientific fact but something accomplished each

day in our creative acts in which we break with routine, complacency and alienation, not as isolatedindividuals but by our common participation in the only ultimate reality, the reality of human


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decisions, initiatives and creations. InAppel aux vivants, published in 1979, Garaudy's Christology is

even more blatantly Hegelian. He claimed that we cannot know anything about God other than what

Jesus' life, teaching, death and resurrection have revealed, and he even spoke of God dying on the crossbeneath the face of Jesus Christ. He maintained that Jesus did not reveal a being or a reality which

exists already outside us and without us, for God is the power to transform the world: a power of which

we are the bearers and for which we are responsible.

Garaudy, Islam and transcendence

In his memoirs, Garaudy remarks that conversion is not necessarily a change of faith but a change ofthe culture in which it is expressed. Although, from the context, he appears to have been thinking of

religious conversions in general, the statement is clearly pertinent to an assessment of his own

conversion to Islam. In many respects, his views have remained remarkably constant throughout the

Communist, Christian and Muslim phases of his life. He has persistently favoured revolution; opposed

the USA and Zionism; criticised the Romanisation of the Church and the hellenisation of its doctrine;

and attributed the global crisis to the false view of man which has dominated Western thought since thesixteenth century. We are therefore justified in asking whether his conversion to Islam involved a

genuine change in his beliefs about God or whether his references to 'God the creator' are simply

another way of expressing his faith in humanity's creative power to transform the world.

There is no straightforward answer to this question. To the present writer, it seems undeniable that

there are serious tensions in Garaudy's recent thought. Part of the problem lies in the ambiguity of theword 'transcendence'. As a Communist, and later as a radical Christian, Garaudy believed in

transcendence in the sense of surpassing or rising above the present human situation, but his Marxist

background made it very difficult for him to countenance a transcendent Deity above and independent

of the universe. Shortly before his conversion, however, he appears to have become convinced that

such a belief was morally necessary and that the Islamic tradition had within it the resources for

making it intellectually tenable. His views on this matter as evinced inL'Islam habite notre avenir('Islam inhabits our future'),Biographie du XXme sicle ('Biography of the 20th Century'),L'Islam en

occident: Cordoue, capitale de l'esprit('Islam in the West: Cordoba, Capital of the Spirit') and

Grandeur et dcadences de l'Islam ('Greatness and Decadences of Islam'), which were published in

1981, 1985, 1987 and 1996 respectively, are relatively consistent. We will therefore begin with them

before examining the position propounded inLes Fossoyeurs ('The Grave-diggers'), which was

published in 1992 and which is strikingly different.

Although Garaudy wroteL'Islam habite notre avenirbefore he officially became a Muslim, manypeople interpreted it as an eloquent and impassioned defence of Islam. By way of explanation, he said

to one admiring reader, 'You can speak with love even of visions of the world which you do not share'.

As mentioned earlier, his principal thesis was that Islam has an important contribution to make to the

future of the world because it values 'transcendence and community', two vital dimensions which are

lacking in contemporary Western society. He observed that the Islamic community serves ends whichgo beyond it, ends fixed by God; the community transcends the individual and God transcends the

community. He was particularly attracted to the basic principles of Islamic economics. Unlike

European law which defines property as 'the right to use and abuse', Islam asserts that God alone

possesses. Muslims are therefore forbidden either to accumulate wealth or to squander it. Moreover,

the institution of zakat, a fixed-percentage charitable tax which is payable annually on both revenueand capital, functions as a form of social security and in theory rules out the possibility of hereditary

fortunes.

So much for the moral appeal of belief in God the creator, but is such a belief intellectually viable?Garaudy observes that the Qur'an is God's Word, not his self-revelation. Moreover, in describing the

function of the mihrab or prayer niche in a mosque, he writes not only does this niche not shelter any

statue or image, but it signifies, by this very absence, the God who is here honoured, a God everywherepresent but everywhere invisible. This emptiness is characteristic of the art of Islam. Nothing is reality,

if not this emptiness, at the heart of all reality, and first and foremost of the mosque, as of the heart of

the believer, the sole but invisible reality.

In view of Garaudy's earlier belief that there is no transcendence other than the future which human

beings strive to create, it is easy to understand the attraction for him of a God whose presence is

marked by his visible absence. Not that God is wholly absent, for according to the Qur'an everything is

a sign, everything is a manifestation of God. There is no reality apart from him. In Garaudy's opinion,

the Qur'an, as interpreted by Ibn Arabi, introduces a radically new perspective on the relationship

between the real and the unreal: nothing can be seen fully except in God, and God can only be seen

fully in the totality of his creation. Moreover this unity is not a matter of being but of praxis. The onlyincontestable proof of God is our experience of his creative activity within us.


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In his subsequent works, Garaudy repeats and clarifies the views which I have just outlined. In

Biographie du XXme sicle, he states that to affirm transcendence is to recognise man's dependance

on his creator; the absence of any continuity between man and God; and the primacy of absolutenorms, not deducible by reason. He reiterates that God's existence is not of the order of being, in the

sense that one says of things that they are. He is the source of their being and the act that creates them.

He stresses that Islamic thought is, however, invulnerable to pantheism because the act of creation

cannot be identified with the totality of what it creates; it is always beyond it, that totality being nomore than the provisional trace left by it. In L'Islam en occident, he defends Ibn Arabi against the

charge of pantheism in these termsPantheism consists in considering God as the additive totality of beings. This is not the case at all for

Ibn Arabi: for him, this additive totality is nothing other than the sum total of the illusions born from

the limited camera work of individuals. It has no reality in itself. The only real being is God, in his

unity and transcendence, in his creative act.

He also insists that it is simplistic to view Ibn Arabi as a Platonist, because for him everything begins

with the incessant creative act of God rather than with the static Platonic ideas. Similar notions arefound in Grandeur et dcadences de l'Islam, the most recent of his works to be considered; it contains

nothing to make us suspect that Garaudy has changed his mind on these key issues.

When we recollect Garaudy's earlier attraction to Teilhard de Chardin, it is hardly surprising that as a

Muslim he became an ardent champion of Ibn Arabi. Unfortunately, however, we cannot end our

examination of his philosophical itinerary at this point, for between L'Islam en occident and Grandeuret dcadences de l'Islam he wrote Les Fossoyeurs. In this book he seems to have lapsed temporarily

into a Hegelian pantheism of love of the sort which he espoused earlier as a Christian. In a most un-

Islamic fashion, he stresses the importance of Jesus' crucifixion for our understanding of God. He

argues that whereas the Greeks, Romans and Jews thought of God as an omnipotent king and lawgiver,

Jesus reveals God not through power, royalty and commandment but on the contrary in the most

impoverished man, born poor and working class, then a wandering preacher, and finally, victim of thepowerful, held up to ridicule, and dying by the most ignominious means of execution reserved for

slaves, namely crucifixion.

A few pages later, he asserts that Jesus was a man inhabited by the presence of the all, and conscious of

not existing except in relation to the all; that it is by his death that he is fully divine; and that his death

shows that the omnipotent God of the ancient theisms is dead.

The reasons for this temporary lapse are unclear but Garaudy's memoirs, which were published three

years earlier, contain a number of possible clues. When he was on the verge of converting, he hadfeared losing Jesus' message. He had been deeply anxious lest his fellow-Muslims failed to accept the

mystery of love, which he held had become through Jesus the warp and woof of every life. After

embracing Islam, he visited many Muslim countries. In Turkey, as he worshipped in the Sleymaniye

Mosque, he wondered whether it had not suffered the same fate as Christianity in becoming an

impoerial ideology Constantinople, the city where in the time of Constantine Christianity married anempire, might it have had with Suleiman this grandiose and baleful vocation to transform yet again the

humble praise of God into a hymn to the power of a sovereign?

In Algeria, at a conference on Islamic thought which took place in 1987, he clashed publicly with a

Wahhabi scholar from Qatar, who criticised him for speaking of the role of the love of God in Islam.

The scholar insisted that there could be no relationship between God and man other than that of masterand slave, and he asked Garaudy about his attitude to the fear of God.

'To fear God is not be afraid of his punishment, it is to fear displeasing him, and that is what is meant

by love' This led to a long polemic centring on this infamous dialectic of the stick and the carrot, sodear to all despotisms searching for a religious justification, and which makes every religion which

accepts it an 'opium of the people'.

I retorted:'You are defending a proslavery concept of Islam!'

The following morning, Sheikh Karadawi re-embarked for Qatar.

It is probably these incidents and others like them which triggered the thoughts which Garaudy

expressed inLes Fossoyeurs. Judging by Grandeur et dcadences de l'Islam, however, he has since

reverted to a more orthodox Muslim attitude to divine transcendence and to the role of Jesus, on him be

peace.

Notes:-Garaudy has given us three accounts of this incident: Parole d'Homme (Paris: Laffont, 1975) pp. 15-

21;Biographie du XXme sicle (Paris: Tougui, 1985) pp. 277-9; andMon tour du sicle en solitaire:

mmoires (Paris: Laffont, 1989) pp. 64-66.-See op. cit. 1989 pp. 395-400


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Documents

The Philosophical Itinerary of Roger Garaudy