Christmas Note

The coincidence of Christmas and the Muslim Eid-al-Fitr (end of fasting) is an occasion to remember that the contact points between the Christian and Islamic religions – and Judaism as well – go far beyond what the goodie-two-shoes ecumenical formulas may suggest.

If there is a definite lesson to be gotten from the study of compared religions is that they are incomparable: they are not varieties of the same genre, which can be evaluated one for the other. They are irreducible manifestations – and irreducibly diverse – of a supra-human intellectual light that, falling over different objects, produces different refractions. The comparison, in this case, can only take two directions: either the sterile confrontation of what cannot be confronted or the simple inspiration that makes us lift our eyes to the common source, whether we imagine it as an unmoving motor or as the eternally silent source of the Word.

That is why the comparative study of religion, when it takes the form of the confrontation of established doctrines, ends up as a dispute of theologists – and this kind of discussion, said the prophet Mohammed, undisputedly takes us to hell. Much more fruitful is the approximation of the symbols, that say the same thing in different languages, but in such a way that, when the mind apprehends the communion of sense between them, cannot translate them into a third. Understood as a contemplative discipline, the science of sacred symbols is an introduction to the clarity of the unmentionable.

Maybe even more significant than the coincidence between Christmas and Eid-al-Fitr would be its approximation with the Laylat-al-Qadr, the night when the Koran "came down" from Heaven into the heart of the prophet. Mohammed is the illiterate that, in the silence of the night, receives through angelic dictation the most beautiful book of the Arabic language, the book that transcends the properties of the idiom to the extent that its recitation out loud affects the animals, that stop to listen to it. It is also at night that the Virgin, made fecund by the Spirit, gives birth to the most noble of human creatures, undistinguished from the Creator himself. The analogy between these two sublime paradoxes is evident. And, while theologists dispute in the dark, weighing Christ against Mohammed, the narrative itself is "light upon light": Mohammed does not correspond to Christ, but to Mary, the human carrier of the Divine Verb; Christ is not Mohammed, it is the Divine Verb, the Logos, Kalimat’ullah.

The spirit blows where it wills, how it wills. It is like the Koran says, "there is in this a sign, for those who understand". This does not mean that the Pope is wrong when he says that Christianism is the only way to salvation. How could he be wrong, if the concept of “way to salvation” itself is not applicable to Islam or Judaism? Judaism is the law, the divine-historical constitution of the chosen people, not the way to salvation for individual souls, for errant sinners and stray sheep. And this word "religion" itself does not correspond to the Arab din, which is thus translated erroneously. Din is the natural and primordial way of being of the social human being, the civil constitution of the sacred society – something without correspondence in the scriptures, where God speaks to the individual souls, regardless of and indifferent to what belongs to Caesar.

How, then, to compare these different dimensions, flattening them in the doctrinal confrontation of right and wrong?

The different religions simply do not speak of the same thing. This needs to be understood so we can be aware that it is the same Voice that speaks through all of them. The conflicts happen caused by human incomprehension, anguished by the vain efforts to reduce to doctrinal unity something that is not doctrine, but the Presence itself. The Koran itself teaches us the limits of these speculations, and warns the Jewish, the Christian, and the Muslims: "Compete in the practice of good, for in the final judgement We will settle thy differences."