CEU Gellner Room

(Chair: Gábor Betegh, Head of CEU’s Interdepartmental Forum on Religion)

Panel I (9.00-11.00)
Keynote Address by Sorin Antohi
Gábor Betegh: Doubt, Theology and Religious Practice in Archaic and Classical Greece
Gábor Kendeffy: From Belief to Faith: Authority & Philosophical Research in Ancient and Patristic Thought

Panel II (11.30-13.00)
György Geréby: Dr Historian and Mr Divine. What history and religion teach to each other
Jozef Matula: Tension between Religion and Science in Byzantine Thought

Panel III (14.00-15.30)
Dominik Perler: Religious Commitment and Philosophical Imagination – an Opposition? A Critical Look at Early Modern Debates
Dániel Schmal: Descartes on Skepticism and Religion


Panel IV (16.00-18.15)
Howard Robinson: TBA
Tamás Agócs: Is Seeing Believing? The Validity of Knowledge from a Buddhist Perspective
Ádám Mestyán: What is Islamic in Islamic Art?

In the closing passage of his short but most inspiring essay, published in 1938, Károly Kerényi, the great Hungarian classicist, quotes the banner of the coat-of-arms of Merton College: “Qui non religiosi, religiosi viverent” (The non-monastic should live as if they were). He argues that for men (and, presumably, also women) of learning the converse holds true: the scholar does not live as if he belonged to a religious order, and yet he does. Can this at first sight somewhat quizzical statement help us to gain a better insight into the relationship of religion and learning, on the one hand, and that of knowledge and doubt, on the other?

It is customary to portray academic scholarship, never content to accept anything as the ultimate truth, in opposition to religious faith which for its part supposedly rests on the foundations of unquestionable dogma. It is this simple contrast that is challenged by Kerényi who points out that religio, i.e. a certain understanding of religiousness going back to antiquity, has much in common with forms of life and thought practised by academics in both ancient and modern times. What religio implies, in this sense, is not clairvoyance or extatic prophetism but rather keen perception and an acute sense of reality. If that is true, then it is perhaps not too bold to say that religio Academici, the religious commitment of the scholar, shares with this understanding of religion a certain sensibility based on the notion that the world is meaningful and is hence – whatever the limitations of human cognition may be – at least to some extent decipherable, describable and explicable. Such a notion does not exclude but rather actively encourages an attitude of critical inquiry and permits much room for doubt whether of a religious or general intellectual nature.

Granted, while practitioners of any faith remain committed to some form of divine existence, the scholar (ideally) refuses to accept any belief as unquestionable. However, and this is Kerényi’s main point, at least on some understanding of religious commitment there remains a common trait too, an attitude of care and even awe however wavering and qualified.

It is also true that critical inquiry may give rise to pervasive doubt and deep misgivings regarding the foundations of knowledge and belief. This is manifest in the historically changing and partly coexisting forms of skepticism: among others, Pyrrhonic, calling for the suspension of all our judgements concerning non-evident propositions, Academic, disputing claims to knowledge (apart from the claim that we do not know anything), and modern Cartesian skepticism, specifically aimed at undermining our beliefs in the existence of anything beyond the contents of our minds. In religious contexts, on the other hand, the examination of one’s beliefs along similar lines has been witnessed to lead to agnosticism or even further. One can say, therefore, that these extreme but theoretically-grounded forms of doubt pose ultimately a challenge to the very attitudes from which they have emerged, i.e. the pursuit of knowledge and certainty whether religious or otherwise. At the same time, this is a challenge that is at the same time a source of irritation and inspiration, or so at least we hope to show.

The proposed workshop takes the idea of a common ground between religion and science as its point of departure to investigate the impact of doubt and critical inquiry on religion and scholarship. At what point does doubt and criticism give way to skepticism? Which forms of skepticism are compatible with a religious stance? How do religious dogmata arise? Is religion essentially dogmatic? Can theology be a science, or vice versa? To what extent is skepticism compatible with religio Academici, the academic commitment to the pursuit of knowledge? To what extent has skepticism been regarded over the ages as undermining scholarly positions themselves at the personal and/or theoretical level? Themes addressed by participants will centre around these questions which will be regarded, beyond their obvious import to epistemological debates, as being eminently relevant to academic attitudes and religious practices.

The approach of the workshop is intended to be both conceptual and historical. Clearly, forms of religiousness change as well as dominant articulations of doubt, intellectual critique and skepticism. The consequence of this is that while religious faith, at least some forms of skepticism and scholarship may have been seen as perfectly congruent in one age, their compatibility was viewed as highly problematic and contentious in another. Moreover, changing skeptical positions may well have specifically inspired new developments in the history of religious as well as non-religious ideas. Special attention will be given thereby to the influence of skeptical positions on the development of methodological approaches in science and the humanities.

The workshop will invite specialists of various epochs in antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity to trace different forms of skepticism and discuss their respective impact on the history of religious, theological and philosophical ideas as well as on the changing self-perception of academics as ‘friends of knowledge’. Of particular interest are the pertaining reflections of philosophers, classicists, theologians, historians who deal with religious ideas and texts and for whom therefore the above issues present themselves with even greater acuity both intellectually and personally. This common concern links together the participants of this interdisciplinary enterprise.