In the undergraduate religious studies courses that I teach, I often ask students why they show up, if not just for the sake of required credits. The answer is always, “I want to understand what's going on in the news.” And religion is certainly in the news. The public visibility and awareness of religion in current global affairs compels us to engage the “postsecular” question, although we may or may not be entering a postsecular age if that term is a descriptor for the reemergence of repressed religion after a secular age. This designation implies that religion and the secular can be conceptualized as neatly bounded and easily separable entities, or even consecutive stages on an evolutionary ladder, a questionable assumption.

A better way to define the postsecular is to see that religion and the secular are not polar opposites but have always been interdependent since their coemergence in the modern West. Although defined as apolitical, interior piety by the normative claims of secularism, religion has never been completely contained inside this model. Claiming the separation of church and state or state neutrality toward different religious traditions, secularism itself has proved to be a problem space that is already implicated in religious questions. The postsecular, therefore, is not merely disenchantment with secularism, but rather an effort to reconsider and reconfigure symbolic assumptions, cultivated sensibilities, and power relations associated with religion and to question the secular's claim to epistemic, affective, and moral-political supremacy. The postsecular is particularly attentive to the fluidity of religion as a constructed category, to the varieties of nonmodern, non-Western religious traditions, and to the flourishing of new types of “spiritual” (although almost invariably embodied) practices.

Postsecular reading follows theological reading to challenge the hegemonic universalism of “secular” reason and joins confessional reading to address the failures of the protectionist exclusionism of “secular” aesthetics. But rather than working within the comfort zone of one literature and one religion, postsecular reading ventures outside those boundaries to question the formation of the sacred or sacralization in a whole range of interlinked “secular” spheres.

In the Western cultural imagination, ethics, religion, and literature exist at an uneasy crossroads, a crossroads often marked by mutual suspicion.

Ethics is suspicious of literature for a variety of reasons, although two such reasons surface with some regularity. First, say ethicists, literature is fictive and therefore must be, at some level, fraudulent. Second, literature stirs the emotions and so can incite and prolong unregulated and disordered desire. Plato's view of literature is more nuanced than his censorship of poets might suggest, but their ban is real nevertheless. And it is not as though these ethical worries have no basis in fact. Every genocide begins with a good story – a compelling narrative about the inhumanity of its victims that incites neighbor to kill neighbor. Literature professors love to talk about the deeper truths revealed by stories, but stories can also propagate – and prop up – horrendous lies. Stories are not necessarily true, but they are powerful, as Plato well understood.

On the other hand, literature, particularly contemporary literature, is often suspicious of ethics. Few epithets are as demeaning to an author as “pedantic,” a term critics find useful when they sniff out moral agendas in a poem or novel. Many twenty-first century readers agree, perhaps unthinkingly, with Archibald MacLeish: “A poem should not mean / But be,” itself a baldly didactic claim.

Sometimes these ethical worries about literature and literary worries about ethics are elided with religious concerns. Among the poets Plato bans from the Republic are those who tell false stories about immoral, duplicitous, and violent gods. When Augustine, in the Confessions, berates himself for crying over Dido, he worries that his empathy for a fictional tragedy will displace sorrow over his own distance from God. English translations of the Bible from the fourteenth century onward inveigh against the “vain imaginations” of human thought that may substitute fantasies for true words about God and the world. And yet narratives and lyrics, stories and poems, are integral to religious accounts, as the chapters in Part III of this volume demonstrate. Most, if not all, religious traditions understand themselves through one or more overarching narratives. There is a story or stories to be told of how a community practices its faith.

THE LIMITATIONS OF ARISTOTELIAN SYLLOGISTIC AND THE NEED FOR NON-SYLLOGISTIC CONSEQUENCES

Medieval theories of consequences are theories of logical validity, providing tools to judge the correctness of various forms of reasoning. Although Aristotelian syllogistic was regarded as the primary tool for achieving this, the limitations of syllogistic with regard to valid non-syllogistic forms of reasoning, as well as the limitations of formal deductive systems in detecting fallacious forms of reasoning in general, naturally provided the theoretical motivation for its supplementation with theories dealing with non-syllogistic, non-deductive, as well as fallacious inferences. We can easily produce deductively valid forms of inference that are clearly not syllogistic, as in propositional logic or in relational reasoning, or even other types of sound reasoning that are not strictly deductively valid, such as enthymemes, probabilistic arguments, and inductive reasoning, while we can just as easily provide examples of inferences that appear to be legitimate instances of syllogistic forms, yet are clearly fallacious (say, because of equivocation). For Aristotle himself, this sort of supplementation of his syllogistic was provided mostly in terms of the doctrine of “immediate inferences” in his On Interpretation, various types of non-syllogistic or even non-deductive inferences in the Topics, and the doctrine of logical fallacies, in his Sophistical Refutations. Taking their cue primarily from Aristotle (but drawing on Cicero, Boethius, and others), medieval logicians worked out in systematic detail various theories of non-syllogistic inferences, sometimes as supplementations of Aristotelian syllogistic, sometimes as merely useful devices taken to be reducible to syllogistic, and sometimes as more comprehensive theories of valid inference, containing syllogistic as a special, and important, case.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF HISTORICAL SOURCES

Accordingly, the characteristically medieval theories of non-syllogistic inferences were originally inspired by Aristotle's logical works other than his Analytics. Aristotle's relevant ideas were handed down to medieval thinkers by Boethius’ translations of and commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge and Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, along with Boethius’ own logical works, the most relevant to the development of consequences being his De Hypotheticis Syllogismis and De Topicis Differentiis.

The main advances in logical investigations in the thirteenth century in the Latin West were concentrated at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. There were other universities and studia generalia, such as Cambridge, Erfurt and elsewhere, where logic was taught, and on which both Oxford and Paris depended for their students, and to which they despatched many of their masters after their studies in Arts. But the real originality in driving forward the logica modernorum, the real innovations in developing the theories of properties of terms, of consequence, of obligations theory and the treatment of insolubles, is found for the most part in the work of masters teaching at Paris and Oxford.

All this had changed by the end of the fourteenth century. By 1400, there were many more universities, particularly in northern Europe, starting with the German universities established at Prague, Vienna, Erfurt and Heidelberg, and in southern Europe there was a revival and extension of the study of logic in Italy and Spain. In the meantime, the Black Death, striking first from 1347 to 1349, and again in 1361 and 1369 (and repeatedly for the next 300 years or so), although reducing the population by at least one-third, had surprisingly not reduced the output of logical treatises, even if it affected their vitality. Nor had the Papal Schism (see Section 6.5) apparently affected the study of logic, but if anything served to disseminate it more broadly.

Returning to the start of the fourteenth century, all real interest in logic was arguably preserved by those working in Oxford. This is the thesis propounded by Ebbesen (1985). We are, of course, dependent for our understanding of historical developments on historical traces, in particular, what logical treatises have been preserved – and indeed, on which of those that have been preserved have been studied. Nonetheless, it does seem that interest in logic waned at Paris towards the end of the thirteenth century in the face of the rise of modism, with its fascination with grammar and the so-called “modes of signification”. Hitherto, univocation had united a term with a single signification throughout the different things for which it supposited: e.g. the signification of ‘man’ is the same though the term supposits for different classes of men in ‘Some man is running’ and ‘Socrates was a man’.

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde offers the reader a manifesto for modern aestheticism, a philosophy of beauty that is essentially a concern for form – for beauty and the manifestations of beauty in themselves. According to Wilde, the integrity of form and therefore the integrity of a work of art can be secured only by excluding the concerns of philosophy and ethics, of truth and goodness, which always threaten to harness what is beautiful for the service of something extrinsic and secondary to it. “Form is absolutely essential,” we are later told (209), but as importantly: nothing else is. “Beautiful things mean only beauty,” says Wilde, and therefore there “is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (1). “All art is quite useless” precisely because aesthetic form, the dimensions of the beautiful thing, is the final and highest reality: there is nothing more ultimate than beauty and so nothing outside itself that it should serve, and this form resides in “surface and symbol” (2).

Wilde's manifesto for modern aestheticism is a confession, and in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde offers two confessional readings of the protagonist by Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward that begin in the presumption that artistic form can be protected only by way of exclusion. In the novel, we witness two versions of aestheticism coordinated by beauty's respective conditions of surface and symbol and represented by the noble lord and the diligent painter, both of whom vie for the soul of that innocent, “unspotted” beauty, Dorian Gray. How they initially understand what it means to have a concern for form, and where Wilde has it lead them, provides a cautionary tale regarding the whole enterprise of literary study and indeed of any aesthetic activity defined by its concern for form and understood as a “secular,” that is to say, as a separated and self-grounding mode of inquiry premised on an act of exclusion.

INTRODUCTION

The logical analysis of modalities, as initiated in Aristotle's On Interpretation and Prior Analytics, focused on the inferential relations among modal propositions, i.e. propositions concerning necessity, possibility and contingency. The Aristotelian legacy of modal logic underwent major transformations in medieval times, in both the Arabic and the Latin traditions. But these transformations took very different forms in the two traditions. The corpus of Aristotle's works was available in Arabic translation at a very early stage as a result of the translation movement that flourished under the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in eighth- to tenth-century Baghdad. Crucial works for modal logic such as Aristotle's On Interpretation and Prior Analytics, as well as texts of indirect but equally significant relevance from the physical and metaphysical corpus were known to logicians in this tradition from the very start. In the Latin tradition, a comprehensive response to Aristotle's writings on the logic of modality had to await the rediscovery in the late twelfth century of the full text of Prior Analytics. The early availability of the key Aristotelian texts to the Arabic world sparked an interpretive effort whose primary concerns were to understand those texts and to resolve the difficulties which they posed. The first fruits of this effort were the commentaries of al-Fārābī (d. 950), whose long commentary on Prior Analytics has, sadly, not survived. The commentatorial tradition in the Arabic-Islamic world reached its apogee in the works of Averroes (d. 1198). The earliest Latin commentary on Prior Analytics, an anonymous and incomplete work, dates from the late twelfth century. The earliest known complete Latin commentary is that of Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279), although, as we shall see below, some of his ideas about the meaning of modal sentences have precedents in the writings of Peter Abelard (d. 1142).

Long before Kilwardby's time, modal logic had received an extraordinary impulse in the Arabic-Islamic world, in the figure of Avicenna (d. 1037), who developed a new and original system that departed from Aristotle in crucial ways. Avicenna's system in effect relegated Aristotle's modal logic to a purely marginal role. The work of the post-Avicennan logicians, particularly in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Eastern tradition, evolved in ways that are entirely independent of Aristotle and seem to be motivated exclusively by the need to go beyond Avicenna's system (Rāzī d. 1210; Khūnajī d. 1248; Kātibī d. 1276) or to defend it (Ṭūsī d. 1274).

Writing this chapter as the representative of “Judaism” makes me feel something like the reluctant Moses at the beginning of the biblical book of Exodus. In chapter 3, God calls to him from a burning bush as Moses, an Egyptian-Jewish fugitive, herds his sheep in the desert. Announces God: I have come to deliver the suffering Jewish people in Egypt from slavery, and you, Moses, will be my agent and messenger to Pharaoh. But Moses declines. A long argument ensues: God keeps urging and assuring; Moses keeps objecting. According to Jewish tradition, this goes on for seven days. Finally, God's patience wears thin, and Moses, reluctantly, agrees.

Each of the biblical prophets, of whom Moses is the foremost, was reluctant. In the end, they managed to carry out their mission by speaking out of their own particular historical situation to their generation, although their words carry meaning beyond their own times. I too am hesitant; I can speak only from my position as a Jewish woman and English professor in the twenty-first century. At the same time, I'm aware of standing in a chain linking me to all the previous and forthcoming generations of Jews.

I preface my discussion of “Judaism” with this remark about generations and generativity because I want to reorient our discussion of literature and religion here away from a discourse about “texts.” A rabbinical student in a yeshiva (religious Jewish academy) in Israel once offered his rabbi an “interpretation of the text.” The teacher responded, “It's not a ‘text.’ It's your mother!” In other words, a Jew's relation to the sacred writings and traditions she or he lives and interprets is as intimate, personal, reciprocal, and complex as the deepest family relation – in fact, it is a family relation. Regardless of personal belief or practice, each Jew is part of the collective Jewish people, each Jew is inextricably tied up with all the Jews who came before and who will come after. And as in a family, you are always a “daughter” or “son” despite any disputes or attempts at disavowal.

In the first half of the twentieth century, French philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone is able to be the source of such poetry.”

Weil was not naïve, and she penned these words with open eyes. She had seen poverty, injustice, and impending war. She was not given to conventional religious or aesthetic sentiments. Yet against her own inclinations, she had found herself drawn to God and to spiritual practices – indeed to a reorientation of her life – although she never formally became a member of a religious community. Her essays, notebooks, and letters remain a testament to her desire for light and her efforts to become attentive to God in the lives of other people, in liturgical and everyday rituals, and in the beauty of an often-marred world.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion begins by acknowledging, with Weil, that human beings need poetry and they need religion, and these two needs are intimately conjoined. It offers a companion for those who want to read literature and religion within the same intellectual and affective frame. It is not a handbook or guide or survey; it makes no pretense of offering a comprehensive map to either of those capacious fields “literature” and “religion,” nor of delimiting their boundaries. Rather, as a companion, it invites us to consider how acts of reading that take both literature and religion seriously may illuminate our encounter with texts, authors, other readers, and the world itself.

The tasks assigned to the writers of each chapter were straightforward, although they were not easy: reflect on your assigned topic, treat with equal rigor literary and religious concerns, and explicate one or more literary works. In other words, each author was asked to undertake an act of reading that incorporated at least one literary text and one religious tradition, however broadly or narrowly “literary” and “religious” might be construed.

To the Islamic scripture, the Qur'an, language is of central importance. The Qur'an relates how earlier prophets performed miracles to validate their claims to prophecy. Curiously though, Muhammad, the bearer of the Qur'an, never showed any such miracles, even when challenged by his opponents to do so. The only miracle he did present was the Qur'an itself. This fact assumes significance when we remember that the first addressees of the Qur'an were, unlike the believing Israelites addressed by the Torah, unbelieving Arabs. These Arabs were fiercely proud of their linguistic prowess – the word ‘Arab literally means “the articulate,” the non-Arabs being called ‘Ajam, literally, “the dumb” – and their first encounter with the Qur'an was at the level of language or form rather than at that of content or message. What initially impressed the Arabs was the Qur'an's literary beauty, which eventually led them to accept the Qur'an as divine revelation. From the very outset, then, the literary aspect of the Qur'an has been inextricably bound up with the thought of the Qur'an – as borne out by the well-known theological-literary doctrine of the matchlessness of the Qur'an. Understandably, the Qur'an has served, not only for Arabic literature but, derivatively, for Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other Islamic literatures as well, as a model of literary excellence and has influenced, at several levels, the vast and variegated literature produced in the many Islamic languages over centuries.

A short chapter cannot capture the variety and breadth of Islamic literature. I will, therefore, select two poems, one medieval Arabic and the other modern Urdu, to illustrate aspects of the intricate relationship that exists between language, religion, and culture in that literature. The Wine Ode (al-Khamriyya) by the Egyptian Sufi ‘Umar ibn ‘Ali ibn al-Farid (1181–1235) and Satan's Advisory Council (Iblis ki Majlis-i Shura) by the South Asian poet-thinker Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) might appear to belong in different worlds, but they are connected, across time and space, by their preoccupation with a set of themes central to the Islamic religious and literary heritage, with the Qur'an standing at the center of that heritage.

Making a clear division between the medieval and the post-medieval periods is impossible, especially if the end of the fourteenth century is taken as a cut-off point. The next century and a half certainly embraced big and important changes in the study of logic, but the new humanist developments were contemporary with continued work in the areas thought of as specifically medieval, such as supposition theory, and indeed there was a flowering of medieval logic in early-sixteenth-century Paris with the work of such men as John Mair (or Major). However, by the mid-sixteenth century, specifically medieval developments had largely died out, leaving behind only fragments of supposition theory and some simplified work on consequences. Aristotle's logic continued to be centrally important throughout the period, but the approach to it came to be very different from that of the Middle Ages. The Greek text of Organon was widely available by the end of the fifteenth century, and could be studied by senior students and teachers, but the main undergraduate teaching came to be done largely through elementary textbooks that summarized Aristotelian logic in simpler language and without the lengthy doctrinal discussions and illustrative sophismata that had characterized many medieval commentaries.

This chapter has two main parts. The first part discusses the effects that historical events and movements had on educational systems and the logical studies thought to be suitable for undergraduates. The Western reception of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century was perhaps the most important event, for it accentuated the impact of the other events and movements. Suddenly it became possible to produce books cheaply, in relatively large numbers, and without the differences between one copy and another that often make work with manuscripts so difficult. By the end of the fifteenth century, many university towns had presses able to print the textbooks needed by the faculty of Arts, and teachers could disseminate their own works. Moreover, publishers, especially in Italy, were able to print the works required for serious scholarship, such as Aristotle's Organon in Greek and the newly discovered Greek commentaries on Aristotle, while in the sixteenth century, the writings of the Protestant reformers and their Roman Catholic opponents could be widely circulated.

For many Eastern Orthodox Christians, the Romanian priest Father Roman Braga has been a living Father Zossima, a radiant man cut from the cloth Dostoevsky tailored into Alyosha's spiritual guide in The Brothers Karamazov. Born in 1922 to free peasants in Moldavia, his life followed the upheavals of his country, from the “Burning Bush” spiritual revival of 1945–1948 and the Communist Revolution of 1947 to the horrors of Pitești Prison, the Communist reeducation experiment that Aleksandr Solzhenitzn called “the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world.” After he was exiled by Ceaușescu in 1968, he eventually became spiritual father to a Romanian women's monastery in Michigan, where a steady stream of pilgrims flowed to make their confessions and receive his counsel until his death in 2015.

Before the Revolution, Father Roman was certified to teach Romanian language and literature, and he often emphasized the importance of literature for transmitting what is good, true, and beautiful in any culture, a conviction that predated his academic training. Recalling a life-changing encounter with Father Nicodemus Sachelarie, his confessor at the Condriţa monastery and now a saint in the Romanian church, Father Roman recounted:

That a monk in rural Romania recommends Dostoevsky in confession, and that this literary encounter is a life-changing event for one who will suffer for the faith and teach thousands, bespeaks the connectedness of literature to life in Orthodoxy, and what we might call the living literariness of Orthodox spirituality.

Eastern Orthodoxy comprises the second largest Christian group worldwide and is one of the fastest growing religious groups in North America but remains largely terra incognita for Western people, a third term outside the Catholic-Protestant binaries that shape Western religion.

Every medieval logic compendium, and every medieval commentary on Aristotle's Analytics, has something to say about the syllogism. While there is a core of standard logical syllogistic theory that is unchanging across the Middle Ages, there are also significant theoretical differences from one author to another. Some of these concern the very definition of the syllogism. Aristotle had crafted the classic definition; but at different times during the Middle Ages, and in different traditions, opinions differed on how much of the Aristotelian definition should be retained, and how the retained clauses should be interpreted. In this chapter, we examine some of the more interesting transformations that the definition of the syllogism underwent in the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages.

Conceptions of the syllogism undergo transformations over time. But the syllogism itself, as a logical structure, is also capable of certain types of transformation. One of these gives rise to what Aristotle called conversive syllogisms (Aristotle 1965, 59b1), and we will consider some medieval analyses of this type of transformation. We will also look at a related form of argument, the syllogism through the impossible. And these investigations will lead us back to the question of the nature of the syllogism.

INTRODUCTION

The Aristotelian theory of the syllogism makes use of technical terminology that was to become standard in both the Arabic and Latin traditions. A categorical proposition contains two terms – a subject and a predicate. Such a proposition states that the predicate applies to all, or to none, or to some, or to not all of the subject. Propositions of the first two of these types are universal, those of the last two types particular; these two attributes give a proposition's quantity. Propositions of the first and third types are affirmative, those of the second and fourth negative; these attributes give a proposition's quality. A valid inference from two categorical propositions (the premises) to a third (the conclusion) is a syllogism only if its two premises share a term (the middle term), and each premise shares a term with the conclusion. The predicate of the conclusion is the major term, and its subject the minor term. Three different arrangements of the middle, minor and major terms were standardly recognised, and these arrangements were called the figures of the syllogism. In the first figure, the middle term is subject in one premise and predicate in the other.