Francis al-Marrāš’s Philosophical Apology of Religion

Abstract

This article, written in the style of a case study, is devoted to an overview of the apologetic arguments of a Greek Catholic writer from Aleppo, a figure in the literary Arab Renaissance, Francis Fatḥallah al-Marrāš (1836–1874), in his posthumously published work Šahādat al-ṭabīʿah fī wuǧūd Allāh wa al-šarīʿah (“The Testimony of Nature on the Existence of God and the Testament”). The arguments selected by al-Marrāš demonstrate methodological kaleidoscopism—an effort to combine traditional theological approaches not only with rational Enlightenment-style theology, which refers to ancient philosophy of religion, but also with the latest achievements of Western natural science. Al-Marrāš, albeit briefly, speaks of religious sentiment (ġarīzat al-diyānah), and this is important evidence of the synchronous, selective reception of Western religious sentimentalism in the non-Western world. The arguments he puts forward in favour of the truth of religious sentiment do not coincide with the theses of German, French and Russian-speaking sentimentalists. The constraints of the Arabic language force al-Marrāš to use the traditional Arab-Muslim categorical system, meaning that ideas borrowed from the West were inevitably subject to reinterpretation within the Middle Eastern Christian theologies. Demonstrating moderate exclusivism, al-Marrāš’s arguments are more akin to today’s confessional apologetics than to the liberal constructs of his contemporaries. Al-Marrāš’s text deserves attention because the theme of theoretical apology for religion is uncharacteristic of Arab Renaissance literature and, consequently, understudied.