Aaron Hughes makes his living by subtraction. He takes a tradition that calls itself ancient and shows it modern, a continuity that calls itself natural and shows it built, an identity that calls itself given and shows it made. The three faiths gathered under the Abrahamic name, the unbroken line from biblical to rabbinic Judaism, the seamless Islam the apologists guard, each dissolves under his hand into a thing assembled by particular men for particular ends. He is the field’s great deflator.
Every scheme a man uses to feel he counts and to hold death off looks, from inside it, like plain reality. That is the center of what Ernest Becker (1924-1974) saw, and it is the trap laid for a man like Hughes, whose scheme is the one that claims to be no scheme at all, the clean removal of everyone else’s. His hero is the man who cannot be fooled. His terror, under all the method, is credulity, the dread of the dupe who never knows he has been taken. He beats that terror by becoming the one who sees through, never taken in, keeping the cold distance the believers cannot keep. And the apparatus he built to deflate every faith holds no tool to deflate the faith in deflation. The machine does not turn on the machine. So the man most afraid of being fooled stays fooled in the single place his life forbids him to look, where his own creed sits in the clothes of method, calling itself the residue that remains once the illusions burn away.
Give him his due, and the due is large. The constructions are constructed. The Abrahamic family is a modern ecumenical invention that reads its twentieth-century usefulness back into antiquity, and Hughes is right that it survives because it serves interfaith conferences and diplomatic need rather than because it tracks the past. Jewish identity is made and remade, not handed down entire from Sinai. Islamic studies does shelter its object behind a protectiveness no historian would grant Rome or the Tudors, and the scholar who says so out loud pays for it, attacked as an orientalist for asking of Islam what every historian asks of everything. Hughes pays that price and keeps writing. The courage is not a pose. He has built a body of work that says the unwelcome true thing, and a field that flattered its objects is the more honest for his presence in it. Where he sees through, he sees clearly.
His creed is the subtraction story carried to its limit. The editors and reporters who claim a view from nowhere strain out their bias as a side effect of the work. For Hughes the straining is the work. Deflation is the whole operation, the removal of the construction to leave the residue, so his claim to stand on nothing but cleared ground runs deeper than theirs ever does. He does not say he has rinsed the bias from his reporting. He says there is no cathedral, only scaffolding that men mistook for stone, and his task is to name the scaffolding. The trouble hides in the word residue. When you strip a tradition of everything its believers take it to be, something stays in your hand, and Hughes treats what stays, the dated record, the documented construction, the sociology of the category, as reality, as the thing the illusion hid. The residue is not the world with the error removed. It is the world as one method renders it, the method that registers what is built and time-bound and situated. The deflator mistakes the reach of his instrument for the shape of the real.
That is where the believer meets him. Yes, says the thoughtful man inside the tradition, the category is built, the continuity is curated, the line to Sinai runs through human hands. And then. Everything that holds a human life is built and time-bound and made by hands, the marriage and the nation and the language and the love, and you have told me the cathedral is scaffolding without telling me why men kneel in it and weep. Hughes can show that the Day of Atonement liturgy was assembled over centuries from scattered sources. He cannot reach what moves in a man when the congregation sings Kol Nidre and the gates close. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) spent a long book on the experience the deflator brackets, the felt change in what it is to believe, and the scholars of lived religion build their work on the sensory and mortal weight of practice that the sociology of the category steps over. Their charge is not that Hughes is wrong about the construction. It is that he has explained the building and missed the prayer, and that a study of religion unable to see why billions arrange their dying around these things has subtracted the phenomenon along with the error.
Watch, too, where the tools go quiet, because the silence has a pattern. Hughes turns the full apparatus on Islamic apologetics and pays in hostility, and the cost buys him the standing of the critic who tells the unpopular truth. He turns it on Jewish continuity and dissolves the claim that rabbinic Judaism is the natural flowering of the Bible. But the chair he sits in is a chair in Judaic studies, endowed and sustained by a community whose central story his method unmakes, and the same hand that takes the continuity apart edits the series that keeps the philosophy shelved, so the heroism of deflation and the income of preservation arrive together from sources that do not agree. And one object the apparatus leaves alone. The cultural memory of the Holocaust could be read as a construction like the others, assembled, deployed, serving present need, and his tools could say so. They do not. The restraint may be decency, and the scale and the living survivors make decency the likeliest reading. It is also true that this is the one deflation that would cost him the ground he stands on, and his own method, turned on anyone else, would not let the convenient silence pass without asking which it was. On himself it never asks.
Here his self-awareness runs backward. Most men see least about the rival across the field and something about themselves. Hughes is the reverse. No one alive is sharper at finding the unexamined faith in another scholar’s work, the place where erudition shades into devotion, the apologetic hiding in the footnote. The whole gift points outward. It cannot be aimed home, because aiming it home is the one operation that would deflate the deflator, and a hero system does not hand its bearer the tool to take the hero apart. He examines every construction but his own with a rigor that goes dark the instant the light would fall on the lamp.
This reading deflates Hughes, and the move that deflates him deflates the one making it, and Becker’s frame, turned on Becker, is a hero system too, a scheme for the significance of the man who sees through schemes. The knife cuts every hand that lifts it, mine as much as his.
Hughes claims for himself the one thing he denies to every believer he studies, a standpoint that is not a standpoint, a seeing with no faith inside it, the residue mistaken for the real. The honest deflator would grant that deflation too is a creed, with its own sacred method and its own quiet dread, and would keep deflating anyway, having surrendered the last illusion, the illusion of standing nowhere.
