Athens versus Jerusalem: a source of left-right conflict in the history of ideas

Abstract

The ancient conflict commonly called ‘Athens versus Jerusalem’ was not just about reason versus faith but more importantly was about the idea in ‘Athens’ of a pre-ordered universe versus the idea in ‘Jerusalem’ of the creative spontaneity of God's self-sufficient will. This ancient intercultural contest became modernized and secularized as the idea of spontaneous creativity increasingly came to be seen as a human power. Meanwhile, the idea of universal order was renewed in the scientific revolution. Today, a legacy of the conflict between ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’ in its modern form is manifested in the ideological conflict over the ultimate source of lawfulness and goodness. Thus one of the ideological cleavages in the politics of contemporary democracies is on the question, are the rules that govern human life to be discovered or are they to be created by human beings? The left–right metaphor in politics has no inherent meaning but some of its conventional connotations are related to this conflict of worldviews.

Notes

Berlin makes this argument throughout his work. For a concise statement, see ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana, 1990), pp. 1–19.

Tertullian, ‘The Prescriptions against the Heretics’, in S.L. Greenslade (Ed. and Trans.), Early Latin Theology, Library of Christian Classics Vol. 5 (London: SCM Press [c. 220] 1956), p. 36.

Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 1–4.

G. Morrow, ‘Introduction’, in Plato, Timaeus, trans. by B. Jowett (New York, 1949), pp. xiv, xx.

Dihle, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 18–25.

Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will [1525], trans. by Janine Marie Idziak, excerpted in Janine Marie Idziak (Ed.), Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen 1979), p. 95.

Daniel O'Connor, ‘The Human and the Divine,’ in Daniel O'Connor and Francis Oakley (Eds.), Creation: The Impact of an Idea (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), pp. 117–118.

Hans Jonas, ‘Jewish and Christian Elements in the Western Tradition,’ in Daniel O'Connor and Francis Oakley (Eds.), Creation: The Impact of an Idea (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), p. 253.

For an argument that ideological politics is rooted in a contest between ‘constrained’ and ‘unconstrained’ visions of human nature and social possibilities, see Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York: William Morrow, 1987).

Descartes completed Le Monde in 1633 but withheld it from publication after Galileo's arrest. It was published posthumously in 1664.

Descartes wrote, ‘I find no distinction’ between mind and soul.' Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. by Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, [1641] 1960), p. 15.

Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

J. J. Rousseau, Discourse in Inequality, in Allan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (Eds.), Rousseau's Political Writings, trans. by Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988), pp. 15–16. Emphasis added.

The word ‘such’ is added here to the King James translation of the original Hebrew to emphasize the implied meaning of existential self-sufficiency.

Marxism was atypical (and perhaps for that reason was unusually successful as a political movement with mass appeal) in synthesizing the idea of willfulness with the empiricist idea of labour as the source of value. By ‘turning Hegel on his head’. Marx brought the idea of social self-sufficiency to the masses, embodied in the form of collective labour. By labouring together, the workers create the foundational conditions of their common existence. With Marx, Hegel's Geist— the self-sufficient spirit of humanity—became self-sufficient class consciousness.

Marx understood the force (as it were) of this argument, though he turned it to create a post-voluntarist theory in which labour would unite into a Rousseauian whole. Like Descartes and Kant, the genius of Marx was in the attempt to synthesize aspects of Athens and Jerusalem to create a new version of the latter tradition.

In the jargon of recent political theory, social conservatives are communitarians but of a certain sort. They are right-communitarians for whom the community is based on given laws, customs, mores, etc. Left-communitarians are those who also see community as a primary good but who see it as self-creative. A historical example of this cleavage may be found the division between Old (or Right) and Young (or Left) Hegelians.

J. J. Rousseau, On Social Contract, in Ritter and Conaway Bondanella (Eds.), Rousseau's Political Writings, p. 108.

Jonas, op. cit., Ref. 8.

The description of Marx as revisionist refers to his departure from the voluntarist tradition in the ‘scientific Marxism’ of his mature period. However, earlier works like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 show the genesis of his thought within the voluntarist tradition. Some post-Marxists have returned to the tradition to recover the ideal of human agency.

Erich Frank, Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 148–152.