Hebrew Scripture and the Wisdom of Philosophical Reason, or What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Indeed, Hazony lacks the clarity of presentation that Thomas Cahill provides in The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (New York: Anchor Books, 1998). The Introduction of Cahill’s book, which Hazony does not mention, is entitled “The Jews Are It” and opens as follows: “The Jews started it all- and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews… we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently. ... And we would set a different course for our lives” (3).

2. Baruch Spinoza, Opera, Vol. II, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuch Handlung, 1925), Part IV, Prop. 18, scholium.

3. Romans 13.8–10. All biblical citations are from the Revised Standard Version.

4. Hazony does mention Spinoza once but only in a note to a passage in which he remarks that there are numerous “philosophers and historians of ideas who are unable to point… to a single idea of significance that might have entered the Western philosophical tradition through the texts of the Hebrew Bible.” In this same passage he goes on to observe that, with the introduction of critical biblical scholarship, Scripture has often been looked at as little more than corrupt “patchworks of fragments” (18). He then adds in a note: “This way of looking at the Hebrew Scriptures appears to begin with Spinoza, who argues [in the Theologico-Political Treatise] that ‘the word of God is faulty, mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent’.” (279). Hazony fails to point out, however, that Spinoza then proceeds to show that the Bible is absolutely true, i.e., that it contains the absolute Word of God as caritas: the command to love your neighbor as yourself. What Spinoza sees and Hazony does not see is that it is precisely error (sin) that guarantees truth. For it is only in light of the truth (of caritas) that we can account for error (sin).

5. All emphases are in the original unless otherwise indicated. When, in a single paragraph, two or more passages are consecutively cited from the same page of the text, the page reference is given at the end of the last passage cited.

6. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 69. Hazony does mention Buber in several footnotes but only in contexts involving biblical exegesis.

7. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). In Chapter 1 Auerbach writes that the poems of Homer “conceal nothing” and “contain no teaching and no secret, second meaning” and therefore can only be analyzed but “cannot be interpreted” (13). In contrast are the stories of Hebrew Scripture: “Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with ‘background’ and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning.” The story of Isaac, unlike the story of Achilles, is filled with elements (involving both God and human actors) “that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. ... If the text of the Biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority forces it still further in the same direction. Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history” (150).

8. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 209.

9. See Chapter 6, note 80.

10. It is important to remember that “disinterest” is not lack of interest but interest that sacrifices mere self-interest to the interest of life, which is the I-thou relationship.

11. Hazony rightly points out that Kant has an altogether dismissive (reductive) view of Jewish Scripture (so typical of Christendom). See pp. 2, 14, and 277 (note 30).

12. Hazony notes that it is commonly said that the correspondence theory of truth, as derived from the Greeks and as presupposing a dualism between speech and object (truth), has characterized “the thought of virtually all philosophers up until recent times” (195).

13. The way of art--literary, visual, and musical--in the past two thousand years is also the story of the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. In my judgment, our great artists, e.g., Shakespeare and Caravaggio, exact contemporaries, demonstrate in and through their works that art has both its origins and its ends, at once historical and ontological--what Hazony calls its purpose--in the philosophical wisdom of the Hebrews, i.e., in Jerusalem, and not in Athens.

14. Hazony writes in the final sentence of the final Chapter 9 of his book that, once we have obtained a clear conception of reason and revelation as biblical, it is not evident that they “will remain things that are possible for us to hold apart and keep distinct from one another” (264). A good place in which to begin is with the demonstration not only of Spinoza in the Theologico-Political Treatise that caritas is the truth of both philosophy (reason) and theology (faith) but also of Hegel in The Philosophy of Religion that reason is revelation: reason is revelation made historically rational; revelation is reason made historically faithful.