Leo Strauss - Jerusalem and Athens

8/4/2019 Leo Strauss - Jerusalem and Athens

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46 COMMENTARY/JUNE 1967ture to which the beholder of all cultures belongsmust be the universal culture, the culture of man-kind, the world culture; the universality of be-holding presupposes, if only by anticipating, theuniversal culture which is no longer one cultureamong many. Nietzsche sought therefore for aculture that would no longer be particular andhence in the last analysis arbitrary. The singlegoal of mankind is conceived by him as in asense super-human: he speaks of the super-manof the future. The super-man is meant to unite inhimself, on the highest level, both Jerusalem andAthens.

However much the science of all cultures mayprotest its innocence of all preferences or evalua-tions, it fosters a specific moral posture. Since itrequires openness to all cultures, it fosters uni-versal tolerance and the exhilaration which de-rives from the beholding of diversity; it necessar-ily affects all cultures that it can still affect bycontributing to their transformation in one andthe same direction; it willy-nilly brings about ashift of emphasis from the particular to the uni-versal. By asserting, if only implicitly, the right-ness of pluralism, it asserts that pluralism is theright way; it asserts the monism of universal tol-erance and respect fo r diversity; for by virtue ofbeing an "-ism," pluralism is a monism.One remains somewhat closer to the science ofculture as it is commonly practiced if one limitsoneself to saying that every attempt to understandthe phenomena in question remains dependentupon a conceptual framework that is alien tomost of these phenomena and therefore necessar-ily distorts them. "Objectivity" can be expectedonly if one attempts to understand the variouscultures or peoples exactly as they understand orunderstood themselves. Men of ages and climatesother than our own did not understand them-selves in terms of cultures because they were notconcerned with culture in the present-day mean-ing of the term. What we now call culture is theaccidental result of concerns that were not con-cerns with culture but with other things-aboveall with the Truth.yET OU R intention to speak of Jerusalem andy Athens seems to compel us to go beyond theself-understanding of either. Or is there a notion,a word that points to the highest that both theBible and the greatest works of the Greeks claimto convey? There is such a word: wisdom. Notonly the Greek philosophers but the Greek poetsas well were considered to be wise men, and theTorah is said, in the Torah, to be "your wisdomin the eyes of the nations." We, then, must try tounderstand the difference between biblical wis-dom and Greek wisdom. We see at once that eachof the two claims to be the true wisdom, thusdenying to the other its claim to be wisdom inthe strict and highest sense. According to theBible, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the

Lord; according to the Greek philosophers, thebeginning of wisdom is wonder. We are thus com-pelled from the very beginning to make a choice,to take a stand. Where then do we stand? Con-fronted by the incompatible claims of Jerusalemand Athens, we are open to both and willing tolisten to each. We ourselves are not wise but wewish to become wise. We are seekers for wisdom,"philo-sophoi." Ye t since we say that we wish tohear first and then to act or to decide, we havealready decided in favor of Athens againstJerusalem.This, indeed, seems to be the necessary positionfor all of us who cannot be Orthodox and there-fore must accept the principle of the historical-critical study of the Bible. The Bible was tradi-tionally understood to be the true and authenticaccount of the deeds of God and men from thebeginning till the restoration after the Babylon-ian exile. The deeds of God include His legisla-tion as well as His inspirations to the prophets,and the deeds of men include their praises of Godand their prayers to Him as well as their God-inspired admonitions. Biblical criticism startsfrom the observation that the biblical account isin important respects not authentic but derivativeor consists not of "histories" but of "memories ofancient histories," to borrow a Machiavellian ex-pression. Biblical criticism reached its first climaxin Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, whichis frankly anti-theological; Spinoza read the Bibleas he read the Talmud and the Koran. The resultof his criticism can be summarized as follows: theBible consists to a considerable extent of self-contradictory assertions, of remnants of ancientprejudices or superstitions, and of the outpour-ings of an uncontrolled imagination; in addition,it is poorly compiled and poorly preserved. Hearrived at this conclusion by presupposing theimpossibility of miracles. The considerable differ-ences between 19th- and 20th-century biblicalcriticism and that of Spinoza can be traced totheir difference in regard to the evaluation ofimagination: whereas for Spinoza imagination issimply sub-rational, it was assigned a much higherrank in later times when it wa s understood as thevehicle of religious or spiritual experience, whichnecessarily expresses itself in symbols and thelike. The historical-critical study of the Bible isthe attempt to understand the various layers ofthe Bible as they were understood by their imme-diate addressees, i.e., the contemporaries of itsauthors. Of course, the Bible speaks of manythings-for instance, the creation of the world-that for the biblical authors themselves belong tothe remote past. But there is undoubtedly muchhistory in the Bible-accounts of events writ-ten by contemporaries or near-contemporaries.One is thus led to say that the Bible contains both"myth" and "history." Yet this distinction is aliento the Bible; it is a special form of the Greek dis-tinction between mythos and logos. From the


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JERUSALEM AND ATHENS 47

point of view of the Bible, the "myths" are as trueas the "histories": what Israel "in fact" did or suf-fered cannot be understood except in the light ofthe "facts" of Creation and Election. What is nowcalled "historical" are those deeds and speechesthat are equally accessible to the believer and tothe unbeliever. But from the point of view of theBible, the unbeliever is the fool who has said inhis heart "there is no God"; the Bible narrateseverything as it is credible to the wise in the bib-lical sense of wisdom. Let us never forget thatthere is no biblical word for doubt. The biblicalsigns and wonders convince men who have littlefaith or who believe in other gods; they are notaddressed to "the fools who say in their hearts'there is no God.'"It is true that we cannot ascribe to the Biblethe theological concept of miracles, for that con-cept presupposes the concept of nature, and theconcept of nature is foreign to the Bible. One is,however, tempted to ascribe to the Bible what onemay call the poetic concept of miracles as illus-trated by Psalm 114:

When Israel went out of Egypt, the house ofJacob from a people of strange tongue, Judahbecame his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.The sea saw and fled; the Jordan turned back.The mountains skipped like rams, the hills likelambs. What ails thee, sea, that thou fleest, thouJordan that thou turnst back? Ye mountainsthat ye skip like rams, ye hills like lambs? Fromthe presence of the Lord tremble thou earth,from the presence of the God of Jacob whoturns the rock into a pond of water, the flintinto a fountain of waters.The presence of God calls forth from His crea-

tures a conduct that differs strikingly from theirordinary conduct: it enlivens the lifeless; it makesfluid the fixed. It is not easy to say whether theauthor of the psalm did not mean his utteranceto be simply or literally true. It is easy to say thatthe concept of poetry-as distinguished from thatof song-is foreign to the Bible. It is perhaps moresimple to say that owing to the victory of scienceover natural theology the impossibility of mira-cles can no longer be said to be established buthas degenerated to the status of an undemon-strable hypothesis. One may trace to the hypo-thetical character of this fundamental premise thehypothetical character of many, not to say all, re-sults of biblical criticism. Certain it is that biblicalcriticism in all its forms makes use of termshaving no biblical equivalents and is to this ex-tent unhistorical.How THEN must we proceed? We shall not takeissue with the findings or even the premisesof biblical criticism. Let us grant that the Bibleand in particular the Torah consists to a consid-erable extent of "memories of ancient histories,"even of memories of memories. But memories ofmemories are not necessarily distorted or pale re-

flections of the original; they may be recollectionsof recollections, deepenings through meditationof the primary experience. We shall therefore takethe latest and uppermost layer as seriously as theearlier ones. We shall start from the uppermostlayer-from what is first for us , even though itmay not be simply the first. We shall start, thatis, where both the traditional and the historicalstudy of the Bible necessarily start. In thus pro-ceeding we avoid the compulsion to make an ad-vance decision in favor of Athens against Jeru-salem. For the Bible does not require us to believein the miraculous character of events that theBible does not present as miraculous. God's speak-ing to men may be described as miraculous, butthe Bible does not claim that the putting-togetherof those speeches was done miraculously. Webegin at the beginning, at the beginning of thebeginning. The beginning of the beginning hap-pens to deal with the beginning: the creation ofheaven and earth. The Bible begins reasonably."IN THE BEGINNING God created heaven andearth." Who says this? We are not told; hence wedo not know. We have no right to assume thatGod said it, for the Bible introduces God's say-ings by expressions like "God said." We shall thenassume that the words were spoken by a namelessman. Yet no man can have been an eyewitness ofGod's creating heaven and earth; the only eye-witness was God. Since "There did not arise inIsrael a prophet like Moses whom the Lord sawface to face," it is understandable that traditionascribed to Moses the sentence quoted and itswhole sequel. But what is understandable orplausible is not as such certain. The narrator doesnot claim to have heard the account from God;perhaps he heard it from some man or men; per-haps he is retelling a tale. The Bible continues:"And the earth wa s unformed and void...." Itis not clear whether the earth thus described wascreated by God or antedated His creation. But itis quite clear that while speaking about how theearth looked at first, the Bible is silent about howheaven looked at first. The earth, i.e., that whichis not heaven, seems to be more important thanheaven. This impression is confirmed by thesequel.God created everything in six days. On the firstday He created light; on the second, heaven; onthe third, the earth, the seas, and vegetation; onthe fourth, the sun, the moon, and the stars; onthe fifth, the water animals and the birds; and onthe sixth, the land animals and man. The moststriking difficulties are these: light and hence day(and nights) are presented as preceding the sun,and vegetation is presented as preceding the sun.The first difficulty is disposed of by the observa-tion that creation-days are not sun-days. One mustadd at once, however, that there is a connectionbetween the two kinds of days, for there is a con-nection, a correspondence between light and sun.


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48 COMMENTARY/JUNE 1967

The account of creation manifestly consists of twoparts, the first part dealing with the first threecreation-days and the second part dealing withthe last three. The first part begins with the crea-tion of light and the second with the creation ofthe heavenly light-givers. Correspondingly, thefirst part ends with the creation of vegetation andthe second with the creation of man. All crea-tures dealt with in the first part lack local motion;all creatures dealt with in the second part possesslocal motion.* Vegetation precedes the sun be-cause vegetation lacks local motion and the sunpossesses it. Vegetation belongs to the earth; it isrooted in the earth; it is the fixed covering of thefixed earth.t Vegetation wa s brought forth by theearth at God's command; the Bible does notspeak of God's "making" vegetation; but as re-gards the living beings in question, God com-manded the earth to bring them forth and ye tGod "made" them. Vegetation was created at theend of the first half of the creation-days; at theend of the last half, the living beings that spendtheir whole lives on the firm earth were created.The living beings-beings that possess life in ad -dition to local motion-were created on the fifthand sixth days, on the days following the day onwhich the heavenly light-givers were created. TheBible presents the creatures in an ascendingorder. Heaven is lower than earth. The heavenlylight-givers lack life; they are lower than the low-liest living beast; they serve the living creatures,which are to be found only beneath heaven; theyhave been created in order to rule over day andnight: they have not been made in order to ruleover the earth, let alone over man.The most striking characteristic of the biblicalaccount of creation is its demoting or degradingof heaven and the heavenly lights. Sun, moon,and stars precede the living things because theyare lifeless: they are not gods. What the heavenlylights lose, man gains; man is the peak of crea-tion. The creatures of the first three days cannotchange their places; the heavenly bodies changetheir places but not their courses; the livingbeings change their courses but not their "ways";men alone can change their "ways." Man is theonly being created in God's image. Only in thecase of man's creation does the biblical account ofcreation repeatedly speak of God's "creating"him; in the case of the creation of heaven and theheavenly bodies, that account speaks of God's"making" them. Similarly, only in the case ofman's creation does the Bible intimate that thereis a multiplicity in God: "Let us make man in ourimage, after our likeness.... So God created manin His image, in the image of God He created him;male and female He created them." Bisexuality isnot a preserve of man, but only man's bisexualitycould give rise to the view that there are gods andgoddesses: there is no biblical word for "goddess."Hence creation is not begetting. The biblical ac-count of creation teaches silently what the Bible

teaches elsewhere explicitly: there is only oneGod, the God whose name is written as the Tetra-grammaton, the living God Who lives from everto ever, Who alone has created heaven and earthand all their hosts; He has not created any godsand hence there are no gods besides Him. Themany gods whom men worship are either noth-ings that ow e such being as they possess to man'smaking them, or if they are something (like sun,moon, and stars), they surely are not gods.** Allnon-polemical references to "other gods" occur-ring in the Bible are fossils whose preservationindeed poses a question but only a rather unim-portant one. Not only did the biblical God notcreate any gods; on the basis of the biblical ac-count of creation, one could doubt whether Hecreated any beings one would be compelled tocall "mythical": heaven and earth and all theirhosts are always accessible to man as man. Onewould have to start from this fact in order tounderstand why the Bible contains so many sec-tions that, on the basis of the distinction betweenmythical (or legendary) and historical, wouldhave to be described as historical.

CCORDING TO THE Bible, creation was com-pleted by , and culminated in, the creation ofman. Only after the creation of man did God "see

all that He had made, and behold, it was verygood." What then is the origin of the evil or thebad? The biblical answer seems to be that sinceeverything of divine origin is good, evil is ofhuman origin. Ye t if God's creation as a whole isvery good, it does not follow that all its parts aregood or that creation as a whole contains no evilwhatsoever: God did not find all parts of Hiscreation to be good. Perhaps creation as a wholecannot be "very good" if it does not containsome evils. There cannot be light if there is notdarkness, and the darkness is as much created asis the light: God creates evil as well as He makespeace (Isaiah 45:7). However this may be, theevils whose origin the Bible lays bare, after it hasspoken of creation, are a particular kind of evils:the evils that beset man. Those evils are not dueto creation or implicit in it, as the Bible shows bysetting forth man's original condition. In order toset forth that condition, the Bible must retellman's creation by making man's creation as muchas possible the sole theme. This second accountanswers the question, not of how heaven andearth and all their hosts have come into being butof how human life as we know it-beset with evilswith which it was not beset originally-has come

* Cf. U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis,Part I, Jerusalem, 1961, p. 42.t Cf. the characterization of the plants as E'YyeLa ("in orof the earth") in Plato's Republic, 491 d 1. Cf. EmpedoclesA 70.* Cf. the distinction between the two kinds of "other

gods" in Deut. 4:15-19, between the idols on the one handand sun, moon, and stars on the other.


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into being. This second account may only supple-ment the first account but it may also correct itand thus contradict it. After all, the Bible neverteaches that one can speak about creation withoutcontradicting oneself. In post-biblical parlance,the mysteries of the Torah (sithre torah) are thecontradictions of the Torah; the mysteries of Godare the contradictions regarding God.

HE FIRST account of creation ended with man;Tthe second account begins with man. Accordingto the first account, God created man and only manin His image; according to the second account,God formed man from the dust of the earth andHe blew into his nostrils the breath of life. Thesecond account makes clear that man consists oftw o profoundly different ingredients, a high oneand a low one. According to the first account, itwould seem that man and woman were createdsimultaneously; according to the second account,man wa s created first. The life of man as we knowit, the life of most men, is that of tillers of thesoil; their life is needy and harsh. If human lifehad been needy and harsh from the very begin-ning, man would have been compelled or at leastalmost irresistibly tempted to be harsh, unchari-table, unjust; he would not have been fully re-sponsible for his lack of charity or justice. Butman is to be fully responsible. Hence the harsh-ness of human life must be due to man's fault. Hisoriginal condition must have been one of ease:he wa s not in need of rain nor of hard work; hewa s put by God into a well-watered garden thatwa s rich in trees that were good for food. Ye twhile man wa s created for a life of ease, he wa snot created for a life of luxury: there was no goldor precious stones in the garden of Eden. Manwa s created for a simple life. Accordingly, Godpermitted him to eat of every tree of the gardenexcept the tree of knowledge of good and evil,"for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surelydie." Man was not denied knowledge; withoutknowledge he could not have known the tree ofknowledge, nor the woman, nor the brutes; norcould he have understood the prohibition. Manwas denied knowledge of good and evil, i.e., theknowledge sufficient for guiding himself, his life.Though not being a child, he wa s to live inchildlike simplicity and obedience to God. We arefree to surmise that there is a connection betweenthe demotion of heaven in the first account andthe prohibition against eating of the tree ofknowledge in the second. While man wa s forbid-den to eat of the tree 9 f knowledge, he was notforbidden to eat of the tree of life.

Man, lacking knowledge of good and evil, wascontent with his condition and in particular withhis loneliness. But God, possessing knowledge ofgood and evil, found that "it is not good for manto be alone, so I will make him a helper as hiscounterpart." So God formed the brutes andbrought them to man, but they proved not to be

the desired helpers. Thereupon God formed thewoman out of a rib of the man. The man wel-comed her as bone of his bones and flesh of hisflesh but, lacking knowledge of good and evil, hedid not call her good. The narrator adds that"therefore [namely because the woman is bone ofman's bone and flesh of his flesh] a man leaveshis father and his mother, and cleaves to his wife,and they become one flesh." Both were naked but,lacking knowledge of good and evil, they werenot ashamed.

Thus the stage was set for the fall of our firstparents. The first move came from the serpent,the most cunning of all the beasts of the field; itseduced the woman into disobedience and thenthe woman seduced the man. The seductionmoves from the lowest to the highest. The Bibledoes not tell what induced the serpent to seducethe woman into disobeying the divine prohibi-tion. It is reasonable to assume that the serpentacted as it did because it wa s cunning, i.e., pos-sessed a low kind of wisdom, a congenital malice;everything that God had created would not bevery good if it did not include something con-genitally bent on mischief. The serpent begins itsseduction by suggesting that God might have for-bidden man and woman to eat of any tree in thegarden, i.e., that God's prohibition might be ma-licious or impossible to comply with. The womancorrects the serpent and in so doing makes theprohibition more stringent than it was: "We mayeat of the fruit of the other trees of the garden; itis only about the tree in the middle of the gardenthat God said: you shall not eat of it or touch it,lest you die."Now, God did not forbid the man to touch thefruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.Besides, the woman does not explicitly speak ofthe tree of knowledge; she may have had in mindthe tree of life. Moreover, God had issued theprohibition only to the man, whereas the womanclaims that God had spoken to her as well; shesurely knew the divine prohibition only throughhuman tradition. The serpent assures her thatthey will not die, "for God knows that when youeat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will belike God, knowing good and evil." The serpenttacitly questions God's veracity. At the same timeit glosses over the fact that eating of the tree in-volves disobedience to God. In this it is followedby the woman. According to the serpent's asser-tion, knowledge of good and evil makes man im-mune to death (although we cannot know wheth-er the serpent believes this). But the woman,having forgotten the divine prohibition, havingtherefore in a manner tasted of the tree of knowl-edge, is no longer wholly unaware of good andevil: she "saw that the tree wa s good for eatingand a delight to the eyes and that the tree was tobe desired to make one wise"; therefore she tookof its fruit and ate. She thus made the fall of theman almost inevitable, for he was cleaving to her:


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she gave some of the fruit of the tree to the man,and lhe ate. The man drifts into disobedience byfollowing the woman. After they had eaten of thetree, their eyes were opened and they knew thatthey were naked, and they sewed fig leaves togeth-er and made themselves aprons: through the fallthey became ashamed of their nakedness; eatingof the tree of knowledge of good and evil madethem realize that nakedness is evil.TE BIBLE says nothing to the effect that ourFirst parents fell because they were promptedby the desire to be like God; they did not rebelhighhandedly against God; rather, they forgot toobey God; they drifted into disobedience. Never-theless, God punished them severely. But the pun-

ishment did not do away with the fact that, asGod Himself said, as a consequence of his diso-bedience "man ha s become like one of us, know-ing good and evil." There wa s now the dangerthat man might eat of the tree of life and liveforever. Therefore God expelled him from thegarden and made it impossible for him to returnto it. One may wonder why man, while he wa sstill in the garden of Eden, had not eaten of thetree of life of which he had not been forbidden toeat. Perhaps he did not think of it because, lack-ing knowledge of good and evil, he did not fearto die and, besides, the divine prohibition drewhis attention away from the tree of life to thetree of knowledge.The Bible intends to teach that man was meantto live in simplicity, without knowledge of goodand evil. But the narrator seems to be aware ofthe fact that a being which can be forbidden tostrive for knowledge of good and evil, i.e., thatcan understand to some degree that knowledgeof good and evil is evil for it, necessarily possessessuch knowledge. Human suffering from evil pre-supposes human knowledge of good and evil andvice versa. Man wishes to live without evil. TheBible tells us that he was given the opportunity tolive without evil and that he cannot blame Godfor the evils from which he suffers. By giving manthat opportunity, God convinces him that hisdeepest wish cannot be fulfilled. The story of thefall is the first part of the story of God's educa-tion of man.Man has to live with knowledge of good andevil and with the sufferings inflicted on him be-cause of that knowledge or its acquisition. Humangoodness or badness presupposes that knowledgeand its concomitants. The Bible gives us the firstinkling of human goodness and badness in thestory of the first brothers. The older brother,Cain, was a tiller of the soil; the younger brother,Abel, a keeper of sheep. God preferred the offer-ing of the keeper of sheep, who brought thechoicest of the firstlings of his flock, to that of thetiller of the soil. There were many reasons for thispreference but one of them seems to be that thepastoral life is closer to original simplicity than

the life of the tillers of the soil. Cain, howeverwas vexed, and despite his having been warned byGod against sinning in general, killed his brother.After a futile attempt to deny his guilt-an at-tempt that increased that guilt ("Am I my broth-er's keeper?")-he was cursed by God as the ser-pent and the soil had been after the Fall, incontradistinction to Adam and Eve who were notcursed. He was punished by God, but not withdeath: anyone slaying Cain would be punishedmuch more severely than Cain himself. The rela-tively mild punishment of Cain cannot be ex-plained by the fact that murder had not been ex-pressly forbidden: Cain possessed some knowledgeof good and evil, and he knew that Abel was hisbrother, even assuming that he did not know thatman was created in the image of God. It is betterto explain Cain's punishment by assuming thatpunishments were milder in the beginning thanlater on. Cain-like his fellow fratricide, Romulus-founded a city, and some of his descendantswere the ancestors of men practicing various arts:the city and the arts, so alien to man's originalsimplicity, ow e their- origin to Cain and his racerather than to Seth, the substitute for Abel, andhis race. It goes without saying that this is not thelast word of the Bible on the city and the arts butit is its first word, just as the prohibition againsteating of the tree of knowledge is, one may say,its first word simply, and the revelation of theTorah-i.e., the highest kind of knowledge ofgood and evil that is vouchsafed to men-is its lastword. The account of the race of Cain culminatesin the song of Lamech who boasted to his wivesof his slaying of men, of his being superior toGod as an avenger. The (antediluvian) race ofSeth cannot boast of a single inventor; its only dis-tinguished members were Enoch, who walkedwith God, and Noah, who was a righteous manand walked with God: civilization and piety aretwo very different things.By the time of Noah the wickedness of man hadbecome so great that God repented of His crea-tion of man and all other earthly creatures, Noahalone excepted; so He brought on the flood.Generally speaking, prior to the flood, man's life-span wa s much longer than after it. Man's ante-diluvian longevity wa s a relic of his original con-dition. Man originally lived in the garden ofEden where he could have eaten of the tree oflife and thus become immortal. The longevityof antediluvian man reflects this lost chance.To this extent the transition from antediluvian topostdiluvian man is a decline. This impression isconfirmed by the fact that before the flood ratherthan after it the sons of God consorted with thedaughters of man and thus generated the mightymen of old, the men of renown. On the otherhand, the fall of our first parents made possible ornecessary in due time God's revelation of HisTorah, and this was decisively prepared, as weshall see, by the flood. In this respect, the transi-


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tion from antediluvian to postdiluvian mankindis progress. The ambiguity regarding the Fall-the fact that it was a sin and hence avoidable andthat it was at the same time inevitable-is reflect-ed in the ambiguity regarding the status of ante-diluvian mankind.The link between antediluvian mankind andthe revelation of the Torah is supplied by the firstcovenant between God and men, the covenantfollowing the flood. The flood was the properpunishment for the extreme and well-nigh univer-sal wickedness of antediluvian men. Prior to theflood, mankind lived, so to speak, without re-straint, without law. While our first parents werestill in the garden of Eden, they were not for-bidden anything except to eat of the tree ofknowledge. The vegetarianism of antediluvianmen was not due to an explicit prohibition (Gen.1:29); rather, their abstention from meat belongstogether with their abstention from wine (cf.9:20); both were relics of man's original simplic-ity. After the expulsion from the garden of Eden,God did not punish men, apart from the relativelymild punishment which He inflicted on Cain. Nordid He establish human judges. God experiment-ed, as it were, for the instruction of mankind,with the possibility of mankind's living free of thelaw. The experiment, just like the experiment ofhaving men remain like innocent children, endedin failure. Fallen or awake man needs restraint,must live under law. But this law must not besimply imposed. It must form part of a covenantin which God and man are equally, though notequal, partners. Such a partnership wa s estab-lished only after the flood; it did not exist inantediluvian times either before or after the fall.

HE INEQUALITY regarding the covenant isShown especially by the fact that when Godundertook never again to destroy almost all lifeon earth as long as the earth lasts, He did not doso on the condition that all or almost all menobey the laws promulgated by God after theflood: God makes His promise despite, or becauseof, His knowing that the devisings of man's heartare evil from his youth. Noah is the ancestor of alllater men just as Adam was; the purgation of theearth through the flood is to some extent a resto-ration of mankind to its original state; it is a kindof second creation. Within the limits indicated,the condition of postdiluvian men is superior tothat of antediluvian men. One point requiresspecial emphasis: in the legislation following theflood, murder is expressly forbidden and madepunishable by death on the ground that manwas created in the image of God (9:6). The firstcovenant brought an increase in hope and at thesame time an increase in punishment. Not untilafter the flood was man's rule over the beasts,ordained or established from the beginning, tobe accompanied by the beasts' fear and dread ofman (cf. 9:2 with 1:26-30 and 2:15).

The covenant following the flood prepares thecovenant with Abraham. The Bible singles outthree events that took place between the cove-nant after the flood and God's calling of Abra-ham: Noah's curse of Canaan, a son of Ham; theachievement of excellence by Nimrod, a grandsonof Ham; and men's attempt to prevent their dis-persal over the earth by building a city which hada tower that reached to the heavens. Canaan,whose land came to be the promised land, wa scursed because Ham saw the nakedness of hisfather, Noah-because Ham transgressed a mostsacred, if unpromulgated, law; the curse ofCanaan wa s accompanied by the blessing of Shemand Japheth who turned their eyes away from thenakedness of their father. Here we have the firstand the most fundamental division of mankind,at any rate of postdiluvian mankind, the divisioninto "cursed" and "blessed." Nimrod was the firstto be a mighty man on earth-a mighty hunterbefore the Lord; his kingdom included Babel(big kingdoms are attempts to overcome by forcethe division of mankind, conquest and hunting

being akin to each other). The city that menbuilt in order to remain together and thus tomake a name for themselves was Babel; God scat-tered them by confounding their speech, bybringing about the division of mankind intogroups that could not understand one another:into nations, i.e., groups united not only by de-scent but also by language. The division of man-kind into nations may be described as a milderalternative to the flood.The three events that took place betweenGod's covenant with mankind after the floodand His calling of Abraham point to God's wayof dealing with men who know good and evil anddevise evil from their youth. Well-nigh universalwickedness will no longer be punished with well-nigh universal destruction, but will be preventedthrough the division of mankind into nations.Mankind will be divided, not into the cursed andthe blessed (the curses and blessings were Noah's,not God's), but into a chosen nation and into na-tions that are not chosen. The emergence ofnations made it possible to replace Noah's Ark-which floated alone on the waters covering theentire earth-by a whole, numerous nation livingin the midst of the nations covering the earth.The election of the holy nation begins with theelection of Abraham. Noah was distinguishedfrom his contemporaries by his righteousness;Abraham separates himself from his contempo-raries and in particular from his country and kin-dred at God's command-a command accompa-nied by God's promise to make of him a greatnation. The Bible does not say that this primaryelection of Abraham was preceded by the fact ofAbraham's righteousness. However this may be,Abraham shows his righteousness by obeyingGod's command at once, by trusting in God'spromise whose fulfillment he could not possibly


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52 COMMENTARY/JUNE 1967live to see, given the short lifespan of postdiluvianman: only after Abraham's offspring would havebecome a great nation would the land of Canaanbe given to them forever.The fulfillment of the promise required thatAbraham not remain childless, and he was alreadyquite old. Accordingly, God promised him thathe would have issue. It was Abraham's trust inGod's promise that, above everything else, madehim righteous in the eyes of the Lord. It wasGod's intention that His promise be fulfilledthrough the offspring of Abraham and his wifeSarah. But this promise seemed laughable toAbraham, to say nothing of Sarah: Abraham wa sone hundred years old and Sarah, ninety. Ye tnothing is too wondrous for the Lord. The laugh-able announcement became a joyous one. It wasfollowed immediately by God's announcement toAbraham of His concern with the wickedness ofthe people of Sodom and Gomorrah. God did notyet know whether those people were as wicked asthey were said to be. But they might be ; theymight deserve total destruction as much as didthe generation of the flood. Noah had acceptedthe destruction of his generation without anyquestioning. Abraham, however, who had a deep-er trust in God, in God's righteousness, and adeeper awareness of his being only dust and ashes,presumed in fear and trembling to appeal toGod's righteousness lest He, the judge of thewhole earth, destroy the righteous along with thewicked. In response to Abraham's insistent plead-ing, God as it were promised to Abraham that Hewould not destroy Sodom if ten righteous mencould be found in the city: He would save the cityfor the sake of the ten righteous men within it.Abraham acted as the mortal partner in God'srighteousness; he acted as if he had some share inthe responsibility for God's acting righteously. Nowonder God's covenant with Abraham wa s in-comparably more incisive than His covenant imme-mediately following the flood.ABRAHAM'S TRUST in God thus appears to be theTrust that God in His righteousness will not

do anything incompatible with His righteousnessand that while, or because, nothing is too won-drous for the Lord, there are firm boundaries setto Him by His own righteousness, by Himself.This awareness is deepened and therewith modi-fied by the last and severest test of Abraham'strust: God's command to him to sacrifice Isaac, hisonly son by Sarah. Abraham's supreme test pre-supposes the wondrous character of Isaac's birth:the very son who wa s to be the sole link betweenAbraham and the chosen people and who wasborn against all reasonable expectations, wa s tobe sacrificed by his father. This command contra-dicted not only the divine promise, but also thedivine prohibition against the shedding of inno-cent blood. Yet Abraham did not argue with Godas he had done in the case of Sodom's destruc-

tion. In the case of Sodom, Abraham was not con-fronted with a divine command to do a certainthing and more particularly he wa s not confront-ed with a command to surrender to God what wasdearest to him: Abraham did not argue with Godfor the preservation of Isaac because he lovedGod-not himself or his most cherished hope-with all his heart, with all his soul, and with allhis might. The same concern with God's right-eousness that had induced him to plead with Godfor the preservation of Sodom if ten just mencould be found in that city, induced him not toplead for the preservation of Isaac, for God right-fully demands that He alone be loved unqualified-ly. The fact that the command to sacrifice Isaaccontradicted the prohibition against the sheddingof innocent blood must be understood in thelight of the difference between human justice anddivine justice: God alone is unqualifiedly, if un-fathomably, just. God promised Abraham that Hewould spare Sodom if ten righteous men couldbe found in it, and Abraham was satisfied withthis promise; He did not promise that He wouldspare the city if nine righteous men were foundin it; would those nine be destroyed together withthe wicked? And even if all Sodomites were wick-ed and hence justly destroyed, did their infantswho were destroyed with them deserve their de-struction? The apparent contradiction betweenthe command to sacrifice Isaac and the divinepromise to the descendants of Isaac is disposed ofby the consideration that nothing is too wondrousfor the Lord. Abraham's supreme trust in God,his simple, singleminded, childlike faith was re-warded although, or because, it presupposed hisentire unconcern with any reward, for Abrahamwas willing to forgo, to destroy, to kill the onlyreward with which he wa s concerned: God pre-vented the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham's intendedaction needed a reward although he wa s not con-cerned with a reward because his intended actioncannot be said to have been intrinsically reward-ing. The preservation of Isaac is as wondrous ashis birth. These two wonders illustrate moreclearly than anything else the origin of the holynation.The God Who created heaven and earth, Whois the only God, Whose only image is man, Whoforbade man to eat of the tree of knowledge ofgood and evil, Who made a covenant with man-kind after the flood and thereafter a convenantwith Abraham which became His covenant withAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob-what kind of God isHe? Or, to speak more reverently and more ade-quately, what is His name? This question wa s ad-dressed to God Himself by Moses when he wassent by Him to the sons of Israel. God replied:"Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh," which is most often trans-lated: "I am That (Who) I am." I believe, how-ever, that we ought to render this statement, "Ishall be What I shall be," thus preserving theconnection between God's name and the fact that


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He makes covenants with men, i.e., that He re-veals Himself to men above all by His command-ments and by His promises and His fulfillment ofthose promises. "I shall be What I shall be" is, asit were, explained in the verse (Ex. 33:19), "Ishall be gracious to whom I shall be gracious andI shall show mercy to whom I shall show mercy."God's actions cannot be predicted, unless HeHimself has predicted them, i.e., promised them.But as is shown precisely by the account ofAbraham's binding of Isaac, the way in which Hefulfills His promises cannot be known in advance.The biblical God is a mysterious God: He comesin a thick cloud (Ex. 19:4); He cannot be seen;His presence can be sensed but not always andeverywhere; what is known of Him is only whatHe chose to communicate by His word throughHis chosen servants. The rest of the chosen peopleknows His word-apart from the Ten Command-ments (Deut. 4:12 and 5:4-5) -only mediately anddoes not wish to know it immediately (Ex. 20:19,and 21, 24:1-2; Deut. 10:15-18; Amos 3:7). Foralmost all purposes the word of God as revealedto His prophets and especially to Moses becamethe source of knowledge of good and evil, thetrue tree of knowledge which is at the same timethe tree of life.HAVING SAID this much about the beginning of

the Bible and what it entails, let us nowcast a glance at some Greek counterparts to thebeginning of the Bible-to begin with, at Hesiod'sTheogony as well as the remains of Parmenides'sand Empedocles's works. They are all the worksof known authors. This does not mean that theyare, or present themselves as being, merelyhuman. Hesiod sings what the Muses, the daugh-ters of Zeus who is the father of gods and men,taught him or commanded him to sing. Onecould say that the Muses vouch for the truth ofHesiod's song, were it not for the fact that theysometimes speak lies which resemble what is true.Parmenides transmits the teaching of a goddess,and so does Empedocles. Yet these men composedtheir books; their songs or speeches are books.The Bible, on the other hand, is not a book. Themost one could say is that it is a collection ofbooks. The author of a book, in the strict sense ofthe term, excludes everything that is not neces-sary, that does not fulfill a function necessary tothe purpose his book is meant to fulfill. The com-pilers of the Bible as a whole and of the Torah inparticular seem to have followed an entirely dif-ferent rule. Confronted with a variety of pre-existing holy speeches, which as such had to betreated with the utmost respect, they excludedonly what could not by any stretch of the imagi-nation be rendered compatible with the funda-mental and authoritative teaching; their verypiety, aroused and fostered by the pre-existingholy speeches, led them to make such changes inthose holy speeches as they did make. Their work

may then abound in contradictions and repeti-tions that no one ever intended as such, whereasin a book in the strict sense there is nothing thatis not intended by the author.Hesiod's Theogony sings of the generation orbegetting of the gods; the gods were not "made"by anybody. Far from having been created by agod, earth and heaven are the ancestors of theimmortal gods. More precisely, according toHesiod everything that is has come to be. Firstthere arose Chaos, Gaia (Earth), and Eros. Gaiagave birth first to Ouranos (Heaven) and then,mating with Ouranos, she brought forth Kronosand his brothers and sisters. Ouranos hated hischildren and did not wish them to come to life.At the wish and advice of Gaia, Kronos deprivedhis father of his generative power and thus un-intentionally brought about the emergence ofAphrodite; Kronos became the king of the gods.Kronos's evil deed was avenged by his son Zeuswhom he had generated by mating with Rheiaand whom he had planned to destroy; Zeus de-throned his father and thus became the king ofthe gods, the father of gods and men, the might-iest of all gods. Given his ancestors it is not sur-prising that while he is the father of men and be-longs to the gods who are the givers of goodthings, he is far from being kind to men. Matingwith Mnemosyne, the daughter of Gaia andOuranos, Zeus generated the nine Muses. TheMuses give sweet and gentle eloquence andunderstanding to the kings whom they wish tohonor. Through the Muses there are singers onearth, just as through Zeus there are kings. Whilekingship and song may go together, there is aprofound difference between the two-a differencethat, guided by Hesiod, one may compare to thatbetween the hawk and the nightingale. SurelyMetis (Wisdom), while being Zeus's first spouseand having become inseparable from him, is notidentical with him; the relation of Zeus and Metismay remind one of the relation of God and wis-dom in the Bible.

Hesiod speaks of the creation or making of mennot in the Theogony but in his Works and Days,i.e., in the context of his speeches regarding howman should live, regarding man's right life, whichincludes the teaching regarding the right seasons(the "days"); the question of the right life doesnot arise regarding the gods. The right life fo rman is the just life, the life devoted to working,especially to tilling the soil. Work thus under-stood is a blessing ordained by Zeus who blessesthe just and crushes the proud: often even awhole city is destroyed for the deeds of a singlebad man. Yet Zeus takes cognizance of men's jus-tice and injustice only if he so wills. Accordingly,work appears to be not a blessing but a curse:men must work because the gods keep hiddenfrom them the means of life and they do this inorder to punish them for Prometheus's theft offire-a theft inspired by philanthropy. But was


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not Prometheus's action itself prompted by thefact that men were not properly provided for bythe gods and in particular by Zeus? Be this as itmay, Zeus did not deprive men of the fire thatPrometheus had stolen for them; he punishedthem by sending them Pandora and her box, thatwas filled with countless evils like hard labor. Theevils with which human life is beset cannot betraced to human sin. Hesiod conveys the samemessage by his story of the five races of men whichcame into being successively. The first of these,the golden race, was made by the gods whileKronos was still ruling in heaven. These menlived without toil or grief; they had all goodthings in abundance because the earth by itselfgave them abundant fruit. Yet the men made byfather Zeus lack this bliss. Hesiod does not makeclear whether this is due to Zeus's ill-will or to hislack of power; he gives us no reason to think thatit is due to man's sin. He creates the impressionthat human life becomes ever more miserable asone race of men succeeds another: there is no di-vine promise, supported by the fulfillment of ear-lier divine promises, that permits one to trust andto hope.The most striking difference between the poetHesiod and the philosophers Parmenides andEmpedocles is that according to the philosophers,not everything has come into being: that whichtruly is, has not come into being and does notperish. This does not necessarily mean that whatexists always is a god or gods. For if Empedoclescalls one of the eternal four elements Zeus, thisZeus has hardly anything in common with whatHesiod, or the people generally, understood byZeus. At any rate, according to both philosophers,the gods as ordinarily understood have come intobeing, just like heaven and earth, and will there-fore perish again.

At the time when the opposition betweenJerusalem and Athens reached the level of whatone may call its classical struggle, in the 12thand 13th centuries, philosophy wa s represented byAristotle. The Aristotelian god, like the biblicalGod, is a thinking being, but in opposition to thebiblical God he is only a thinking being, purethought: pure thought that thinks itself and onlyitself. Only by thinking himself and nothing buthimself does he rule the world. He surely doesnot rule by giving orders and laws. Hence he isnot a creator-god: the world is as eternal as god.Man is not his image: man is much lower in rankthan other parts of the world. For Aristotle it isalmost a blasphemy to ascribe justice to his god;he is above justice as well as injustice.IT HA S OFTEN been said that the philosopher

who comes closest to the Bible is Plato. This wassaid not least during the classical struggle betweenJerusalem and Athens in the Middle Ages. BothPlatonic philosophy and biblical piety are ani-mated by the concern with purity and purifica-

tion: "pure reason" in Plato's sense is closer tothe Bible than "pure reason" in Kant's sense or fo rthat matter in Anaxagoras's and Aristotle's sense.Plato teaches, just as the Bible does, that heavenand earth were created or made by an invisibleGod whom he calls the Father, who is eternal,who is good, and hence whose creation is good.The coming-into-being and the preservation ofthe world that he has created depend on the willof its maker. What Plato himself calls theologyconsists of two teachings: (1) God is good andhence in no way the cause of evil; (2) God issimple and hence unchangeable. On the questionof divine concern with men's justice and injus-tice, Platonic teaching is in fundamental agree-ment with biblical teaching; it even culminatesin a statement that agrees almost literally withbiblical statements.* Yet the differences betweenthe Platonic and biblical teachings are no lessstriking than the similarities. The Platonic teach-ing on creation does not claim to be more than alikely tale. The Platonic God is a creator also ofgods, of visible living beings, i.e., of the stars; thecreated gods rather than the creator God createthe mortal living beings and in particular man;heaven is a blessed god. The Platonic God doesnot create the world by his word; he creates itafter having looked to the eternal ideas whichtherefore are higher than he. In accordance withthis, Plato's explicit theology is presented withinthe context of the first discussion of education inthe Republic, within the context of what one maycall the discussion of elementary education; inthe second and final discussion of education-theeducation of philosophers-theology is replacedby the doctrine of ideas. As for the thematic dis-cussion of providence in the Laws, it may sufficehere to say that it occurs within the context ofthe discussion of penal law.In his likely tale of how God created the visiblewhole, Plato makes a distinction between tw okinds of gods, the visible cosmic gods and the tra-ditional gods-between the gods who revolve mani-festly, i.e., who manifest themselves regularly, andthe gods who manifest themselves so far as theywill. The least one would have to say is that ac-cording to Plato the cosmic gods are of muchhigher rank than the traditional gods, the Greekgods. Inasmuch as the cosmic gods are accessibleto man as man-to his observations and calcula-tions-whereas the Greek gods are accessible onlyto the Greeks through Greek tradition, one may,in comic exaggeration, ascribe the worship of thecosmic gods to barbarians. This ascription is madein a manner and with an intention altogethernon-comic in the Bible: Israel is forbidden toworship the sun and the moon and the starswhich the Lord has allotted to the other peopleseverywhere under heaven. This implies that the

* Compare Plato's Laws 905 a 4-b 2 with Amos 9:1-3 andPsalm 139:7-10.


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worship of the cosmic gods by other peoples, thebarbarians, is not due to a natural or rationalcause, to the fact that those gods are accessible toman as man, but to an act of God's will. It goeswithout saying that according to the Bible theGod Who manifests Himself as far as He wills,Who is not universally worshipped as such, is theonly true God. The Platonic statement taken inconjunction with the biblical statement brings outthe fundamental opposition of Athens at its peakto Jerusalem: the opposition of the God or godsof the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac,and Jacob, the opposition of reason and revela-tion.

II. On Socrates and the ProphetsIFTY YEARS AGO, in the middle ofWorld War I, Hermann Cohen, the

greatest representative of , and spokesman for,German Jewry, the most powerful figure amongthe German professors of philosophy of his time,stated his view on Jerusalem and Athens in a lec-ture entitled "The Social Ideal in Plato and theProphets." He repeated that lecture shortly beforehis death, and we may regard it as stating his finalview on Jerusalem and Athens and therewith onthe truth. For, as Cohen says right at the begin-ning, "Plato and the prophets are the two mostimportant sources of modern culture." Being con-cerned with "the social ideal," he does not say asingle word about Christianity in the whole lec-ture.

Cohen's view may be restated as follows. Thetruth is the synthesis of the teachings of Plato andthe prophets. What we ow e to Plato is the insightthat the truth is in the first place the truth ofscience but that science must be supplemented,overarched, by the idea of the good which toCohen means, not God, but rational, scientificethics. The ethical truth must not only be com-patible with the scientific truth; the ethical truthneeds the scientific truth. The prophets are verymuch concerned with knowledge: with the knowl-edge of God. But this knowledge, as the prophetsunderstood it, has no connection whatever withscientific knowledge; it is knowledge only in ametaphorical sense. It is perhaps with a view tothis fact that Cohen speaks once of the divinePlato but never of the divine prophets. Why thencan he not leave matters at Platonic philosophy?What is the fundamental defect of Platonic phi-losophy that is remedied by the prophets andonly by the prophets? According to Plato, the ces-sation of evil requires the rule of the philoso-phers, of the men who possess the highest kind ofhuman knowledge, i.e., of science in the broadestsense of the term. But this kind of knowledgelike, to some extent, all scientific knowledge, is,according to Plato, the preserve of a small minor-ity: of the men who possess a certain nature andcertain gifts that most men lack. Plato presup-

poses that there is an unchangeable human na-ture and, as a consequence, a fundamental struc-ture of the good human society which is un-changeable. This leads him to assert or to assumethat there will be wars as long as there will behuman beings, that there ought to be a class ofwarriors and that the class ought to be higher inrank and honor than the class of producers andexchangers. These defects in Plato's system areremedied by the prophets precisely because theylack the idea of science and hence the idea ofnature, and therefore they can believe that men'sconduct toward one another can undergo achange much more radical than any change everdreamed of by Plato.

Cohen brought out very well the antagonismbetween Plato and the prophets. Nevertheless wecannot leave matters at his view of that antago-nism. Cohen's thought belongs to the world pre-ceding World War I, and accordingly reflects agreater faith in the power of modern Westernculture to mold the fate of mankind than seems tobe warranted now. The worst things experiencedby Cohen were the Dreyfus scandal and thepogroms instigated by Tsarist Russia: he did notexperience Communist Russia and Hitler Ger-many. More disillusioned than he regarding mod-ern culture, we wonder whether the two separateingredients of modern culture, of the modernsynthesis, are not more solid than the synthesis it-self. Catastrophes and horrors of a magnitudehitherto unknown, which we have seen andthrough which we have lived, were better pro-vided for, or made intelligible, by both Plato andthe prophets than by the modern belief in prog-ress. Since we are less certain than Cohen wa s thatthe modern synthesis is superior to its pre-moderningredients, and since the tw o ingredients are infundamental opposition to each other, we are ulti-mately confronted by a problem rather than bya solution.More particularly, Cohen understood Plato inthe light of the opposition between Plato andAristotle-an opposition that he understood inturn in the light of the opposition between Kantand Hegel. We, however, are more impressedthan Cohen was by the kinship between Platoand Aristotle on the one hand and the kinshipbetween Kant and Hegel on the other. In otherwords, the quarrel between the ancients and themoderns seems to us to be more fundamentalthan either the quarrel between Plato and Aris-totle or that between Kant and Hegel.We, moreover, prefer to speak of Socrates andthe prophets rather than of Plato and the proph-ets, and for the following reasons. We are no long-er as sure as Cohen wa s that we can draw a clearline between Socrates and Plato. There is tradi-tional support for drawing such a clear line,above all in Aristotle; but Aristotle's statementson this kind of subject no longer possess for usthe authority that they formerly possessed, and


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56 COMMENTAR Y / JUNE 1967

this is dlue partly to Cohen himself. The clear dis-tinction between Socrates and Plato is based notonly on tradition, but on the results of modernhistorical criticism; ye t these results are in the de-cisive respect hypothetical. The decisive fact fo rus is that Plato points, as it were, away from him-self to Socrates. If we wish to understand Plato,we must take him seriously; we must take seri-ously in particular his deference to Socrates.Plato points not only to Socrates's speeches butto his whole life, and to his fate as well. HencePlato's life and fate do not have the symboliccharacter of Socrates's life and fate. Socrates, aspresented by Plato, had a mission; Plato did notclaim to have a mission. It is in the first place thisfact-the fact that Socrates had a mission-thatinduces us to consider, not Plato and the proph-ets, but Socrates and the prophets.I cannot speak in my own words of the missionof the prophets. Let me, however, remind thereader of some prophetic utterances of singularforce and grandeur. Isaiah 6:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also theLord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,and his train filled the temple. Above it stoodthe seraphim: each one had six wings; withtwain he covered his face, and with twain hecovered his feet, and with twain he did fly. Andone cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy,holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole world is fullof his glory.... Then I said, Woe is me ! for Iam undone; because I am a man of unclean lips,and I dwell in the midst of a people of uncleanlips.... Then flew one of the seraphim untome, having a live coal in his hand, which he hadtaken with the tongs from off the altar: And helaid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hathtouched thy lips; and thine iniquity is takenaway, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voiceof the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, andwho will go for us? Then said I, Here am I;send me.

SAIAH, it seems, volunteered for his mission.Could he not have remained silent? Could herefuse to volunteer? When the word of the Lordcame unto Jonah, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that

great city, and cry against it; for their wickednessis come up before me," "Jonah rose up to fleeunto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord";Jonah ran away from his mission; but God didnot allow him to run away; He compelled him tofulfill it. Of this compulsion we hear in differentways from Amos and Jeremiah. Amos 3:7-8:"Surely the Lord God will do nothing but he re-vealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.The lion hath roared, who will not fear? TheLord God hath spoken; who will not prophesy?"The prophets, overpowered by the majesty of theLord, bring the message of His wrath and Hismercy. Jeremiah 1:4-10.Then the word of the Lord came unto me, say-ing, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew

thee and before thou camest out of the womb Isanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophetunto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord God!behold, I cannot speak; for I am a child. But theLord said unto me, Say not, I am a child; forthou shalt go to al l that I shall send thee, andwhatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.. . Then the Lord put forth his hand, andtouched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me,Behold I have put my words in thy mouth. See,I have this day set thee over the nations andover the kingdoms, to root out, and to pulldown, and to destroy, and to throw down, tobuild, and to plant.To be sure, the claim to have been sent by Godwa s raised also by men who were not truly proph-ets but prophets of falsehood, false prophets.Many or most hearers were therefore uncertain asto which kinds of claimants to prophecy were tobe trusted or believed. According to the Bible,

the false prophets simply lied in saying that theywere sent by God. The false prophets tell thepeople what the people like to hear; hence theyare much more popular than the true prophets.The false prophets are "prophets of the deceit oftheir ow n heart" (ibid. 26); they tell the peoplewhat they themselves imagined (consciously orunconsciously) because they wished it or theirhearers wished it. But: "Is not my word like as afire saith the Lord, and like a hammer that break-eth rock in pieces?" (ibid. 29). Or, as Jeremiahput it when opposing the false prophet, Hana-niah: "The prophets that have been before meand before thee of old prophesied both againstmany countries, and against great kingdoms, ofwar, and of evil, and of pestilence" (28:8). Thisdoes not mean that a prophet is true only if he isa prophet of doom; the true prophets are alsoprophets of ultimate salvation. We understandthe difference between the true and the falseprophets if we listen to and meditate on thesewords of Jeremiah: "Thus saith the Lord; Cursedis the man, that trusteth in man, and makes fleshhis arm, and whose heart departeth from theLord.... Blessed is the man that trusteth in theLord, and whose hope the Lord is." The falseprophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is thetemple in Jerusalem, the promised land, thechosen people itself, or even God's promise to thechosen people (if that promise is taken to be anunconditional promise and not as a part of acovenant). The true prophets, regardless ofwhether they predict doom or salvation, predictthe unexpected, the humanly unforeseeable-what would not occur to men, left to themselves,to fear or to hope. The true prophets speak andact by the spirit and in the spirit of Ehyeh-asher-ehyeh. For the false prophets, on the other hand,there cannot be the wholly unexpected, whetherbad or good.Of Socrates's mission we know only throughPlato's Apology of Socrates, which presents itselfas the speech delivered by Socrates when he de-


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fended himself against the charge that he did notbelieve in the existence of the gods worshippedby the city of Athens and that he corrupted theyoung. In that speech he denies possessing anymore than human wisdom. This denial wa sunderstood by Judah Halevi among others as fol-lows: "Socrates said to the people: 'I do not denyyour divine wisdom, but I say that I do not under-stand it; I am wise only in human wisdom.' "While this interpretation points in the right di-rection, it goes somewhat too far. Socrates, atleast, immediately after having denied possessinganything more than human wisdom, refers to thespeech that originated his mission, and of thisspeech he says that it is not his but he seems toascribe to it divine origin. He does trace what hesays to a speaker who is worthy of the Athenians'credence. But it is probable that he means by thatspeaker his companion, Chairephon, who is moreworthy of credence than Socrates because he wa sattached to the democratic regime. This Chaire-phon, having once come to Delphi, asked Apollo'soracle whether there wa s anyone wiser thanSocrates. The Pythia replied that no one waswiser. This reply originated Socrates's mission.We see at once that Socrates's mission originatedin human initiative, in the initiative of one ofSocrates's companions. Socrates, on the otherhand, takes it for granted that the reply given bythe Pythia was given by the god Apollo himself.Ye t this does not induce him to take it for grantedthat the god's reply is true. He does take it fo rgranted that it is not meet for the god to lie. Ye tthis does not make the god's reply convincing tohim. In fact he tries to refute that reply by dis-covering men who are wiser than he. Engaging inthis quest, he finds out that the god spoke thetruth: Socrates is wiser than other men becausehe knows nothing, i.e., nothing about the mostimportant things, whereas the others believe thatthey know the truth about the most importantthings. Thus his attempt to refute the oracle turnsinto a vindication of the oracle. Without intend-ing it, he comes to the assistance of the god; heserves the god; he obeys the god's command. Al-though no god had ever spoken to him, he issatisfied that the god had commanded him to ex-amine himself and the others, i.e., to philosophize,or to exhort everyone he meets to the practice ofvirtue: he has been given by the god to the city ofAthens as a gadfly.While Socrates does not claim to have heardthe speech of a god, he claims that a voice-something divine and demonic-speaks to himfrom time to time, his daimonion. This daimon-ion, however, has no connection with Socrates'smission, for it never urges him forward but onlykeeps him back. While the Delphic oracle urgedhim forward toward philosophizing, toward ex-amining his fellow men, and thus made him gen-

*Kuzari IV, 13 and V,14.

erally hated and thus brought him into mortaldanger, his daimonion kept him back from polit-ical activity and thus saved him from mortaldanger.

HE FACT that both Socrates and the prophetsHave a divine mission means, or at any rate im-plies, that both Socrates and the prophets are con-cerned with justice or righteousness, with the per-fectly just society which, as such, would be free ofall evils. To this extent Socrates's figuring out ofthe best social order and the prophets' vision ofthe messianic age are in agreement. Yet whereasthe prophets predict the coming of the messianicage, Socrates merely holds that the perfect societyis possible: whether it will ever be actual de-pends on an unlikely, although not impossible,coincidence, the coincidence of philosophy andpolitical power. For, according to Socrates, thecoming-into-being of the best political order is notdue to divine intervention; human nature will re -main as it always has been; the decisive differencebetween the best political order and all othersocieties is that in the former the philosopherswill be kings or the natural potentiality of thephilosophers will reach its utmost perfection. Inthe most perfect social order, as Socrates sees it,knowledge of the most important things will re-main, as it always was, the preserve of the philos-ophers, i.e., of a very small part of the popula-tion. According to the prophets, however, in themessianic age "the earth shall be full of knowl-edge of the Lord, as the waters cover the earth"(Isaiah 11:9), and this will be brought about byGod Himself. As a consequence, the messianicage will be the age of universal peace: all na-tions shall come to the mountain of the Lord,to the house of the God of Jacob, "and they shallbeat their swords into plowshares, and theirspears into pruning hooks: nation shall not liftup sword against nation, neither shall they learnwar any more" (Isaiah 2:2-4). The best regime,however, as Socrates envisages it, will animate asingle city which, as a matter of course, will be-come embroiled in wars with other cities. The ces-sation of evils that Socrates expects from theestablishment of the best regime will not includethe cessation of war.Finally, the perfectly just man, the man who isas just as is humanly possible, is, according toSocrates, the philosopher; according to the proph-ets, he is the faithful servant of the Lord. Thephilosopher is the man who dedicates his life tothe quest for knowledge of the good, of the ideaof the good; what we would call moral virtue isonly the condition or by-product of that quest.According to the prophets, however, there is noneed for the quest for knowledge of the good:God "hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; andwhat doth the Lord require of thee, but to dojustly, and to love mercy, and to walk humblywith thy God" (Micah 6.8).

Documents

Leo Strauss - Jerusalem and Athens