In its simplest expression, the disagreement between
Greek philosophy and the Bible has to do with what is, in Leo Strauss’s words,
‘that which supplements or completes morality.’ This search for a supplement to
morality presupposes that Jerusalem as well as Athens perceives the
insufficiency of morality for leading a complete human life. Morality alone
cannot resolve the problem of man’s end. It can acquire a meaning only if it is
completed by something that both goes beyond and grounds it. This is why
Strauss places the question of the supplement to morality and that of its basis
on the same footing. The ultimate
vindication of morality – that is, of obedience to the law- will be
furnished at the moment that the supplement to morality is found. Yet the Bible
and Greek philosophy respond to the question of the supplement in diametrically
opposed manners: whereas for philosophy the supplement is theoria (the contemplative life), for the Bible it is ‘piety, the need
for divine mercy or redemption, obedient love.’
Strauss does not think of this opposition in abstract terms. It is an
opposition between two ways of life and ways or responding to the most
important question for man: ‘How should I live my life?’ With reference to Weber, Strauss summarizes
the problem that confronts all men: if they need to know the good in order to
live, can men acquire knowledge of the good by means of their natural faculties
or must they depend upon a divine revelation in order to obtain this knowledge?
Two paths then open before them: that of human or divine guidance. One cannot
evade this choice since no synthesis of the two attitudes exists that can pass
the test of an honest examination. These two attitudes are fundamentally antagonistic,
‘for both philosophy and the Bible proclaim something as the one needful, as
the only thing that ultimately counts, and the one thing needful proclaimed by
the Bible is the opposite of that proclaimed by philosophy: a life of obedient
love versus a life of free insight.’ To these two opposite attitudes correspond
two different ways of life. Philosophy is a way of life to the same extent that
a life of obedience to the law is away of life. Strauss thinks that before
being a body of doctrines or a collection of positions, philosophy is in fact a
mode of life animated by a particular passion: philosophic eros. The philosophers
who share this way of life group themselves into a ‘sect’ (the adherents to
philosophy’) which, by the very fact of its existence, comes into conflict with
other sects. What distinguishes this particular sect from other sects is that
each of its members has decided to devote his life to the search for the answer
to the question ‘What is the best way of life’ by using only the powers of
reason, rather than simply obeying the law given by tradition.
Perhaps nothing can bring out the contrast of these two ways of life better
than the human sentiment that lies at their origins. Whereas the beginning of
philosophy is wonder, the beginning of wisdom for the Bible is the fear of God.
According to Strauss, the philosopher lives beyond fear and trembling, as well
as beyond hope. For the philosopher there is no final redemption, no end of
evil, no messianic reign – things that all presuppose for their fulfilment the
intervention of an omnipotent God who relaxes
the grip of necessity that governs nature. This purely contemplative
attitude towards the world also tends to weaken the force of moral demands.
This theoretical and contemplative attitude towards the world is in fact a
fundamentally trans-social, trans-political,
and, we would dare to say in the spirit of Strauss, a trans-moral attitude. The
gaze with which the philosopher looks at the world is a gaze indifferent to the
distinction between the beautiful and the ugly, good and evil. More precisely,
if he sees the various workings of these ideas, he has for the most part become
insensible to their influence: he sees because he masters his heart. He
contemplates the reign of necessity within the real, and this contemplation is
for him the experience that vindicates his very existence. Strauss, at the very
end of a public lecture, revealed almost brutally the meaning of philosophical
activity and its amor Dei intellectualis:
‘we cannot exert our understanding without from time to time
understanding something of importance, and this act of understanding may be
accompanied by an awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of
understanding, by noesis noeseos, and
this so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it
to his God. The experience is entirely independent of whether what we
understand primarily is pleasing or displeasing, fair or ugly. It leads us to
realize that all evils are in a sense necessary if there is to be understanding.’
Philosophy is intrinsically edifying not because it dictates morality, but
because it manifests the dignity of the human mind through its contemplative
activity. Evil can be understood as a manifestation of natural necessity.
Rather than rebelling against evil and suffering, the philosopher perceives all
things as if they were manifestations of the necessity or destiny that governs
the Whole.
The philosophic attitude thus comes with a certain moral harshness. Strauss
recognizes thus fact when he highlights the contrast between the biblical
attitude and the philosophic attitude with regard to the poor. While the Bible
makes of the poor a synonym from the just. Greek philosophy does not consider
poverty a virtue. To the contrary, it seems that the exercise of virtue
presupposes economic independence, which is perhaps the image for the independence
of heart necessary for the freedom of the mind. Poverty in itself does not have
a moral value; it is not glorified by Greek philosophy. Strauss further illustrates
this anthropological contrast between the Bible and Greek philosophy by
contrasting Greek magnanimity to biblical humility. Magnanimity, as described
by Aristotle, seems to be the highest virtue since it concerns man as an
individual and not in his relationship to others. The magnanimous man is he
who, conscious of his worth, can claim those honors that he knows he deserves.
Magnanimity presupposes that man can strive toward virtue and even become
virtuous by his own powers. Hence the consciousness of sin, past faults, and
remorse, or feelings of shame, are foreign to the genuinely magnanimous man.
The feeling of guilt belongs to the tragic or the common man, not to the
magnanimous man. Yet it is precisely the feeling of guilt that is at the origin
of the two feelings characteristic of religion: fear and pity. Pity is born of
the guilt man feels for those he has wounded, and fear is born of the
anticipated revenge for the fault committed.
Those feelings that give birth to the fear of God are precisely those that
Greek philosophy seeks to eliminate from the heart of the genuinely virtuous
man. If tragedy has a cathartic effect, it is indeed by freeing man’s heart
from the type of feeling that destroy man’s self-esteem and confidence in his
own powers. The fear of God constrains man to look into his own heart so as to
test the purity of his motives. For God, the only judge, reads men’s hearts.
Yet, according to the opinions of philosophers, God does not concern himself
with human beings. Thus man must find the good by relying on his own resources
alone. From such a perspective, biblical humility is an unreasonable attitude,
indeed, even foolish. It can in fact vindicate itself only if we have assurance
that a God, who is king and judge, concerns himself with the general order of
the world and, even more, with the particular fate of each individual. Faced
with such a God, humility makes sense since no man can claim to vie for
sanctity with the one who is the source of all sanctity.
One cannot learn from Greek philosophy the humility
necessary to discover the meaning of the words: ‘Fear of God is the beginning
of wisdom.’ On the contrary, here a man will learn to take more pride in his
own intelligence than in regulating his behavior in accord with the Divine Word.
For him, the beginning of wisdom is not the fear of a God he does not know, but
wonder before a nature that veils and at the same time unveils itself. Strauss
illustrates the whole difference that separates the philosophic from the religious
attitude. The very model of obedient faith is embodied by Abraham, who,
although he does not grasp the meaning of God’s injunction ordering him to
sacrifice his son Isaac, obeys the divine command. Socrates’ response to the
Delphic Oracle is altogether characteristic of the philosophic attitude. He
does not consider Apollo’s judgment, according to which he is the wisest of
men, as final. Instead, he seeks to test its validity. He substitutes rational
examination of the divine command for blind obedience. This idea of an examination
conducted by means of one’s own resources alone indicates the presence of another
disagreement that brings the anthropological disagreement to completion. For
lack of a better expression, we call this disagreement methodological, by which we mean that Jerusalem and Athens envision
reality according to two fundamentally distinct approaches or methods. Of course, we do not mean
methods in the modern sense of the term, but rather in the larger sense of away
of apprehending reality . . .
We maintain that the fundamental ontological distinction for Strauss was that which
separates ‘to be in truth’ from ‘to be by virtue of law or convention.’ It was
by recognizing this distinction that philosophy came into the world. The birth
of philosophy is contemporaneous with the theoretical emancipation from what is
first for man, that is, ‘being by virtue or law or convention.’ Need one spell
out that the law here in question is the
political law that is supported by a divine law, or, in other words, the
theological-political law that organizes the way of life of each particular
city? The moment this given law becomes problematic, philosophy can take
flight. The given law can become problematic only if it is judged from a point
of view outside itself. This external point of view will be the idea of nature that precedes and overshadows
all codes and particular laws.
Before this discovery of nature, the good was identified quite simply with
custom or way. Each thing had its way of being: each living being follows away of behavior; each people or
tribe has its way regulated by a set of customs. Each group considers its customs
to be supreme. To enhance the dignity of its customs, each group attributes to
them a long-ago ancestral origin. Understanding this to be the work of the gods
lends even more dignity to the code that expresses the particular way of the
group. The ancestral law of the group is therefore also a divine law. The
divine law commands obedience and regulates before and all conflicts with regards to the just and unjust. It is
therefore by authority of divine law that the understanding of both what is
just and unjust and the correct life are defined. The authority of the law
establishes how the first things are to understood as well as the norms of
behavior. . . .
The first philosophic experience is perplexity at the contradictory character
of the character of the divine codes and the calling into the question of the
authority that supports them . . .
The Bible teaches that God is mindful of man and that man has in faith the
experience of the care that God lavishes upon him. God is not blind necessity
ruling over nature but a person who concerns himself with the good of his
creatures. The authentic religious experience is an entering into dialogue with
this God who summons man. Yet is precisely this type of interpretation of the
experience of what surpasses man that poses a problem for Greek philosophy . .
.the opposition between the biblical conception of God and the Greek
philosophic conception of an impersonal reign of necessity is at the
theological and metaphysical heart of the conflict between ( to use metaphor)
Jerusalem and Athens.(etc.)
[But here’s ‘the hitch': in Strauss’s formulation the opposition between Revelation
and Philosophy in the anthropological and
methodological senses is not dialectical, no synthesis can be obtained;
philosophy is ‘contaminated’ with religion and religion is ‘contaminated’ with
philosophy and this, in Strauss’s view, is what defines the ‘new thinking’ of
modernity, as the author writes:]
In the final analysis, it is the impossibility of philosophy to refute the
biblical understanding of God that keeps the conflict between Jerusalem and
Athens open. The genuine argument against revelation would in effect have to be
able to exclude absolutely the hypothesis of the existence of an omnipotent and
mysterious God. Yet philosophy has always failed to produce a rational system
that would make all of reality transparent, divine action included. Strauss thinks
neither Spinoza nor Hegel succeeded in this enterprise.
