JERUSALEM AND ATHENS
In the Anglican Theological Review (Vol. XXXVI, No. 4 October, 1954)
Copyright 1954 by the Anglican Theological Reviews. Reprinted by permission.
By E. LA B. CHERBONNIER
Barnard College
An ancient question in the history of thought has become even more acute in our time: What is the relation between the truth of Christianity and that of other philosophies? Old and New Testament scholarship have made it impossible to ignore the cleavage between the biblical conceptions of God, man, and human destiny, and the corresponding conceptions in most academic philosophy. Recognition of this difference has led theologians both past and present to approach the problem of "revelation and reason" with a plausible but fateful assumption: that since the God of the prophet differs so decisively from that of the professional philosopher, the truth of the Bible is therefore incompatible with human reason. Once this assumption is granted, the issue between Christian and non-Christian world-views can only be stated in terms of two equally awkward alternatives: either the Bible at the expense of reason, or reason at the expense of the Bible. Either the theologian must mortify his intellect before a written authority, or he must allow human reason to sit in judgment upon the Word of God.
This dilemma will continue to plague theologians as long as they accept the assumption upon which it rests, the incompatibility of revelation and reason. The standard way to challenge this assumption has traditionally been to deny any fundamental difference between biblical and other metaphysics. Since current scholarship has rendered this argument obsolete, the present article will renew the challenge from the opposite direction. It will urge that the Bible's deviation from other metaphysics is a positive philosophical asset. If these points of divergence, far from proving the Bible irrational, can establish instead its intellectual superiority, theology may yet find a way out of the predicament which otherwise confronts it.
I. IMPASSE
The history of Christian thought has been governed by two opposing schools, corresponding to the horns of the dilemma mentioned above. The strength of each consists partly in the weakness of the other. The
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first, from Tertullian through Martin Luther to Karl Barth, actually seems to revel in the mortification of the intellect: "I believe because it is impossible." "Reason is the devil's whore."
The second school, perceiving that the first invariably makes use of the very rationality it disparages, seeks instead to demonstrate the wisdom of Christianity. Its method, however, is to argue that, after all, the Bible and other philosophies are only saying the same "truth" in different ways. In order to do so, it must obscure what is distinctive in the biblical categories. The mystical tradition, especially (if not explicitly or even consciously), dissolves them into mere symbolical prefigurations of some supposedly more "respectable" truth. The net result of such efforts is to render Christianity superfluous.
One can sympathize with both positions: with those who are determined to guard the uniqueness of the Bible against absorption into an alien metaphysic, and with those who understand that a Christianity which is not communicable is no Christianity at all. But one can scarcely deny that together they constitute an impasse which has prevented theology from solving its own most urgent problem.
Is this impasse necessary, or can it be avoided? The only way to avoid it is to challenge the fatal assumption which underlies both schools, the one more obviously, the other more subtly: that because there are differences between biblical categories and those of other philosophies, the biblical ones are ipso facto not rational. Once this is assumed, it is no wonder that reason must either be defied in the name of Christianity, or that biblical categories must be distorted in order to appease some other metaphysic. Is it possible to acknowledge the obvious differences which do exist, without concluding that revelation and reason are therefore incompatible? On one and only one condition could this be done: only if, by the rigorous standards which philosophy itself acknowledges, the metaphysic implied in the Bible could establish a more legitimate claim to "rationality" than its competitors - if it should prove to hold the key to what philosophy has so long sought in vain.
In short the way to preserve the uniqueness of the Bible is not to deny its reasonableness. Such a denial merely absolves Christianity's competitors of the responsibility for philosophically substantiating their own gods as against the God of the Bible. The way to preserve the uniqueness of the Bible is precisely to demonstrate its superior reasonableness. Not, however, by urging that it agrees with Plato or Aristotle, but by showing that at points of divergence between their conceptions of the divine and the Lord of Hosts, it is the latter who holds
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the philosophical advantage. In this way theology might find a third alternative to the two horns of the dilemma which has so long beset it.
Like the one horn, this alternative would emphasize the difference between biblical and unbiblical world-views, but without concluding that revelation is therefore anti-rational. Like the other horn, it would argue that Christianity is indeed the best philosophy, but without sacrificing the characteristic biblical categories. Instead, it would demonstrate that the distinctive biblical metaphysic has no need either to retreat into splendid isolation, or to surrender in timid compliance, when confronted by rival conceptions of God, man, and human destiny.
Such a program would involve frank endorsement by the theologian of the enduring contributions of the Greek genius to human thought; namely: clarity, coherence, consistency; an open-minded readiness to consider on its merits any question, free from the dictation of any authority; the willingness to accept the burden of proof for one's statements and not simply to assert them gratuitously; and most important of all, the corresponding willingness to accept responsibility for the logical implications of all that one says. In a word, the theologian must be prepared to meet all the requirements of systematic thinking.
At this point the theologian concerned to safeguard biblical categories from subversion by Greek presuppositions may suspect that a Trojan horse has been smuggled past the gates of Jerusalem. But the simple truth is that one can ill afford to deny any of these principles. Every attempt to do so implicitly presupposes them, and thereby invites the philosopher to tie a certain kind of biblical theology into knots. Moreover, a second glance at the foregoing philosophical canons reveals that nothing substantial, nothing involving content, has been conceded to Greece. On the contrary, all these rules of thought are purely formal: they refer to the manner of thinking alone, and are easily converted into adverbs: clearly, coherently, systematically, and so forth. They are the criteria by which any philosophy, whatever its content, must be tested. Since it is only in matters of content that differences between biblical and other philosophies attain any significance, the adoption of these principles need occasion no alarm.
It is the present purpose to show that in addition to these merely formal rules of procedure, secular philosophies have often introduced a further, unproved, and highly debatable assumption as to content: a dogma concerning the nature of the real itself. It may even happen that the philosopher will be unwilling to discuss this assumption, to the extent even of pinning the label "unphilosophical" on all who refuse to
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accept it uncritically (on authority). Such an accusation is itself "unphilosophical." For the test of an adequate philosophy is whether it satisfies these systematic criteria, and not whether it satisfies the assumptions of the individual philosopher. The theologian consequently need not be intimidated by cries of "unphilosophical activities". If he will scrutinize critically the philosopher's own dogma as to content, he may well discover that the labels "philosophical" and "unphilosophical" could properly be reversed. For if God is indeed the Lord of all creation, then there follows a fateful consequence: a philosophy based upon a false assumption concerning the nature of the real (God) will ultimately be betrayed by the tell-tale symptom of self-contradiction. Conversely, only a philosophy whose assumption about the real is correct can hope to satisfy its own criterion of consistency. The Christian therefore enters the philosophical arena confident that if the formal requirements of Athens are to be met, the content must come from Jerusalem.
II. PHILOSOPHY AGAINST ITSELF
The proposal is to inquire whether biblical or some other philosophy will better withstand testing by the criteria of Athens. As an experimental illustration, this test will be applied to one of the most crucial points in the content of any philosophy: its conception of the real and the true. The respective positions on this point held by the Bible, on the one hand, and what historically has been the most important kind of "religious philosophy," on the other, will be critically compared.
Some theologians may fear that the correlation of the real and the true, assumed in the preceding paragraph, already capitulates to Platonic philosophy. To this there are two replies. First, the attempt to deny the correlation of the real and the true always ends in self-contradiction. For if the real is not the true, then it will ultimately claim a validity over against whatever else is postulated as true. That is, it will constitute a "truth which is not the truth." This is the point at which Plato will make sport of alternative philosophies, whether Aristotelian, empirical, or positivistic. Secondly, this correlation of the real and the true is formal only. The proper bone of contention between the Bible and Plato (including so-called "Christian Platonism") concerns the question of content: of the nature of truth and reality. The following pages will subject this issue to critical examination.
he reasoning by which so many philosophers of Platonic stamp have arrived at their conclusion concerning the nature. of the real is
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plausible enough: if we are to know anything, then the object of our knowledge, the real, must be "rational". It must conform to the requirements of reason; but if it is not alien to the canons of reason, it cannot be different from them. And if not different, then, according to the momentous conclusion of idealist philosophy, reality and reason are the same. In Hegel's formulation, "The real is the rational, and the rational is the real;" or in Parmenides', "Thought and Being are One."
To the further question, "If the rational is the real, then what exactly do you mean by `rational'?" the answer is evident: the rational is the logical. The most real is, therefore, that which enjoys the greatest logical priority. As it is frequently put, the real is "not the sum total of everything that is, but the precondition, the `ground', of all that is." This is the answer which this kind of philosophy gives to the question which it shares with the Bible: the most real is the logically most prior. The name generally given to this ens realissimum is "Being" (esse, auto to on). In the words of a distinguished representative of this school, Paul Tillich, "Being" is the one non-symbolic word for God because it "precedes in logical dignity" all other designations.1
As an illustration of what is entailed by this logical priority, one can apply it to two spheres of experience, the temporal process and the multiplicity of objects in the physical world. Apply this principle to the former, and it follows logically that in order for there to be change at all, there must first be "something which changes" as its precondition. "That which truly is" (Being) is not change, but the "something which underlies all change," the immutable behind all transience. In Platonic terms, "Being is prior to Becoming."
When the same principle is applied to the "world of ten thousand things," as the Chinese say, it is evident that they, too, fail to command logical priority, either individually or collectively. For as long as there are even two separate entities, there are two different "reals" and, consequently, two different "truths" - a self-contradiction. Logically prior to all plurality, therefore, is the one "reality" which transcends all multiplicity. Thus plurality can provide no resting place for logic, but goads it on and on until it comes to rest in "the one behind the many," capitalized "the One" by mystics like Plotinus. It is consequently perfectly consistent and even necessary for upholders of this view to insist that God cannot be "a being besides other beings;" for then the
1See C. W. Kegley and R. W. Bretall, edd., The Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Macmillan, 1952) Section III, "Reply to Interpretation and Criticism," p. 339.
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"really real" would have to be that which includes and transcends the lesser totality of God-plus-other-beings (a purely quantitative conception, incidentally, of God).
The final issue of this line of argument is that God may not stand in relation to anything else. If He did, this would at once differentiate Him from it; and this in turn sets up a duality of God-and-the-world, thereby requiring a "higher" reality which is prior to both. By the same token, there can be no differentation in God, for any differentation again presupposes the plurality of differentia. Consequently, it is also perfectly consistent and necessary to maintain, as the mystic does, that "sin is separation," since separation is precisely the (to him) abhorrent process of differentiation. This is why "Chrstian mysticism" can never satisfactorily distinguish between creation and the fall.
Such is the god of this kind of philosophy: as Socrates says in Plato's Phaedrus, a "colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to the mind."2 It is immutable and therefore static; unrelated and unconditioned; impassive (for to care is to care about something and therefore to stand in relation to it, and this would presuppose plurality). For the same reason it is without will or purpose, and also for an additional reason: purpose implies that God wills something which he lacks, and this would in turn imply an incompleteness and imperfection in God (again a quantitative conception of perfection). Hence from Plato to the present, scarcely a philosopher has been willing to attribute will or purpose to God, except when speaking mythologically. And finally, when the chain reaction set off by the foregoing presuppositions is followed through consistently, God must be beyond the distinction between good and evil. For this distinction presupposes a duality, whereas the divine must be the unity which underlies all duality, including that between good and evil. A vivid picture of such a god is drawn by a contemporary philosopher of art, who shows its significance for the field of sculpture:
Zeus, so Pheidias would have argued, must not be caught. in his passing moods or actions as the benevolent, fatherly or as the angry, thundering god, nor even as the victim of incidental light and color. He should be Zeus simply, unrelated, abstract, and absolute; not in his outer, casual appearance, but in his very idea and
2Phaedrus, 247.
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essence, of which his appearance could just be a meaningless shadow - a shadow's shade, Plato would say .3
How radically such a god differs from the God of the Bible is quite obvious when its properties are listed together. Yet Anglican theology, especially, has not always kept this difference firmly in sight. Aware of the dangers in Protestant theologies which seek to preserve the uniqueness of the Bible at the expense of rationality, Anglicans frequently succumb to the other danger, and try to reconcile the Bible with reason on terms laid down by Platonic philosophy. Though Anglican practice is often superior to its theory, and can probably count on the Prayer Book to save it from some of its theological tendencies, nevertheless it might well ponder the unbridgeable gulf which separates the god of so much speculative metaphysics from the Lord of the Church.
Thus far, the argument has avoided questions of validity, confining itself to an exposition of the attributes of the philosopher's god, and of the reasoning behind them. So plausible is this reasoning that to challenge it would seem to court disaster. But there is one remaining question to put to this school of philosophy which, when exploited, can shake its very foundations. The real, or Being, equated with the rational, was reached by differentiating it from whatever failed to meet the requirement of logical priority. Now the question is: What is the status of the irrational, and particularly the vital, aspects of experience?
The only consistent reply, viz. that they have no share in Being and therefore do not exist, has in fact been made by most Oriental philosophy. Vedanta, for example, teaches that the whole world of time, space, and matter is an illusion (maya). If this were so, however, an awkward consequence would follow: if only the rational existed, there would be no difference between the teachings of the wise philosopher and the ignorant opinions of the many, and the whole philosophic enterprise would be absurd. The ultimate outcome of philosophy would be a selfdefeating snare and delusion, and its highest wisdom would be to know nothing at all, as is in fact advocated both by Taoism and by Western mystics who subscribe to Nicolas of Cusa's docta ignorantia.
Owing perhaps to this difficulty, as well as to a healthy admixture of common sense, many Western philosophers have been reluctant to pronounce the everyday world unreal. But this reluctance provides no solution to their dilemma. For they, too, must give the non-logical
3Curt Sachs, The Commonwealth of Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1946) p. 257.
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aspects of experience, excluded from Being by definition, the label of "Non-Being." When they try to maintain that this irrational Non-Being does in some sense exist, they are forced into the inconsistency of saying that Non-Being has Being! This admission entails the conclusion, as catastrophic as it is astonishing, that since Being "somehow" includes Non-Being, the two must in the last analysis be the same.
To the unbiased analyst, philosophers like Hegel and Heidegger, to mention only two who have endorsed this proposition in so many words,4 thus present a curious spectacle. From what appeared to be the pinnacle of philosophical respectability they are suddenly forced to repudiate the very means by which they climbed there: the distinction of the rational (Being) from the irrational (Non-Being). At first separated from each other as white and black, these two categories are now blithely declared to be the same. At one stroke, consistency, clarity, and all that philosophy was supposed to stand for are abruptly revoked. The mystics quite explicitly direct their attack against reason itself. For them, the logical distinctions inherent in the reasoning process are sufficient proof of its "fallen" nature. By their standards, rational discrimination is branded "divisive." It only aggravates the degeneration of primordial unity into the manifold world of space and time. This incompatibility of reason with the mystic's goal is expressed by the Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tse: "Returning to their Root without knowing it, the result will be a formless whole which will never be cut up. To know it is to cut it up."5 Does this disparagement of reason have a familiar ring? Was it not the major premise of the "anti-rationalist" school from which the philosopher originally dissociated himself? By a strange irony, when the philosopher gets to the end of his road, he encounters Karl Barth coming the other way. They shake hands, and exchange the salutation, "Reason is the devil's whore."
These strictures against reason are accompanied by an assault upon truth as well. For if Being and Non-Being correlate respectively with truth and falsehood; and if Being and Non-Being are the same; then there is no distinction between falsehood and truth! Martin Heidegger, for example, declares that since "untruth must derive from the essence of truth," one must therefore "dedicate untruth to oneself."6 The same
4Existence and Being: Selected essays by Martin Heidegger; translated by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick (London: Vision Press, 1949) p.. 377.
5Lin Yutang, trans. and ed.. The Wisdom of Laotse (New York, Random House: Modern Library, 1948) p. 113.
6Ibid., pp. 337, 347. Also Martin Heidegger, Sein and Zeit (Tiibingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1949 p. 299.
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point is made by Nicolas of Cusa in his doctrine of the coincidence of opposites, which extends even to the "coincidence" of truth and falsehood. This position has been reaffirmed only recently by W. T. Stace, whose numerous references illustrate beautifully how the philosopher is obliged finally to declare, with Jacob Boehme, that "the Eternal Yes and the Eternal No lie together in the ultimate nature of God."7 This consideration moves him quite frankly to glory in self-contradiction. It prompts another contemporary author to argue that the use of certain terms is justified by their ambiguity!8
How does the philosopher get into such a plight? How does it happen that defenders of the principles of Athens, the passion for truth and the discipline of rational clarity, are driven by the inner logic of their own primary assumptions deliberately to cultivate ambiguity, renounce reason, and obscure the distinction between falsehood and truth? To the Bible, this question is no enigma at all. In fact, had its chief interest been speculative philosophy, the Bible would surely have prophesied just such a predicament. It would have sounded the alarm the moment the philosopher made his fateful decision concerning the nature of the real. When he converted the mere rules of thought into the content of his system ("the rational is the real"), in that moment he unwittingly fell under the dominion of a false god. Deified reason, true to the hallmark of all false gods, visits the victims of its empty promises with cruel disillusionment. Far from fulfilling the philosopher's dream of a consistent system, it drives him instead to disparage logic and truth. The biblical understanding of the "dynamics of idolatry" thus finds the strongest corroboration in the field of philosophy. He who deifies the canons of philosophy, created by God and discovered by Athens, will be driven inexorably to violate them.
The Bible not only understands how the philosopher is tricked into pulling the rug out from under himself; it also provides a metaphysical context invulnerable to such embarrassment. Since for it the real is not reason but its Author, it never regards some imagined "undifferentiated unity" as a "divine standard" from which to impugn logical discrimination as "divisive." What an irony that the supposedly irrational Bible, by delivering the philosopher from a mistaken conception of the real
7Stace, W: T. Time and Eternity (Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 158. See also Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Yale University Press, 1952), p. 23.
8Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951) pp. 156, 203.
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(God), can free him for the single-minded pursuit of the systematic rigor which he at first endorsed!
This is so clearly the end of the road for this particular kind of philosophy that one wonders how it has managed not only to survive for so long, but in fact to maintain a hegemony in its field. The explanation is again provided by the biblical insight into the inner workings of idolatry. Perceiving that false gods invariably entangle their followers in self-deception, biblical metaphysics is not surprised when philosophers, instead of acknowledging their obvious inconsistencies and seeking to rectify them, actually seek to justify them. As an illustration of this phenomenon, the following paragraphs will examine three of the arguments commonly urged by philosophers in their own extenuation. As might be expected, all three prove to be self-defeating. Each one violates the canons of philosophy laid down by Athens. Whenever this occurs, Athens invariably has her revenge. For every departure from these rules of thought eventually runs afoul of the philosopher's own peculiar nemesis: self-contradiction.
The first such tactic to which the philosopher may have recourse is to insist that what has been refuted by the foregoing argument is nothing but a straw man, that he fails to recognize himself in this account of his difficulties. The specific point at which this charge is often made concerns the meaning of the term "Being." "Being," he avers, has been far too narrowly and statically defined. Actually, it is a much more inclusive term-in fact the most inclusive, excluding neither the dynamic aspect of reality nor indeed the biblical categories themselves. Far from constituting a defense, however, this argument turns out in fact to be an admission which strengthens the indictment. For it is unhappily all too true that the term "Being" has been applied in at least three different senses, often by the same philosopher, and with little or no attempt to distinguish between them. There is, first, "Being" in the strict, Platonic sense indicated above: changeless, undifferentiated unity. Many philosophers, however, in search of something more impressive than this static, innocuous essence, have turned instead to what was excluded from it: the irrational, chaotic, dynamic aspects of reality, which had been lumped together as Non-Being. This Non-Being is then held to be more real than mere Being (Boehme, Heidegger, Berdyaev). In the words of the Tao-Teh-Ching, "The things of this world come from Being, and Being from Non-Being."9 But since the term "Being" ought properly to be reserved for the most real,
9Tao-Teh-Ching, 40.
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it is evident that the application of it to immutable, undifferentiated unity actually constituted a misnomer. Consequently it is now appropriated and applied to the dynamic - a sense precisely the opposite of its original use. Thus the philosopher once again finds himself in the unenviable position of saying that Non-Being is Being. This is the second sense in which the term "Being" may be used, a sense which allows the philosopher either to mean what he says, or the opposite of what lie says, in sublime indifference to the most elementary rules of rational discourse.
In addition, to complicate matters still further, there is a third meaning of "Being". If reality is divided into rational and irrational components (yang and yin), then the "most real" of all, that which alone deserves the designation "Being," could not be either member of this duality, but would have to be the "reality" which includes them both. This explains how the philosopher can get himself into the position of saying that Being includes both Being and Non-Being (where "Being" is used first in this last-mentioned sense, and then in the narrower, Platonic sense). As Paul Tillich expresses it, “Being ‘embraces’ itself and Non-Being.’”10
Armed with these three different meanings of the same word, the philosopher can keep the neophyte guessing indefinitely in a sort of metaphysical shell game, in which it is never permitted to lift the shells to see which one conceals the meaning of the moment. The point, however, is not how many people are fooled, but whether or not the methods are legitimate - whether the indiscriminate use of the same word with several incompatible meanings can be reconciled with the Creek canons of clarity and consistency, or whether instead Kierkegaard was right in branding such procedure as "solving problems by superscription."
Finally, to defend "Being" on the ground that it includes everything is surely an eloquent way of testifying against it. For philosophy proceeds by logical sequences, by making distinctions on the basis of logical compatibility or incompatibility. If it is now suddenly granted that these distinctions are all to be abandoned and swallowed up in
10Paul Tillich The Courage to Be, p. 34; cf. also p. 180. Translated into the language of everyday human concerns, this equivocal position obscures the distinction between life and death themselves. Tillich not only can, but must, in all consistency, speak with Nietzsche of the "death which belongs to life" (ibid., p. 34; cf. also pp. 32, 35, 179-181). As another contemporary writer puts it "Death and decay are aspects of life and growth, though from the opposite side" (Curt Sachs, op. cit., p. 261). It requires no Nietzsche to spell out the implications of this doctrine.
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"Being," then one wonders by what right such a philosophy professes to speak in the tradition of Athens. Its own principle of logical discrimination might have been a warning to it that the final criterion of reality would not be merely quantitative and inclusive, but rather, as the Bible never forgets, qualitative and exclusive.
A second riposte which the philosopher is sometimes tempted to try is the contention that it is really more profound to raise problems than to answer them, that the confusions of his philosophy only reflect the bewildering nature of reality itself - in a word, that the more obscure a metaphysician, the more profound. Such an argument explicitly forfeits the Greek passion for precision and systematic rigor, and, as always, Greece gets her revenge for the desertion, for the argument is patently self-defeating: if obscurity is the mark of profundity, then it is impossible to distinguish which of two equally obscure philosophies is the truer; and, to push this line of defense to its logical conclusion, a philosophy which manages to make even a modicum of sense is, by this standard, less profound than the babblings of an infant, which make none at all. (In tenacious fidelity to this chain of reasoning, Zen Buddhism has developed its koan in the deliberate effort to reduce the language of rational articulation to meaningless noises.)
The third expedient sometimes adopted by the philosopher in self-defense is the plea that if a particular philosophy meets with a favorable response, it therefore "speaks to the times" and is above reproach. As the Greeks would be the first to ask, however, supposing it does find a sympathetic reception among a particular group, precisely what is proved by that? The question of philosophic import remains: Is this particular school right? There are times when some philosophers seem almost ready to abandon the most elementary principle of both Athens and Jerusalem, to waive the question of truth altogether and simply assert that a philosophy is justified if it appeals to a majority. The Greeks were far wiser than this. The rival Stoic and Epicurean schools never appealed for vindication to their respective enrollments. For if the majority determined what is true, then philosophers would be reduced to taking a continual public opinion poll in order to keep abreast of day-to-day fluctuations in the truth market, and philosophy itself would become a popularity contest. And then, of course, the majority could always decide that the majority was wrong, thus delivering to philosophy its coup de grace.
Thus, instead of alleviating the philosopher's discomfiture, these three counter-arguments only compound it. As long as philosophy's formal
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rules are erected into a false god (the real), every effort to escape his predicament will only tighten the noose. That the biblical conception of the real can fulfil these formal requirements will be urged in the following section.
III. THE BIBLICAL ALTERNATIVE
Turning from the foregoing critique of what Aldous Huxley calls the "perennial philosophy," the present discussion will now contrast it with the biblical conception of God (the real). While the god of the former is impassible, the God of the Bible loves; while the former, since it is beyond all distinctions, is beyond good and evil, the latter is the God of righteousness. The former is inclusive and general (Being-as-such); the latter is unique, distinct, particular (a Being). The former (though held to be absolutely unrelated!) is related to the world by a sort of unlucky accident which is, nevertheless a necessity of its nature; namely, the two-fold process by which "the many" differentiate out of "the one" and return to it again. This ambiguous process is "unfortunate" insofar as it disrupts unity, but "fortunate" insofar as it adds to the totality of Being. The God of the Bible, on the contrary, brings his creation into existence for a special purpose by a concrete act of will.
It is this single word, "will," as fundamental to biblical thought as it is distorted or omitted by most other philosophies, which best expresses the gulf between these two gods. Nothing is more characteristic of the Living God than purposive action. Yet the attitude of most philosophers toward this common sense conception is illustrated by Spinoza, who maintained that if a stone hurtling through the air were endowed with consciousness, it would imagine that it was free11 (unless, he might have added, the stone's consciousness should rise to the intensity of the philosopher's, in such case it would realize that freedom is illusory). On the basis of the original dichotomy by which the philosopher separates reality into static, rational "Being," and dynamic, irrational "Non-Being," there is simply no room for freedom at all. What has happened historically is that freedom has been "reinterpreted" in terms of one or the other of these two categories, neither of which allows for free choice in any significant sense. Philosophers who, like Spinoza or Hegel, give priority to reason and knowledge (Being) have reduced freedom to the "recognition of necessity." Those who, like Bergson and Berdyaev, have inclined toward the vital and irrational (Non-Being) have reduced freedom to chaotic, undirected
11Benedict Spinoza, Epistle 62.
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spontaneity (Bergson was never able to wriggle out of the trammels of his own logic, which drove him to concede that animals were more "free" than men). Evidence that this latter trend has infiltrated theology itself occurs whenever the attempt is made to equate the living, personal God of the Bible with the "Dionysian" or "Scotistic" aspect of reality.
Lacking any foundation for real freedom in their metaphysic, philosophers (Bertrand Russell, to mention only one) have often explicitly tried to exclude it from philosophic discourse by branding the phrase "free will" as meaningless, or the "discussion about free will" as obsolete. How, in the name of philosophy, they can thus expose themselves to the charge of censorship is difficult to understand - until it is recalled that this very freedom constitutes their Achilles heel. Having begun with the division of reality into the rational and the irrational, this kind of philosophy can never hope to put Humpty-Dumpty together again from these two fragments. It could only avoid this embarrassment if it were to begin, as the Bible does, with the freedom of God and man. The philosophical cogency of this biblical position can be established in two different ways, the first more "existential," the second more strictly logical. The first runs as follows:
If man is free (and it is finally self-contradictory to suppose the contrary, as will be shown below), a definite conclusion follows concerning the kind of "god" who could really (and not just in name) be God for a human being. In order really to be God, he would have to enjoy at least the same freedom as man himself. As between a free being and one who is unfree, the former always exercises dominion over the latter. Consequently, when man in his freedom sets up something unfree and calls it "god," he can do so only an the basis of a deception. While paying lip service to such a "god," man himself actually pulls the strings. The Old Testament prophets, in their running battle with idolatry, constantly emphasize the self-deception upon which it depends, and which, when exposed, makes the idolater look foolish: "He (the idolater) feedeth on ashes. A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, `Is there not a lie in my right hand?"' (Isaiah 44:20). Though originally aimed against idols of wood and stone, this insight has a direct philosophical application. When philosophy maintains, for example, that God cannot have will or purpose, or that God cannot be a Being distinct from his creation ("a Being besides other beings"), just who is calling the tune for whom? Is the "god" of such pronouncements, however sophisticated, any less
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pathetic than the gods of the Dahomean tribe in Africa, who must be kept alive by daily instructions from their soi-disant worshippers?12
According to the prophets, to let God be God means to allow him at least the same freedom that man has; that is, if the word "god" is to be properly used, it can refer only to a Free Agent. A philosophy which fails to meet this requirement is based upon a falsehood. The prophet could therefore apply to it the same confident prediction he makes about other forms of idolatry: the self-deception which it conceals will become the agent of its own destruction. And conversely, such a philosophy will never achieve coherence and truth until it incorporates an adequate conception of the real. The biblical concept of idolatry thus impinges directly upon metaphysics. Transcribed into philosophical terms, it makes explicit and central a principle to which Socrates alone adhered faithfully, and which even he never fully articulated: self-contradiction is the tribute which false presuppositions ultimately pay to true ones.
Biblical and unbiblical philosophies agree, then, that even though a primary presupposition cannot be established by proof, it can be tested indirectly by whether or not it entails consequences which are incompatible with one another. This contention that only the true content can satisfy philosophy's formal criterion of consistency is the basis of the second, more strictly logical argument in support of biblical metaphysics. This argument rests on the consideration that all human endeavor presupposes freedom, including the enterprise of philosophy itself. For the philosopher depends upon the distinction of true from false - that is, on the freedom to distinguish true from false. Take away freedom and you thereby preclude all thinking. For example, what is the difference between being told that there is a man under the bed by an insane person, and by a normal person? The idiot's statement has no claim to credibility because he is not free to make this distinction. The latter's, however, if made in good faith, claims my serious attention precisely because it is made with such freedom. Without freedom, then, no distinction of true and false is possible, and philosophy can never get started. Philosophy has therefore often been at cross purposes with itself. On the one hand, in dedicating itself to separate the true from the false, it has implicitly presupposed the freedom to do so. On the other hand, by reducing all reality to static-rational and dynamic-irrational, it is led explicitly to deny the very freedom upon which it depends. One could venture a safe prediction about the outcome of
12See Herbert Muller, The Uses of the Past (Oxford Univ. Press, 1952) pp. 55, 340.
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such an undertaking: the attempt to exclude freedom while tacitly presupposing it, would eventually issue in self-contradictions. By drawing attention to some of these, the foregoing pages have sought to illustrate the principle that false premises lead inevitably to mutually contradictory conclusions.
In order to avoid these difficulties, it would be necessary to acknowledge that the real cannot exclude freedom, but must include it. The word "freedom", however, refers directly to no reality at all, but is merely a term of convenience derived from the fact of free agents. Contrary to what philosophy has so often maintained, therefore, that the real is the rational, that reason-in-general (logos) is the presupposition of all that is, it would appear that the Bible is philosophically more correct in holding that the reasoning process itself presupposes the free agent, without whom it could not exist at all. To the question, "What is the real?" the answer could therefore no longer be given in terms of logos or Being (or Non-Being, either), but the presupposition of all reasoning whatsoever: the free agent. The question about ultimate reality would then have to be re-phrased. Instead of "what is ultimately real?" the proper question would then be, "Who is ultimately real?" As long as philosophy continues to ask the first question, it can be expected to fall into contradictions in its quest for an answer.
So much for a brief exposition of the arguments in favor of the biblical conception of the real. In view of the correlation already noted between the real and the true, it remains to examine the implications of this position for the biblical view of truth. Truth could no longer be primarily conceived in terms either of data about something (Thomism) or of some imagined "identity of subject and object" which cannot be put into words (mysticism). Rather, it would refer to Someone and to the direction and purposes of His elective will. This would mean that if there were to be the possibility of truth at all (an open question thus far), it would depend on there being Someone who could say without deception, "I am the truth." And if there were to be the further possibility of knowing this truth, it would partly depend, as always in the case of knowing (connaitre, kennen) another person, upon his Voluntary initiative (revelation) and man's response to it (faith).
The consequences of such a position are radically at variance with the inveterate predilection of most philosophy, which has tended to eschew all knowledge which could not be derived from within oneself alone. Anything which comes from without seems to it to bear the stamp of contingency and must be rejected in favor of demonstration
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a priori. Plato's doctrine of recollection is perhaps the most familiar illustration. In the same spirit, as the starting point for his philosophy, Descartes chose to be "shut up in a stove," cut off from all external influences. Spinoza's attempt to make philosophy a deductive science "in the manner of geometry" corroborates Bertrand Russell's epigram, "The influence of mathematics on philosophy has been profound and unfortunate." A classic example of this tendency is Fichte's statement of the philosopher's ideal:
The philosopher must deduce from his adopted principles all possible phenomena of experience. . . In the fulfilment of this purpose, he does not require the aid of experience; he proceeds purely as a philosopher (sic!), paying no respect whatever to experience; rather, he describes time as a whole in all its possible epoch, absolutely a priori.13
By contrast, a biblical metaphysic would hold that all that the philosopher can accomplish in vacuo is to discover unmistakably that he is indeed in vacuo. The answer to his quest would require a word from beyond himself, rather than the hypostatization of the vacuum itself.
To persons already under the influence of this "perennial metaphysic," the suggestion that knowledge of the truth cannot be derived from contemplation of the principles of reason and logic, but depends instead upon the philosopher's relation to Him who is the Truth, will appear to signal the end of philosophy. All it really marks, however, is the end of a certain kind of philosophy, a kind which the most recent developments in logical analysis, however unproductive they have so far been in themselves, have justifiably described as tautologous. The end of this kind of speculation would simply mean the realization by philosophers that when reason makes itself its own god, all it can do thereafter is to pull rabbits out of the hat which it has itself put there in the first place.
Perhaps on the theory that the best defense consists in counterattack, this "perennial philosophy" sometimes makes the charge that the entire biblical metaphysic is simply anthropomorphism. To pin a label on an argument, however, hardly serves to refute it. The question remains whether or not this "anthropomorphism" is philosophically legitimate. In an attempt to consider this question on its merits, the first point is that if one is to speak at all, one cannot avoid a "morph-
13Quoted by F. M. Cornford in The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1950) p. 31.
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ism" of some kind, and the only choice would seem to be between anthropomorphism and "sub-anthropomorphism." The most obvious kind of sub-anthropomorphism, the worship of idols of wood and stone, was the target of the prophets' ridicule. Less obvious and more sophisticated is the idol created simply in the image of the principles of logic. Should one care to engage in the byplay of coining labels, one could call this "logicomorphism." The real issue would then simply be: which of the two better satisfies the canons of philosophy, anthropomorphism or logicomorphism? - the very inquiry undertaken by the present article.
In reply, it is sometimes maintained that there is a third alternative, that the real is neither the personal nor sub-personal, but "more than personal." "The personal element is included in Being."14 The issue is simply this: either, as biblical metaphysics maintains, the unique freedom of the person defies subsumption under any category, or, on the contrary, his apparently qualitative uniqueness can be reduced to merely quantitative terms, and thus incorporated under some more inclusive heading. As a test of these two positions, the following experiment can be applied. Suppose that there were in fact no higher category than the self, that the free agent is not simply high up on the mountain slope, but stands on the pinnacle. In that case, any attempt to go beyond the personal to some imagined "supra-personal" level would instead only plunge headlong down the other side. Whether this has in fact occurred can be determined by a perfectly simple question: Is the philosophy which cleaves reality into the dichotomy of rational and irrational, static and dynamic, able to distinguish between the so-called "supra-personal" and the merely sub-personal? This distinction it does not care to state. Its reluctance to do so invites the suspicion that it mercy offers the same package under two different labels. Caveat emptor. The Bible's insistence that no category is higher than the free agent again gives it the metaphysical advantage.
To press the argument one step further, the gods of Being and Non-Being themselves turn out to be "anthropomorphic," in the sense that they are simply projections of that fictitious monstrosity, the philosopher's man. For all that remains of the free agent after he has been through the logical meat-grinder is "rational animal" - a compound of rationality (Being), on the one hard, and chaotic vitality (Non-Being), on the other - the very stuff of which philosophy's gods are so often made. Thus even the charge of anthropomorphism is one which back-
14This is the position taken by Paul Tillich in "The Idea of the Personal God", Union Seminary Quarterly Review, November, 1940.
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fires. Perhaps anthropomorphism would be less obnoxious to this kind of philosophy if it had a more adequate conception of anthropos.
It remains to be noted that some theologians react to the mere mention of the word "anthropomorphism" as though to a loud "Boo!", owing to their understandable anxiety to avoid the conception of God which has unfortunately found its way into a good deal of Christian piety - a sort of heavenly Santa Claus who promises pie-in-the-sky, or who fondly endorses and even assists the private aspirations of the individual. The trouble with such a god, however, is not that it is anthropomorphic. The trouble is rather that it is not anthropomorphic. Far from being analogous to a real, flesh-and-blood man, it is made in the image merely of the wishes of particular men. In order to be truly anthropomorphic, it would have to become free. A God who is free, however, is the only kind of God whom man could not create, whose will man would have to wait upon, instead of secretly pulling his puppet strings from behind the scenes. Such a God spells the doom of all wishful deification of one's own pet projects, for such a God can alone say "no" to the indiscrimiate or unprincipled ambitions of men, as he so emphatically does in the Bible.
IV. CONCLUSION
Suppose that the foregoing suggestions, with their supporting arguments, should in some form survive the test of philosophical criticism, and that truth and reality were conceived in terms of Him who is the Truth. What then? What would be the implications for theology and philosophy? Philosophy as a deductive science would be dedicated in part to proving that the answers to the fundamental questions as to the nature of God, the nature of man, and human destiny (questions to which not even logical positivism can avoid implying answers) could not in principle be derived a priori. Instead, they would be "contingent" upon "knowledge by acquaintance" with this Someone, and upon right relationship with Him. The role of reason in the goodness of creation would thus consist partly in re-phrasing many of philosophy's traditional questions in such a way as to demonstrate its own futility apart from revelation. By anticipating the personal form that revelation would have to take, it could enable men more readily to recognize God when they encounter Him. The process of logical demonstration thus comes to an end, not with a climactic and certain proposition about the cosmos, but with a burning question: Who is He? Has He in fact revealed Himself? On the basis of reason itself, the philosopher can thus
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be led to the living water. Precisely because this water is the "truth which makes free," however, neither logic nor any other human device can coerce him to drink. What theology can do is to show him that if one does drink, then and only then do philosophy's deepest questions find an answer.
The questions answered by Christianity, however, are not primarily of interest for the sake of an intellectual jig-saw puzzle. Indeed, if there is any single point at which a biblical metaphysic enjoys an initial advantage, it is the fact that the issues with which it deals all spring directly out of the common stuff of everyday experience, the use and abuse of freedom. Unable as they are to include freedom it! their systems, academic philosophies, by contrast, have frequently decried the common sense views of "the many" as "upside down," or "backwards." From Plato to Heidegger, they have likened ordinary living to cavedwelling, and scorned the cares and concerns of the average man (das Man) as "unauthentic" (uneigentlich). Biblical categories are "unique" and "distinctive," not as compared to the "naive" language of ordinary men, but in contrast to the esoteric tendencies of most other philosophies. If freedom were established at the center of metaphysics, then the key words at the heart of biblical thinking, words as close to everyday living as they are foreign to most metaphysics, would become decisive for philosophy itself. Sin, repentance, forgiveness, love, gratitude, righteousness, covenant, choice, all meaningless outside a context of free agents, would take precedence over Being, Non-Being, logos, and most of the rest of a highly technical vocabulary. It would be the task of biblical metaphysics to develop its "structures" - to answer the age-old philosophical questions concerning the meaning of life - in terms of these words and of the actions of free agents to which they refer. In this way it can confirm the conviction of many theologians that the truest philosophy will also be the most relevant. For the biblical categories are "distinctive" precisely because they are able to speak at all times to all men, provided only that they are willing to listen.
If such a project can be successfully carried out, then there will be a new aspect to the answer implied by Tertullian's rhetorical question, "What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?" Basically, the answer will be the same as always: Jerusalem has everything to do with Athens. She has to save Athens from herself. First and foremost, she has to save men. One aspect of this primary task, however, inevitably involve the minds of men. Car. Jerusalem challenge Athens in her own bailiwick, the realm of thinking? However unlikely the prospect might seem
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at first glance, the preceding pages have found some encouragement for the hope not only that biblical metaphysics need not take a back seat for academic philosophy, but that the sons of Athens herself may find that all roads are blind alleys except the one that leads to Jerusalem.
Need it come as a surprise to the Christian if this should indeed turn out to be the case? For every philosophy has its theos, its ultimate presupposition as to the nature of the real. Just as the gods of the Canaanites eventually proved impotent before the Living God, so also might we not suspect that in the realm of philosophy, too, the incorporation of a well-intended but mistaken idea of God would bring about the eventual downfall of such a philosophy in a mass of contradictions? Tertullian was surely right in holding with St. Paul that the biblical conception of God was "foolishness to the Greeks." But if this God really is the Lord of all creation, then it should be possible to show, in terms of the standards which philosophy itself acknowledges, that in its metaphysical application this very "foolishness of God" really is "wiser than men"- that even in the realm of metaphysical inquiry God hath not left himself without witness.
ANGLICAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW