The following is highly relevant to our Trinitarian/Christological discussions:
For Leo Strauss, ". . . Western civilization consists of two elements, or has two roots, which are in radical disagreement with each other." ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 245) These two elements are the Bible and Greek philosophy, Jerusalem and Athens. The "whole history of the West" is an attempt at harmonizing this radical disagreement. But the various attempts at harmonization were doomed to fail for the following reason:
. . . each of these two roots of the Western world sets forth one thing as the one thing needful, and the one thing needful as proclaimed by the Bible is incompatible, as it is understood by the Bible, with the one thing needful proclaimed by Greek philosophy, as it is understood by Greek philosophy. To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. (Ibid., p. 246, emphasis added.)
I should point out that Strauss goes on to speak of an underlying agreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy, but I'll leave that for a subsequent post. What he says above, though, strikes me as exactly right. First, Western civilization does have the two roots mentioned, a fact apparently missed by the Reverend Jesse Jackson when he sang at Stanford University, "Hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go." Did Brother Jesse realize that he was advocating the throwing out of his own bread and butter?
Second, the two roots or elements are in radical, albeit fruitful, tension. Indeed, the vitality of the West, as Strauss remarks elsewhere, derives in good measure from this tension, a tension which, absent in the Islamic world, may help explain the inanition in that world.
ADDENDUM
A reader suggests that Pope Benedict's Regensburg address can be read, in part, as an implicit response to the Straussian thesis of radical disagreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy. Compare this passage:
Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
Recent Comments