Maverick Philosopher

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of  philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther."  What is Strauss getting at? I turn to Heiko A. Oberman' s magisterial Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 1989, tr. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart). On p. 160, Oberman speaks of the new Wittenberg theology that Luther formulated "against the whole of scholasticism": "The whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light."

Why do I like the "in spite of Luther?" Because I am averse to Protestantism for three solid reasons: it is anti-monastic, anti-mystical, and anti-philosophical (anti-rational).  No doubt the RCC is even more corrupt now under Bergoglio the Termite than it was in Luther's day; so if this maverick decides he needs a church, he will have to make the journey to the (near) East.  Go east old man! (I plan to report later on Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.)  But here's a bit more Oberman to nail down my point about Protestantism (or at least Lutheranism's ) being anti-philosophical:

The knowledge that there was an infinite, qualitative distance between Heaven and earth became an established principle for Luther as early as 1509: all human thought, as noble, effective, and indispensable as it might be to solve problems in the world, does not suffice to fathom salvation because it cannot cannot reach Heaven.  Questions of faith must be resolved through the Word of God or not at all. The temptation -- or compulsion -- to sanctify the words of an and believe in them is satanic. When God is silent, man should not speak; and what God has put asunder, namely Heaven and earth, man should not join together.

Thus not even Augustine, especially Augustine the neo-Platonist, could become the new, infallible authority, because that would merely have been replacing one philosophy with another, substituting Plato for Aristotle. [. . .]

The alternative is clear: whatever transcends the perception of empirical reality is either based on God's Word or is pure fantasy. As a nominalist Luther began making a conscious distinction between knbowledge of tge world and faith in God . . . . (pp. 160-161, emphasis added)

A quick question: given sola scriptura, where in the Scriptures does God deliver his verdict on the  problem of universals and come down on the side of nominalism? And if Holy Writ is silent on the famous problem, then it is "pure fantasy" and Luther has no justification for his nominalism. 

And what about sola scriptura itself? Where in the Bible is the doctrine enunciated?

Romanists 1; Lutherans 0. And this despite the undeniable corruption of the RCC in those days that triggered Luther's protest.

Adeimantus, Machiavelli, Bloom, and Strauss

Recent events make it clear that the West is on the wane. The sun is setting on the Land of Evening. As the West goes under, the philosopher, like the proverbial owl of Minerva, spreads his wings in the gathering dusk so as to attain an altitude from which to survey the passing scene.  He soars and he strains, to com-prehend and understand, and if he is of the tribe of Plato, he seeks to discern what might lie beyond the scene he surveys.  His flight is fueled by the thoughts of his great predecessors.

 

I found the following in Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic which is appended to his translation thereof. (Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Basic Books, 1968, p. 371, correction and emphasis added.)

Adeimantus' objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli's: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities. It is foreign policy which makes the devotion to the good life within a city impossible [sic; read: possible]  One must be at least as powerful as one's neighbors and must adopt a way of life such as to make this possible. Poverty, smallness, and unchangingness cannot compete with wealth, greatness, and innovation. The true policy is outward-looking, and cities and men are radically dependent on others for what they must be. Without a response to this objection— which Machiavelli thought to be decisive for the rejection of classical political thought — the very attempt to elaborate a utopia is folly. (p. 371)

My gloss: An enlightened nationalism, while chary of intervention, cannot be isolationist.

And the following I found in Leo Strauss' essay "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, University of Chicago Press, 1988, originally published by The Free Press, 1959, pp. 40-41, emphasis and hyperlink added.

The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He tried to effect, and he did effect, a break with the whole tradition of political philosophy. He compared his achievement to that of men like Columbus. He claimed to have discovered a new moral continent. His claim is well founded; his political teaching is "wholly new." The only question is whether the new continent is fit for human habitation.

In his Florentine Histories he tells the following story: Cosimo de Medici once said that men cannot maintain power with pater-nosters in their hands. This gave occasion to Cosimo's enemies to slander him as a man who loved himself more than his fatherland and who loved this world more than the next. Cosimo was then said to be somewhat immoral and somewhat irreligious. Machiavelli himself is open to the same charge. His work is based on a critique of religion and a critique of morality.

His critique of religion, chiefly of Biblical religion, but also of paganism, is not original. It amounts to a restatement of the teaching of pagan philosophers, as well as of that medieval school which goes by the name of Averroism and which gave rise to the notion of the three impostors. Machiavelli's originality in this field is limited to the fact that he was a great master of blasphemy. The charm and gracefulness of his blasphemies will however be less strongly felt by us than their shocking character. Let us then keep them under the veil under which he has hidden them. I hasten to his critique of morality which is identical with his critique of classical political philosophy. One can state the main point as follows: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a Utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualization is highly improbable. Let us then cease to take our bearings by virtue, the highest objective which a society might choose; let us begin to take our bearings by the objectives which are actually pursued by all societies. Machiavelli consciously lowers the standards of social action. His lowering of the standards is meant to lead to a higher probability of actualization of that scheme which is constructed in accordance with the lowered standards. Thus, the dependence on chance is reduced: chance will be conquered.

I will take a stab at a gloss of the italicized passage. It is a grave error to aim at a utopian resolution of our political predicament. To seek the unachievable best is to preclude the attainment of the achievable good. The pursuit of unrealizable ideals will make hypocrites of us and what is far worse, murderers who will be able to justify mass murder  to achieve perfection as if anything truly straight could ever be made by human effort from the crooked timber of humanity.

 

Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

Here:

Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. The positive element was the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Sir Roger reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can be a prime resource in freedom’s armory. “Our most necessary beliefs,” he wrote, “may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and . . . the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”

A necessary belief, I take it, is one that we need to live well.  And it may be that the beliefs we need the most to flourish are ones that we cannot justify if our standards are exacting.  It is also true that a failure to justify a belief can lead to skepticism and to a loss of belief.   But which prejudices should we live by? The ones that we were brought up to have?  Should we adopt them without examination?  

Here is where the problem lies. Should we live an unexamined life, simply taking for granted what was handed down?  Think of all those who were brought up to believe that slavery is a natural social arrangement, that some races are fit to be slaves and others to be masters.  Others were brought up to believe that a woman's place is in the home and  that any education beyond the elementary was wasted on them.  Punishment by crucifixion, the eating of human flesh, and so on were all traditionally accepted practices and their supporting  beliefs were  accepted uncritically from supposed authorities.  "That's the way it has always been done." "That's the way we do things around here." "Beef: It's what's for dinner." It is not that the longevity of the practices was taken to justify them; it is rather that the question of justification did not arise.  Enclosed within their cultures, and shielded from outside influences, there was no cause for people to doubt their beliefs and practices.  Beliefs and practices functioned well enough as social cement and so the questions about truth and justification did not arise.

The opposite view is that of Socrates as reported by Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living."  For humans to flourish, they must examine their beliefs and try to separate the true from the false, the justified from the unjustified, the better from the worse.  Supposed authorities must be tested to see if they are genuinely authoritative.  The cosmogonic myths and the holy books contradict each other; hence they cannot all be true. Which is true? Might it be that none are true? Then what is the ultimate truth about how we should live? 

Man come of age is man become aware of the great dualities: true and false, real and unreal, good and evil. Man come of age is man having emerged into the light of spirit, man enlightened, man emergent from the animal and tribal.  Mythos suppressed and Logos ascendent, inquiry is born, inquiry whose engine is doubt. While remaining a miserable animal, man as spirit seeks to know the truth.  To advance in knowledge, however, he must question the handed-down.

The problem is the tension between the heteronomous life of tradition, authority, prejudice, and obedience, and the autonomous Socratic, truth-seeking life, a life willing to haul everything and anything before the bench of Reason, including itself, there to be rudely interrogated. In different dress this is the old problem of Athens and Jersualem in its stark Straussian contours.  

The problem is real and it is no solution to appeal to tradition, authority, and prejudice. On the other hand, there is no denying that the spirit of  inquiry, the skeptical spirit, can and in some does lead to a weakening of belief and a consequent loss of the will to act and assert oneself and the interests of one's group. Decadence and nihilism can result from the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit. The West is in danger of perishing due to lack of will and a lack of belief in our values as we let ourselves be replaced by foreign elements.  Europe faces extinction or dhimmitude if it does not affirm its will to live and take measures against the invasion of representatives of an  inferior unenlightened culture.  

Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. “Real freedom,” Sir Roger observed, “concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”

Really? So I am truly free when I bend my knee to the sovereign? True freedom is bondage to the lord and master? Sounds Orwellian. Could real freedom, concrete freedom, be a form of obedience? Perhaps, if the one obeyed is God himself. But God is absent. In his place are dubious representatives.

My interim judgment: Scruton's conservatism as presented by Kimball is facile, superficial, and unsatisfying. It is a mere reaction to Enlightenment and classically liberal excesses.

Another typically aporetic (and therefore inconclusive) conclusion by the Aporetic Philosopher. It seems right, fitting, and helpful unto enlightenment that a maverick should be an aporetician.

The Philosopher and the Christian

For Vito Caiati

.......................

George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be.

Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, the Word and Wisdom of God embodied.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

If a sage is a possessor of wisdom, no philosopher qua philosopher is a sage. If a philosopher were to become a sage, he would thereby cease to be a philosopher: one does not seek what one possesses. Socrates is the embodiment of philosophy but not of wisdom. Socrates, then, is not a sage.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew that he did not know what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth as recounted in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Suppose a philosopher comes to accept Christian doctrine.  Does he remain a philosopher in his acceptance of Christian doctrine or does he move beyond philosophy?  I say that a philosopher who accepts the revealed truths characteristic of Christianity has moved beyond philosophy in this acceptance.  Why?

A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself.  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. The philosopher qua philosopher asks:  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification? 

You say our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact 'known' by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, attended by nuns, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.   As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary: 

 

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is 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. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

That is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?

The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.  

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

 

But is it true?

In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

Is the Christian the True Philosopher?

Steven Nemes makes two main points in his Christian Life as Philosophy.  The first I agree with entirely: Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, "The Wisdom of God embodied," as Nemes accurately puts it.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Here is Nemes' second point:

So Christ falls into the category of god or sage (or both), rather than that of philosopher. On the other hand, the Christian -- the person who desires to learn of Christ, and who finds in him the fount of all wisdom -- is the true philosopher. The Christian admits that she lacks wisdom, yet she desires it. So she goes to the source of all wisdom, which is Christ, in order to learn from him.

Christian life can therefore be understood as philosophy: a desirous effort to learn wisdom from Wisdom Itself, embodied in the person of the Godman Jesus Christ.

I disagree with this second point. A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself .  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification?  You say  our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness ?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact known by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is 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. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

An Evolved Animal With a Higher Origin? Some Theological Speculation

I just remembered this old post from the Powerblogs site, a post relevant to present concerns.  Written February 2008.

................

I raised the question whether divine revelation is miraculous. I answered tentatively that it is not. Though revelation  may be accompanied by miraculous events such as the burning bush of  Exodus 3:2, I floated the suggestion that there need be nothing miraculous about revelation as such. So I was pleased to find some  support for this notion from another quarter. The following is from an   essay by Leo Strauss on Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism:

   
     Revelation is the continuation of creation since man as the
     rational and moral being comes into being, i.e., is constituted, by
     revelation. Revelation is as little miraculous as creation. (Leo
     Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, U. of Chicago
     Press, 1983, p. 237.)

This is an extremely interesting suggestion in that it may offer us a way to make sense of the notion that God creates man in his image and  likeness but without interfering in the evolutionary processes most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes  common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms.

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine fiat  without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

I suggest that what 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through an encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone. This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a spiritual event, and its transmission was not by semen,  but by some spiritual (socio-cultural) means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other -- but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Returning to Hermann Cohen's suggestion above, as mediated by Leo Strauss, we can say that the divine-human encounter whereby the animal man becomes spirit is God's revelation to man. God's revealing himself is at the same time a creation of man as a spiritual being. In Heideggerian terms, at the moment of encounter moment man becomes Dasein, the Da of Sein, the site where Being (Sein) achieves finite self-understanding. But there is nothing ontically miraculous in this, no contravention of any law of nature.

Revealing himself to man as Being itself -- Exodus 3:14 "I am who am" -- God creates man as understandor of Being.

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of  philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther."

Leo Strauss on Reading and Writing

 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing:

     It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a
     rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful
     writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to
     be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself.
     Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to
     write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good
     books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully
     written. (Quoted from Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method:
     A Reading of Spinoza's Ethics, Princeton University Press, 1988,
     p. ii.)

   "We learn to write by reading."  This is why reading good books is
   essential to becoming a good writer.

Athens and Jerusalem at Loggerheads Over the One Thing Needful

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.