The God of Abraham and the God of Aristotle

Shortly after Pascal’s death, a servant accidentally found a small folded note in the lining of one of his jackets. This note, or “Memorial”, attests to a decisive moment of revelation he experienced on November 23, 1654.

It was evidently a moment he wanted to have close to him for the rest of his life as he had the note re-sewn into successive jackets between the 1654 moment of revelation and his eventual death in 1662.

Fire

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants

(see http://inters.org/faith-reason-pascal-memorial)

The Memorial refers to the two foundational pillars of the West: Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion. Phillip Cary has compared the Western tradition to a body: the two legs of this body being the Greek and Hebrew traditions, the mid-section being the Middle Ages; the arms being the Renaissance and Reformation and the head being the Enlightenment. The two legs of this Western body, the Greek and Hebrew traditions, are marked by their emphases: the Greek tradition is marked by an emphasis on REASON; the Hebrew tradition is marked by an emphasis on REVELATION.

Hebraism and Hellenism

In Culture and Anarchy (1867-68), Matthew Arnold characterized the two pillars mentioned above as the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism. For Arnold, the Western world moves “between these two points of influence”:

At one time if feels more powerfully the attraction one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.

Arnold goes on to list a number of distinctive characteristics of each of these tendencies. For our purposes, in order to isolate the Abrahamic contribution to the Western tradition, let us underline one of these: “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience” (Culture and Anarchy, Chapter 4)

In other words:

• Greek = Knowing the world in its truth

• Hebrew = Obedience and right conduct

The Jewish understanding found one of its clearest expressions in the “Book of Wisdom,” attributed to Solomon, but, most likely, written around 100 BCE. In this text, Wisdom is achieved through proper conduct, not through properly seeing and knowing the world.

For perverse thoughts separate people from God,

and when his power is tested, it exposes the foolish;

because wisdom will not enter a deceitful soul,

or dwell in a body enslaved to sin.

For a holy and disciplined spirit will flee from deceit,

and will leave foolish thoughts behind,

and will be ashamed at the approach of unrighteousness.

For wisdom is a kindly spirit,

but will not free blasphemers from the guilt of their words (Book of Wisdom 1:3-6; NRSV).

The Divine Name

Who is the “God of Abraham”. We are given a Divine self-naming in the Book of Exodus: “I shall be What I shall be” (Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Exodus 3:14). In Hebrew the verb can be in the present or future tense. So, the Divine Name could be translated as “I Am What I Am” as well. The translation in the future tense emphasizes the unknowable nature of the God of Abraham, his essential mystery (See Leo Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens).

The Greeks and the Hebrews provide two fundamental paths to guide us – they are incommensurable and not amenable to a “synthesis”:

• Because the Greek gods exist within a pre-existing and eternal cosmos, always subject to Moira (Fate), they are knowable in human terms. Grounding human life and determining “the Good” will be a matter of coming to know the cosmos (beings as a whole) as completely as possible. Philosophy arises among the Greeks as a response to the human need to have a definitive account of the whole in order to guide our life.

• The Hebrew God stands outside of the realm of beings. The cosmos is created by God; the cosmos has a beginning and end. The Good life will consist in living in accordance with God’s Law or Covenant. Religion in the Judeo-Christian is a response to the human need to have a definitive account of our obligations under this law, or under the fulfilled law (as Divine Grace) under Christ.

It is for this reason that Leo Strauss distinguishes between the presentation of the gods in Greek literature and philosophy and that in Genesis. In “Preliminary Observations of the Gods in Thucydides Work”, Strauss says Nikias: "Had applied himself more than any other of Thucydides’ contemporaries to the exercise of that virtue which is praised and held up by the law – as distinguished from another, possibly higher, kind of virtue – but his theology [his belief the gods favor those who are just as determined by human law] is refuted by his fate." (101)

We can contrast this assertion, that the theology of Nikias is refuted based on his fate (or experience), with Strauss’s clear assertion elsewhere that biblical theology can never be refuted based on the claims of reason (or human knowledge) or experience (see Strauss, On the Interpretation of Genesis – first few pages). The God of Abraham is inscrutable and claims made by reason or experience that God does or does not exist can never be authoritative. In other words, Strauss seems to say that claims about the Greek gods (i.e., Zeus rewards justice) can be rationally adjudicated or disproved by examples where Zeus does not reward justice. However, because the God of Abraham is unknowable and arises as wholly other, his failure to live up to the covenant with the Jewish people, for instance, or rational arguments about God’s omniscience as being a contradiction with man’s freedom, are not counter-arguments to orthodox belief.